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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#511

Post by JeremyNT »

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…

I see what these can do and I'm already thinking, why would I ever hire a junior developer? I can fire up opencode and tell it to work multiple issues at once myself.

The bottleneck becomes how fast you can write the spec or figure out what the product should actually be, not how quickly you can implement it.

So the future of our profession looks grim indeed. There will be far fewer of us employed.

I also miss writing code. It was fun. Wrangling the robots is interesting in its own way, but it's not the same. Something has been lost.

Re: We mourn our craft

#512

Post by stoneforger »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #84
Banditoz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't really understand. It's a bit difficult to take "wait x months" at face value because I've been hearing it for so long. Wait x months for what? Why hasn't it happened yet? Things seem to be getting better from December 2022 (chatgpt launch), sure, but is there a ceiling we don't see?

Um.. Claude Code has been out less than a YEAR.. and the lift in capability in the last year has been dramatic. It does seem probable based on progress that in 1-2 more model generations there will be little need to hand code in almost any domain. Personally I already don't hand code AT ALL, but there are certainly domains/languages that are under performing right now. Right now with the changes this week (Opus 4.6 a…

Because then you won't be important, the model will be important. And then everyone will have to use their model, that's their dream. Why isn't that your nightmare too? Why will you be special if it can just code whatever it needs to code? Then anthropic can just employ all the programmers that will ever be needed, to just review new skills and modules of code. It was predicted early on there would be a need for about six big computers worldwide. Well now we'll just need six AI shepherds. And then literally everyone else will forget how anything works because it will be a solved problem. People already treat computers like magic, it will literally become a dark art. And I guess it's fine, what can we do, right? Go with the flow I guess. "If I don't , someone else will. Maybe I can be one of those six real people at Anthropic".

Re: We mourn our craft

#513

Post by renegade-otter »

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…

Nothing meaningful happened in almost 20 years. After the iPhone, what happened that truly changed our lives? The dumpster fire of social media? Background Netflix TV?

In fact, I remember when I could actually shop on Amazon or browse for restaurants on Yelp while trusting the reviews. None of that is possible today.

We have been going through a decade of enshitification.

Re: We mourn our craft

#514

Post by stoneforger »

bopbopbop7 wrote: post #447
Kiro wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things have progressed much faster than even the most optimistic predictions, so every "wait 6 months" has come true. Just look at how the discourse has changed on HN. No-one is using the arguments from 6 months ago and any argument today will probably be equally moot in 6 months.

Maybe we should look at output like quality of software being produced instead of discourse on forums where AI companies are spending billions to market? Where is all this new software and increased software quality from all this progression?

Quality shmuality. Get good bro, my app already uses best patterns and you can do all the things and has enterprise SSO and runs on vercel and needs 39 services and costs a few million to run to show you AI generated excel sheets because you cant be bothered to think for a hot minute. We can't have you thinking you might get wrong ideas about ownership. I'm afraid open source was a mistake in the end because it enabled enterprises to iterate faster than they ever could on their own.

Re: We mourn our craft

#515

Post by oxag3n »

ozozozd wrote: post #509

I can relate coz once upon a time I enjoyed reading poetic code - which I later found to be impossible to modify or extend. > Eventually your boss will start asking why you’re getting paid twice your zoomer colleagues’ salary to produce a tenth of the code. And then I couldn’t relate because no one ever paid me for lines of code. And the hardest programming I ever did was when it took me 2 days to write 2 lines of C…

It's the end goal that matters in this context.

Boss that counts LOC will be fired or will bankrupt the company/team.

One of my friend who never lost a touch with coding in hist 30+ years career recently left FAANG and told me it's the best time to realize his dream of building a start up. And it's not because AI can write code for him - it would take him about 12 month to build the system from the ground up manually, but it's the best time because nobody can replicate what he's doing by using AI only. His analogy was "it's like everyone is becoming really good cyclist with electric bikes, even enthusiast cyclists, but you secretly train for Tour de France".

Re: We mourn our craft

#516

Post by hintymad »

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…

One thing that I realized was that a lot of our so-called "craft" is converged "know-how". Take the recent news that Anthropic used Claude Code to write a C compiler for example, writing compiler is hard (and fun) for us humans because we indeed need to spend years understanding deeply the compiler theory and learning every minute detail of implementation. That kind of learning is not easily transferrable. Most students tried the compiler class and then never learned enough, only a handful few every year continued to grow into true compiler engineers. Yet to our AI models, it does not matter much. They already learned the well-established patterns of compiler writing from the excellent open-source implementations, and now they can churn out millions of code easily. If not perfect, they will get better in the future.

So, in a sense our "craft" no longer matters, but what really happens is that the repetitive know-how has become commoditized. We still need people to do creative work, but what is not clear is how many such people we will need. After all, at least in short term, most people build their career by perfecting procedural work because transferring the know-how and the underlying whys is very expensive to human. For the long term, though, I'm optimistic that engineers just get an amazing tool and will use it create more opportunities that demand more people.

Re: We mourn our craft

#517

Post by stoneforger »

chrysoprace wrote: post #391
grahar64 wrote: post #7

"Wait 6 months" has been the call for 3-4 years now. You can't eulogize a profession that hasn't been killed, that's just mean.

Humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future. We can't even reliably predict the weather a week from now.

If we were as smart as the smartest guys throwing trillions at LLMs we wouldn't be predicting anything, we would be creating it like the gods we were always meant to be ever since someone hurt our feelings irrevocably. Hitler could have been a painter, these guys could be slinging dope for a living but here we are.

Re: We mourn our craft

#518

Post by Nextgrid »

AstroBen wrote: post #498
Nextgrid wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An LLM isn’t (yet?) capable of remembering a long-term representation of the codebase. Neither is it capable of remembering a long-term representation of the business domain. AGENTS.md can help somewhat but even those still need to be maintained by a human.

But don’t take it from me - go compete with me! Can you do my job (which is 90% talking to people to flesh out their unclear business requirements, and only 10% actually writing code)? It so, go right ahead! But since the phone has yet to stop ringing, I assume LLMs are nowhere there yet. Btw, I’m helping people who already use LLM-assisted programming, and reach out to me because they’ve reached their limitations and need an actual human to sanity-check.

Re: We mourn our craft

#519

Post by emp17344 »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #200
XenophileJKO wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet.. my car was surrounded by 5 self-driving cars with no people in them on the way to work on Thursday.

Waymos require a highly mapped environment to function safely in. Not to take away from what Waymo has accomplished, but it's a far more bounded problem that what the "self driving" promise has been.

And they still rely on human operators for some maneuvers, as we learned this week.

Re: We mourn our craft

#520

Post by stoneforger »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #218
codazoda wrote: post #59

“We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of” I still feel proud when skillfully guiding a set of AI agents to build from my imagination. Especially when it was out of my reach just 6-months ago. I’m a 49 year old veteran who started at just 10 years old and have continued to find pure passion in it.

I wonder if this is just a matter of degree. In a few years (or less) you may not have to "skillfully guide" anything. The agents will just coordinate themselves and accomplish your goals after you give some vague instruction. Will you still feel proud? Or maybe a bit later then agents will come up with their own improvements and just ship them without any input at all. How about then?

That requires thinking. Let's just ship now, think later. Does it matter? Show me the money and all that. We will all just ride in the sunset with Butch Cassidy and the Sunset Kid I'm sure.
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