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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#401

Post by stack_framer »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #341
stack_framer wrote: post #227

> wait six months. I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!" I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wante…

> LLM coding doesn't feel revolutionary or exciting like this. Maybe you’re just older.

Older than whom?

Re: We mourn our craft

#402

Post by jmclnx »

apitman wrote: post #101
jmclnx wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I retired a few years ago, so I have no idea what AI programming is. But I mourned when CRT came out, I had just started programming. But I quickly learned CRTs were far better, I mourned when we moved to GUIs, I never liked the move and still do not like dealing with GUIs, but I got used to it. Went through all kinds of programming methods, too many to remember, but those were easy to ignore and workaround. I view t…

OT but I see your account was created in 2015, so I'm assuming very late in your career. Curious what brought you to HN at that time and not before?

I did not know it existed before 2015 :)

Re: We mourn our craft

#404

Post by IhateAI_2 »

If you must use these tools, when using one thay has the option, please press thumbs down when a response was good, and thumbs up when the response is bad.

Dont train your replacements, better yet lets stop using them whenever we can.

Re: We mourn our craft

#405

Post by notnullorvoid »

Nextgrid wrote: post #137

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper. If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations. The perks of a…

Agreed. Programming languages are not ambiguous. Human language is very ambiguous, so if I'm writing something with a moderate level of complexity, it's going to take longer to describe what I want to the AI vs writing it myself. Reviewing what an AI writes also takes much longer than reviewing my own code.

AI is getting better at picking up some important context from other code or documentation in a project, but it's still miles away from what it needs to be, and the needed context isn't always present.

Re: We mourn our craft

#406

Post by Jensson »

esafak wrote: post #398
Nextgrid wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they can magically increase context length to such a size that can conveniently fit the whole codebase, we're safe. It seems like the billions so far mostly go to talk of LLMs replacing every office worker, rather than any action to that effect. LLMs still have major (and dangerous) limitations that make this unlikely.

Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory, and neither do you. You both search for what you need. Models can already memorize more than you !

> Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory, and neither do you

Humans rewire their mind to optimize it for the codebase, that is why new programmers takes a while to get up to speed in the codebase. LLM doesn't do that and until they do they need the entire thing in context.

And the reason we can't do that today is that there isn't enough data in a single codebase to train an LLM to be smart about it, so first we need to solve the problem that LLM needs billions of examples to do a good job. That isn't on the horizon so we are probably safe for a while.

Re: We mourn our craft

#407

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

hnlmorg wrote: post #299
sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems. Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did. And software that’s open and can be modified. Instead what we have is: - AI which are little black boxes and beyond our ability to fully reason. - perpetual subscription services for the same software we used to “own”.…

Have you tried using GenAI to write documentation? You can literally point it to a folder and say, analyze everything in this folder and write a document about it. And it will do it. It's more thorough than anything a human could do, especially in the time frame we're talking about.

If GenAI could only write documentation it would still be a game changer.

Re: We mourn our craft

#408

Post by chasd00 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #44
sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

Same. I was born in 84 and have been doing software since 97 it’s never been easier, better or more accessible time to make literally anything - by far. Also if you prefer to code by hand literally nobody is stopping you AND even that is easier. Cause if you wanted to code for console games you literally couldn’t in the 90s without 100k specialized dev machine. It’s not even close. This “I’m a victim because my softw…

it's an exciting time, things are changing and changing beyond "here's my new javascript framework". It's definitely an industry shakeup kind of deal and no one knows what lies 6 months, 1 year, 5 years from now. It makes me anxious seeing as i have a wife+2 kids to care for and my income is tied to this industry but it's exciting too.

Re: We mourn our craft

#409

Post by Nextgrid »

esafak wrote: post #398
Nextgrid wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they can magically increase context length to such a size that can conveniently fit the whole codebase, we're safe. It seems like the billions so far mostly go to talk of LLMs replacing every office worker, rather than any action to that effect. LLMs still have major (and dangerous) limitations that make this unlikely.

Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory, and neither do you. You both search for what you need. Models can already memorize more than you !

I’ll believe it when coding agents can actually make concise & reusable code instead of reimplementing 10 slightly-different versions of the same basic thing on every run (this is not a rant, I would love for agents to stop doing that, and I know how to make them - with proper AGENTS.md that serves as a table of contents for where stuff is - but my point is that as a human I don’t need this and yet they still do for now).

Re: We mourn our craft

#410

Post by davidw »

Levitating wrote: post #36
sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

> golden age of computing I feel like we've reached the worst age of computing. Where our platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and our software is over-engineered garbage. The same company that develops our browsers and our web standards is also actively destroying the internet with AI scrapers. Hobbyists lost the internet to companies and all software got worse for it. Our most popular desktop o…

Yes, this is where it's at for me. LLM's are cool and I can see them as progress, but I really dislike that they're controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use.
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