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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#491

Post by bopbopbop7 »

bgar wrote: post #475
bopbopbop7 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why quantitative? I have friends at most major tech companies and I work at a startup now. You shouldn’t write by hand what can be prompted. Doesn’t mean the hard parts shouldn’t be done with the same care as when everything was handwritten, but a lot of minutiae are irrelevant now.

Because anything not quantitative is either “trust me bro” or AI marketing. Some of us are engineers, so we want to see actual numbers and not vibes.

And there are studies on this subject, like the MITRE study that shows that development speed decreases with LLMs while developers think it increases speed.

Re: We mourn our craft

#492

Post by koiueo »

cmiles74 wrote: post #450
koiueo wrote: post #171

> We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. I'll miss it not because the activity becomes obsolete, but because it's much more interesting than sitting till 2am trying to convince LLM to find and fix the bug for me. We'll still be sitting till 2am. > They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. I've been hearing t…

I am not confident that AI tooling can diagnose or fix this kind of bug. I’ve pointed Claude Opus at bugs that puzzle me (with only one code base involved) and, so far, it has only introduced more bugs in other places.

I'm not saying it can btw. I'm arguing for the opposite.

And for the record, I'm impressed at issues it can diagnose. Being able to query multiple data sources in parallel and detect anomalies, it sometimes can find the root cause for an incident in a distributed system in a matter of minutes. I have many examples when LLMs found bugs in existing code when tasked to write unit tests (usually around edge cases).

But complex issues that stem from ambiguous domain are often out of reach. By the time I'm able to convey to an LLM all the intricacies of the domain using plain English, I'm usually able to find the issue myself.

And that's my point: I'd be more eager to run the code under debugger till 2am, than to push an LLM to debug for me (can easily take till 2am, but I'd be less confident I can succeed at all)

Re: We mourn our craft

#493

Post by Gud »

munksbeer wrote: post #457
_zagj wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

IRC is still around, that old internet is still there.

You just have to get off the commercial crap and you’ll find it.

Re: We mourn our craft

#494

Post by Gud »

busterarm wrote: post #378
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 definitely have lost something. I got into computers because they're deterministic. Way less complicated than people. Now the determinism is gone and computers are gaining the worst qualities of people. My only sanctuary in life is slipping away from me. And I have to hear people tell me I'm wrong who aren't even sympathetic to how this affects me.

But no one is forcing you to use this software?

Re: We mourn our craft

#495

Post by [deleted] »

themacguffinman wrote: post #471
bopbopbop7 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something tells me a non-deterministic code generator won't be the solution to this problem.

Humans are also non-deterministic code generators though. It can be possible that an LLM is more deterministic or consistent at building reliable code than a human.

[deleted]

Re: We mourn our craft

#496

Post by NeutralCrane »

bobro wrote: post #17
AllegedAlec wrote: post #4

While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...

How do you read this article and hear indigence? It’s clearly someone grieving something personal about their own relationship with the technology.

It may not be a reaction to the article itself but to the many comments in this thread and others that fall under that category.

Re: We mourn our craft

#497

Post by mirawelner »

ludicity wrote: post #490
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!)

I’m a contract hire that you paid upfront! You can’t fire me!

Also let this be a lesson to internet folks to be careful what you post if your boss shitposts on the orange yelling site

Re: We mourn our craft

#498

Post by AstroBen »

Nextgrid wrote: post #481
munksbeer wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> programming is about translating unclear requirements in a verbose (English) language into a terse (programming) language

Why are we uniquely capable of doing that, but an LLM isn't? In plan mode I've been seeing them ask for clarifications and gather further requirements

Important business context can be provided to them, also

Re: We mourn our craft

#499

Post by Gud »

bdangubic wrote: post #415
davidw wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they're controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use. is there anything you use that isn't? like laptop on which you work, software that you use to browse the internet, read the email... I've heard similar comment like yours before and I am not sure I understand it given everything else - why does this matter for LLMs and not the phone you use etc etc?

I’ve used FreeBSD since I was 15 years old - Linux before that.

My computer was never controlled by any corporation, until now.

Re: We mourn our craft

#500

Post by archagon »

Nextgrid wrote: post #204
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see my job as having many aspects. One of those aspects is coding. It is the aspect that gives me the most joy even if it's not the one I spend the most time on. And if you take that away then the remaining part of the job is just not very appealing anymore. It used to be I didn't mind going through all the meetings, design discussions, debates with PMs, and such because I got to actually code something cool in the…

You won't be prompting AI for the fun stuff (unless laying out boring boilerplate is what you consider "fun"). You'll still be writing the fun part - but you will be able to prompt beforehand to get all the boilerplate in place.

If you’re writing that much boilerplate as part of your day to day work, I daresay you’re Doing Coding Wrong. (Virtue number one of programming: laziness. https://thethreevirtues.com)

Any drudgework you repeat two or three times should be encapsulated or scripted away, deterministically.

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