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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#581

Post by joquarky »

terminalbraid wrote: post #32
massysett wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Now it's always available. And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)

Your comment does not align with my experience.

Garbage in, garbage out still applies.

Re: We mourn our craft

#582

Post by joquarky »

Levitating wrote: post #36
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…

> golden age of computing I feel like we've reached the worst age of computing. Where our platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and our software is over-engineered garbage. The same company that develops our browsers and our web standards is also actively destroying the internet with AI scrapers. Hobbyists lost the internet to companies and all software got worse for it. Our most popular desktop o…

Unfortunately we live in a "vote with your wallet" paradigm where some of the most mentally unhealthy participants have wallets that are many orders of magnitude bigger than the wallet of the average participant.

Re: We mourn our craft

#583

Post by icedchai »

blibble wrote: post #534
hintymad wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stude…

writing a C compiler is a 1st year undergrad project C was explicitly designed to make it simple to write a compiler

These are toy compilers missing many edge cases. You’ll be lucky if they support anything other than integer types, nevermind complex pointer-to-pointer-to-struct-with-pointers type definitions. They certainly won’t support GNU extensions. They won’t compile any serious open source project, nevermind the Linux kernel.

Re: We mourn our craft

#584

Post by fragmede »

hnlmorg wrote: post #473
fragmede wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

People have been building alternatives to MS Office, Adopt Creative Suite, and so on and so forth for literally decades and yet they’re still the de facto standard. Turns out it’s a lot harder to disrupt than it sounds.

It's really hard. But not impossible. Figma managed to. What's different this time around is AI assisted programming means that people can go in and fix bugs, and the interchange becomes the important part.

Re: We mourn our craft

#585

Post by icedchai »

boxedemp wrote: post #161
Fraterkes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a hundred ai-generated things, and they are rarely interesting. Not because the tools are insufficient, it's just that the kind of person that can't even stomach the charmed life of being a programmer will rarely be able to stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative. Why should someone be interested in you creations? In what part of your new frictionless life would you've picked up something…

You may be mistaking some ai dev with non, because it doesn't have tell tails

Many AI generated web sites have a “look” and it’s not just all the emojis.

Re: We mourn our craft

#586

Post by orwin »

throwup238 wrote: post #440
orwin wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it write mostly useless documentation Which take time to read and decipher. And worse, if you are using it for public documentation, sometimes it hallucinate endpoints (i don't want to say too much here, but it happened recently to a quite used B2B SaaS).

Loop it. Use another agent (from a different company helps) to review the code and documentation and call out any inconsistencies. I run a bunch of jobs weekly to review docs for inconsistencies and write a plan to fix. It still needs humans in the loop if the agents don’t converge after a few turns, but it’s largely automatic (I baby sat it for a few months validating each change).

That might work for hallucinations, that doesn't work for useless verbose. And the main issue is that LLM don't always distinguish useless verbose from necessary one, so even when I ask it to reduce verbose, it remove everything save a few useful comments/docstring, but some of the comments that were removed I deemed useful. Un the end I have to do the work of cutting verbose manually anyway.

Re: We mourn our craft

#587

Post by hnlmorg »

fragmede wrote: post #584
hnlmorg wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been building alternatives to MS Office, Adopt Creative Suite, and so on and so forth for literally decades and yet they’re still the de facto standard. Turns out it’s a lot harder to disrupt than it sounds.

It's really hard. But not impossible. Figma managed to. What's different this time around is AI assisted programming means that people can go in and fix bugs, and the interchange becomes the important part.

Figma is another subscription-only service with no native applications.

The closest thing we get to “disruption” these days are web services with complimentary Electron apps, which basically just serves the same content as the website except for duplicating the memory overhead of running a fresh browser instance.

Re: We mourn our craft

#588

Post by plomme »

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 think it’s naive to think that not every part of our jobs will worryingly soon be automated. All the way up to and inckuding CEO. This is not exciting.

Re: We mourn our craft

#589

Post by massysett »

cess11 wrote: post #580
xeromal wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a hostile question.

Yeah, sure, it can be perceived like that. The message I'm responding to shows a blatant disregard for millenia of scriptural knowledge traditions. It's a 'I have a pocket calculator, why should I study math' kind of attitude, presenting itself in a celebratory manner. To me it is reminiscent of liberalist history, the idea that history is a constant progression from animalistic barbarism to civilisation, and nothing…

If I have a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions, so did Noah Webster when he compiled a dictionary. So did Carl Linnaeus when he classified species. So did the Human Genome Project. I have a pocket calculator, yet I know how to do long division. I use LLMs to learn and to enhance my work. A dictionary is a shortcut to learning what a word means without consulting an entire written corpus, as the dictionary editors have already done this.

Is my use of a dictionary a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions? I don’t think so at all. Rather, it exemplifies how human knowledge advances: we build on the work of our predecessors and contemporaries rather than reinvent the wheel every time. LLM use is an example of this.

Re: We mourn our craft

#590

Post by remify »

leecommamichael wrote: post #153

> Now is the time to mourn the passing of our craft. Your craft is not my craft. It's entirely possible that, as of now, writing JavaScript and Java frontends (what the author does) can largely be automated with LLMs. I don't know who the author is writing to, but I do not mistake the audience to be "programmers" in general... If you are making something that exists, or something that is very similar to something tha…

It's funnily enough quite the opposite front ends that have a focus on UX are pretty well protected from generative AI
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