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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#481

Post by Nextgrid »

munksbeer wrote: post #474
Nextgrid wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guide the AI. If I see it produce stuff that I think can be done better, I either just do it myself or point it in the right direction. 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…

If you’re repeatedly prompting, I will defer to my usual retort when it comes to LLM coding: programming is about translating unclear requirements in a verbose (English) language into a terse (programming) language. It’s generally much faster for me to write the terse language directly than play a game of telephone with an intermediary in the verbose language for it to (maybe) translate my intentions into the terse language.

In your example, you mention that you prompt the AI and if it outputs sub-par results you rewrite it yourself. That’s my point: over time, you learn what an LLM is good at and what it isn’t, and just don’t bother with the LLM for the stuff it’s not good at. Thing is, as a senior engineer, most of the stuff you do shouldn’t be stuff that an LLM is good at to begin with. That’s not the LLM replacing you, that’s the LLM augmenting you.

Enjoy your sensible use of LLMs! But LLMs are not the silver bullet the billion dollars of investment desperately want us to believe.

Re: We mourn our craft

#482

Post by themacguffinman »

mirawelner wrote: post #385

These posts make me feel like I’m the worst llm prompter in existence. I’m using a mix of Gemini, grok, and gpt to translate some matlab into c++. It is kinda okay at its job but not great? I am rapidly reading Accelerated C++ to get to the point where I can throw the llm out the window. If it was python or Julia I wouldn’t be using an LLM at all bc I know those languages. AI is barely better than me at C++ because I…

A lot of people are using Claude Code which many consider to be a noticeably better for coding than the other models.

I think also they tend to be generating non-C++ code where there are more guardrails and less footguns for LLMs to run into. Eg they're generating Javascript or Python or Rust where type systems and garbage collection eliminates entire classes of mistakes that LLMs can run into. I know you said you don't use it for Python because you know the language but even experienced Python devs still see value in LLM-generating Python code.

Re: We mourn our craft

#483

Post by mirawelner »

themacguffinman wrote: post #482
mirawelner wrote: post #385

These posts make me feel like I’m the worst llm prompter in existence. I’m using a mix of Gemini, grok, and gpt to translate some matlab into c++. It is kinda okay at its job but not great? I am rapidly reading Accelerated C++ to get to the point where I can throw the llm out the window. If it was python or Julia I wouldn’t be using an LLM at all bc I know those languages. AI is barely better than me at C++ because I…

A lot of people are using Claude Code which many consider to be a noticeably better for coding than the other models. I think also they tend to be generating non-C++ code where there are more guardrails and less footguns for LLMs to run into. Eg they're generating Javascript or Python or Rust where type systems and garbage collection eliminates entire classes of mistakes that LLMs can run into. I know you said you do…

That’s funny bc I linked my post to a server I’m on and I also was told to use an agent.

My worry about an agent is I’m trying to translate the math with full fidelity and an agent might take liberties with the math rather than full accuracy. I’m already having issues with 0 to 1 indexing screwing up some of the algorithm.

But I will try an agent - can’t hurt to try

Re: We mourn our craft

#484

Post by hnlmorg »

davidhyde wrote: post #480
hnlmorg wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.…

My take on the difference between now and then is “effort”. All those things mentioned above are now effortless but the door to “effort” remains open as it always has been. Take the first point for example. Those little black boxes of AI can be significantly demystified by, for example, watching a bunch of videos ( https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html ) and spending at least 40 hours of hard cognitive effort learnin…

I’ve worked in the AI space and I understand how LLMs work as a principle. But we don’t know the magic contained within a model after it’s been trained. We understand how to design a model, and how models work at a theoretical level. But we cannot know how well it will be at inference until we test it. So much of AI research is just trial and error with different dials repeated tweaked until we get something desirable. So no, we don’t understand these models in the same way we might understand how an hashing algorithm works. Or a compression routine. Or an encryption cypher. Or any other hand-programmed algorithm.

I also run Linux. But that doesn’t change how the two major platforms behave and that, as software developers, we have to support those platforms.

Open source hardware is great but it’s not on the same league of price and performance as proprietary hardware.

Agentic AI doesn’t make me feel hopeless either. I’m just describing what I’d personally define as a “golden age of computing”.

Re: We mourn our craft

#485

Post by kaffekaka »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #461
kaffekaka wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well put. Two things are true at the same time, this makes people uneasy.

In fact, contrary things are so very often both true at the same time, in different ways. Figuring out how to live in the uncomfortableness of non-absolutes, how to live in a world filled with dualisms, is IMO one of the primary and necessary maturities for surviving and thriving in this reality.

Yes. Unwillingness to accept contradicting data points is holding many people back. They have an unconscious need to always pick one or the other, and that puts them at a disadvantage. "I know what I think." But no, you do not.

Re: We mourn our craft

#486

Post by [deleted] »

hnlmorg wrote: post #470
HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problems about documentation I described wasn’t about the effort of writing it. It was that modern chipsets are trade secrets. When you bought a computer in the 80s, you’d get a technical manual about the internal workings of the hardware. In some cases even going as far as detailing what the registers did on their graphics chipset or CPU. GenAI wouldn’t help here for modern hardware because GenAI doesn’t have ac…

[deleted]

Re: We mourn our craft

#487

Post by hnlmorg »

apitman wrote: post #448
ctmnt wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure Go belongs on that list. Otherwise I hear what you’re saying.

A large percentage of the code I've written the last 10 years is Go. I think it does somewhat better than the others in some areas, such as relative simplicity and having a robust stdlib, but a lot of this is false security. The simplicity is surface level. The runtime and GC are very complex. And the stdlib being robust means that if you ever have to implement a compiler from scratch, you have to implement all of st…

I’ve got 8 year old Go code that still compiles fine on the latest Go compiler.

Go has its warts but backwards compatibility isn’t one of them. The language is almost as durable as Perl.

Re: We mourn our craft

#489

Post by socalgal2 »

crawshaw wrote: post #57
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…

Glad to see this already expressed here because I wholly agree. Programming has not brought me this much joy in decades. What a wonderful time to be alive.

I wish I could have you sit by my side for a week or two and pair program what I'm working on because most for the time I'm not getting great results.

Re: We mourn our craft

#490

Post by ludicity »

mirawelner wrote: post #385

These posts make me feel like I’m the worst llm prompter in existence. I’m using a mix of Gemini, grok, and gpt to translate some matlab into c++. It is kinda okay at its job but not great? I am rapidly reading Accelerated C++ to get to the point where I can throw the llm out the window. If it was python or Julia I wouldn’t be using an LLM at all bc I know those languages. AI is barely better than me at C++ because I…

I'm firing you for being unable to adequately commune with the machine spirit.

(But for real, a good test suite seems like a great place to start before letting an LLM run wild... or alternatively just do what you're doing. We definitely respect textbook-readers more than prompters!)

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