471–480 of 918 posts
I hope that "our craft" which now produces, largely, vulnerable buggy bloatware actually dies. Perhaps people or machines will finally figure out how to make software which actually works without a need to weekly patching
Something tells me a non-deterministic code generator won't be the solution to this problem.
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This feels right when you're looking forwards. The perfect AI bot is definitely not 6 months away. It'll take a lot longer than that to get something that doesn't get things wrong a lot of the time. That's not especially interesting or challenging though. It's obvious. What's much more interesting is looking back 6, 12, 18, or 24 months. 6 months ago was ChatGPT 5, 12 months ago was GPT 4.5, 18 months ago was 4o, and…
ChatGPT 3.5 was almost 40 months ago, not 24. GPT 4.5 was supposed to be 5 but was not noticeably better than 4o. GPT 5 was a flop. Remember the hype around Gemini 3? What happened to that? Go back and read the blog posts from November when Opus 4.5 came out; even the biggest boosters weren't hyping it up as much as they are now. It's pretty obvious the change of pace is slowing down and there isn't a lot of evidence…
I am not claiming it's perfect, or even particularly good at some tasks (pelicans on bicycles for example), but anyone claiming it isn't a mind-blowing achievement in a staggeringly short time is just kidding themselves. It is.
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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”.…
> perpetual subscription services for the same software we used to “own”. In another thread, people were looking for things to build. If there's a subscription service that you think shouldn't be a subscription (because they're not actually doing anything new for that subscription), disrupt the fuck out of it. Rent seekers about to lose their shirts. I pay for eg Spotify because there's new music that has to happen,…
Turns out it’s a lot harder to disrupt than it sounds.
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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.
It definitely doesn't do a good job of spotting areas ripe of building abstractions, but that is our job. This thing does the boring parts, and I get to use my creativity thinking how to make the code more elegant, which is the part I love.
As far as I can tell, what's not to love about that?
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Well, on the surface it may seem like there’s nothing being created of value, but I can assure you every company from seed stage to unicorns are heavily using claude code, cursor, and the like to produce software. At this point, most software you touch has been modified and enhanced with the use of LLMs. The difference in pace of shipping with and without AI assistance is staggering.
> every company from seed stage to unicorns are heavily using claude code, cursor, and the like to produce software > The difference in pace of shipping with and without AI assistance is staggering. Lets back up these statements with some evidence, something quantitative, not just what pre-IPO AI marketing blog posts are telling you.
If you're programming for the art, you can continue. Someone who enjoys painting can do so even after the camera
As you probably know, painting changed quite a bit after cameras became common. I wonder if handcrafted code will have a similar shift, becoming more "artistic" :)
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> 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 99% of the functions I've written in my life? Absolutely drudgery. They're barely algorithms. Just bog-standard data transformation. This is what I love having AI replace. For the other 1% that actually…
I do agree with this, and in fact I do often use LLMs for for these tasks! I guess my message is more intended towards vibe-only coders (and, I guess, the non-technical higher ups drooling at the idea of never having to hire another developer).
If you're programming for the art, you can continue. Someone who enjoys painting can do so even after the camera
But you have to admit it loses a certain shine in the cases where you know that what you're doing is no longer solving a problem that could be solved simpler and cheaper another way.
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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”.…
Actually this makes me think of an interesting point. We DO have too many layers of software.. and rebuilding is always so cost prohibative. Maybe an iteresting route is using LLMs to flatten/simplify.. so we can dig out from some of the complexity.
Using AI to write yet another run-of-the-mill web service written in the same bloated frameworks and programming languages designed for the lowest common denominator of developers really doesn’t feel like it’s taking advantage leap in capabilities that AI bring.
But using AI to write native applications in low level languages, built for performance and memory utilisation, does at least feel like we are bringing some actual quality of life savings in exchange for all those fossil fuels burnt to crunch the LLMs tokens.
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”.…
Hostile operating systems. Take the effort to switch to Linux.
Undocumented hardware, well there is far more open source hardware out there today and back in the day it was fun to reverse engineer hardware, now we just expect it to be open because we couldn’t be bothered to put in the effort anymore.
Effort gives me agency. I really like learning new things and so agentic LLMs don’t make me feel hopeless.