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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#451

Post by icedchai »

tatjam wrote: post #249
crazygringo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the point is you're now doing the most creative and satisfying part. Not the drudgery. It's not that you've stopped doing anything at all, like the other commenter claimed in their personal chef analogy.

Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests? For me, the act of sitting down and writing the code is what actually leads to true understanding of the logic, in a similar way to how the only way to understand a mathematical proof is to go trough it. Sure,…

I think there is room for a hybrid approach. You can delegate most of the "drudgery" to AI, but keep the parts that require creative solutions for yourself. There is undoubtedly a lot of crappy work we have to do as engineers. This is stuff that needs to be done but has also been done many times before.

Re: We mourn our craft

#452

Post by andyjohnson0 »

iambateman wrote: post #9

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learn…

> Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.

For how long do you think this is sustainable? In the sense of you, or me, or all these other people here being able to earn a living. Six months? A couple of years? The time until the next-but-one Claude release drops?

Does everyone have to just keep re-making themselves for whatever the next new paradigm turns out to be? How many times can a person do that? How many times can you do that?

Re: We mourn our craft

#453

Post by Nextgrid »

Revanche1367 wrote: post #443
Nextgrid wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my experience they can definitely write concise and reusable code. You just need to say to them “write concise and reusable code.” Works well for Codex, Claude, etc.

Writing reusable code is of no use if the next iteration doesn’t know where it is and rewrites the same (reusable) code again.

Re: We mourn our craft

#454

Post by fiala__ »

gob_blob wrote: post #403

"They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months." They've been saying that for years. Stop believing it.

Also, it’s always six months from now, because otherwise you could just point at the hundred ways they’re wrong right now. It’s nothing but the ol’ dotcom “trust me, bro” kind of marketing.

Re: We mourn our craft

#455

Post by icedchai »

gamblor956 wrote: post #304
iambateman wrote: post #9

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learn…

If AI can do the coding, those of us who aren't programmers don't need you anymore. We can just tell the AI what we want. Luckily for real programmers, AI's not actually very good at generating quality code. It generates the equivalent of Ali Baba code: it lasts for one week and then breaks. This is going to be the future of programming: low-paid AI clerks to generate the initial software, and then the highly paid pr…

Yes. The problem is there is a huge invisible gap between "looks like it works" and "actually works", and everything that entails, like security and scaling beyond a couple users. Non-programmers and inexperienced ones will have trouble with those gaps. Welcome to our slop filled future.

Re: We mourn our craft

#456

Post by jauntywundrkind »

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…

Yes. And I'm excited as hell.

But I also have no idea how people are going to think about what code to write when they don't write code. Maybe this is all fine, is ok, but it does make me quite nervous!

Re: We mourn our craft

#457

Post by munksbeer »

_zagj wrote: post #238
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…

> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We could easily approach a state of affairs where most of what you see online is AI and almost every "person" you interact with is fake. It's hard to see how someone who supposedly remembers computing in the 80s, when the power of USENET and BBSs to facilitate long-distance, or even international, communication and foster personal relationship…

I'm from the early 90s era. I know exactly what you're saying. I entered the internet on muds, irc and usenet. There were just far fewer people online in those communities in those days, and in my country, it was mostly only us university students.

But, those days disappeared a long time ago. Probably at least 20-30 years ago.

Re: We mourn our craft

#458

Post by cess11 »

massysett wrote: post #26
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…

We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary. Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.

"The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was"

Did you have trouble with this part?

Re: We mourn our craft

#459

Post by notnullorvoid »

karmasimida wrote: post #97

> If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me. I think we should move past this quickly. Coding itself is fun but is also labour , building something is the what is rewarding.

By that logic prompting an AI is also labour.

It's not even always a more efficient form of labour. I've experienced many scenarios with AI where prompting it to do the right thing takes longer and requires writing/reading more text compared to writing the code myself.

Re: We mourn our craft

#460

Post by [deleted] »

strange_quark wrote: post #365
tibbar wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you're completely skipping the emergence of reasoning models, though? 4.5 was slower and moderately better than 4o, o3 was dramatically stronger than 4o and GPT5 was basically a light iteration on that. What's happening now is training models for long-running tasks that use tools, taking hours at a time. The latest models like 4.6 and 5.3 are starting to make good on this. If you're not using models that are wi…

> Wait, you're completely skipping the emergence of reasoning models, though? o1 was something like 16-18 months ago. o3 was kinda better, and GPT 5 was considered a flop because it was basically just o3 again. I’ve used all the latest models in tools like Claude code and codex, and I guess I’m just not seeing the improvement? I’m not even working on anything particularly technically complex, but I still have to cons…

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