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I am happier writing code by hand

abhinavomprakash.com

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Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#241

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

agentultra wrote: post #81
woeirua wrote: post #5

This is no different then carpentry. Yes, all furniture can now be built by machines. Some people still choose to build it by hand. Does that make them less productive? Yes. Will they ever carve furniture by hand for a business? Probably not. Can they still enjoy the act of working with the wood? Yes. If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do…

I’ve heard this metaphor before and I don’t think it works well. For one, a power tool like a bandsaw is a centaur technology. I, the human, am the top half of the centaur. The tool drives around doing what I tell it to do and helping me to do the task faster (or at all in some cases). A GenAI tool is a reverse-centaur technology. The algorithm does almost all of the work. I’m the bottom half of the centaur helping t…

The “work” is not creating for and while loops. The work for me is:

1. Looking at the contract and talking to sales about any nuances from the client

2. Talking to the client (use stakeholder if you are working for a product company) about their business requirements and their constraints

3. Designing the architecture.

4. Presenting the architecture and design and iterating

5. Doing the implementation and iterating. This was the job of myself and a team depending on the size of the project. I can do a lot more by myself now in 40 hours a week with an LLM.

6. Reviewing the implementation

7. User acceptance testing

8. Documentation and handover.

I’ve done some form of this from the day I started working 25 years ago. I was fortunate to never be a “junior developer”. I came into my first job with 10 years of hobbyist experience and implementing a multi user data entry system.

I always considered coding as a necessary evil to see my vision come to fruition.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#242

Post by bigstrat2003 »

echelon wrote: post #55
sgarland wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don’t understand: why highly-paid SWEs seem to think that their salaries will remain the same (if they even still have a job) if their role is now a glorified project manager.

This is what I don't understand: everyone who thinks we're still relevant with the same job and salary expectations. Everything just changed. Fundamentally. If you don't adapt to these tools, you will be slower than your peers. Few businesses will tolerate that. This is competitive cycling. Claude is a modern bike with steroids. You can stay on a penny farthing, but that's not advised. You can write 10x the code - go…

> You can write 10x the code - good code.

This is just blatantly false.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#243

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

thwarted wrote: post #233
agentultra wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard this metaphor before and I don’t think it works well. For one, a power tool like a bandsaw is a centaur technology. I, the human, am the top half of the centaur. The tool drives around doing what I tell it to do and helping me to do the task faster (or at all in some cases). A GenAI tool is a reverse-centaur technology. The algorithm does almost all of the work. I’m the bottom half of the centaur helping t…

There's DeWALT, Craftsman, Stanley, etc carpentry/mechanic power tool brands who make a wide variety of all manner of tools and tooling; the equivalents in computers (at least UNIXy) are coreutils (fileutils, shellutils, and textutils), netpbm, sed, awk, the contents of /usr/bin, and all their alternative, updated brands like fd, the silver searcher, and ripgrep are, or the progression of increased sharpening in revi…

That may be true - and?

Does money appear in my account at the end of every two weeks or formally RSUs appear in my brokerage account at the end of every vesting period?

At the end of the day, that’s what supports my addiction to food and shelter.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#244

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

blks wrote: post #164
tux1968 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you're doing a lot of work to miss the actual point. Focusing on the minutiae of the analogy is a distraction from the over arching and obvious point. It has nothing to do with how you feel , it has to do with how you will compete in a world with others who feel differently. There were carpenters who refused to use power tools, some still do. They are probably happy -- and that's great, all the power to…

I don’t think it’s correct to claim that AI generated code is just next level of abstraction. All previously mentioned levels produce deterministic results. Same input, same output. AI-generation is not deterministic. It’s not even predictable. And example of big software companies clearly show what mass adoption of AI tools will look like in terms of software quality. I dread if using AI will ever be an expectation,…

No one is using Gen AI to determine if a number is odd at runtime - they are testing the deterministic code that it generates

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#245

Post by lstodd »

utopiah wrote: post #49
drob518 wrote: post #44

It feels like all of modern society is being reduced to button clicks that produce dopamine hits. And that’s sad. No wonder everything is a mess.

When slot machine is the ultimate UX.

Cf. wirehead, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#246

Post by mupuff1234 »

AstroBen wrote: post #231
mupuff1234 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk what the median lifespan of a piece of code / project / employee tenure is but probably way less than 10 years, which makes that "long term investment" pretty pointless in most cases.

Unsuccessful projects: way less than 10 years Successful projects: quite often much longer than 10 years Code quality doesn't matter until lots of people start using what you wrote and you need to maintain/extend/change it God it's a depressing thought that whatever work you do is just a throwaway no-one will use. That shouldn't be your end goal

> God it's a depressing thought that whatever work you do is just a throwaway no-one will use

I didn't say that.

In fact if your code doesn't significantly change over time it probably means your project wasn't successful.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#247

Post by MarkMarine »

woeirua wrote: post #5

This is no different then carpentry. Yes, all furniture can now be built by machines. Some people still choose to build it by hand. Does that make them less productive? Yes. Will they ever carve furniture by hand for a business? Probably not. Can they still enjoy the act of working with the wood? Yes. If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do…

I agree with this analogy, as someone who professionally codes and someone who pulls out the power tools to build things around my house but uses hand tools for furniture and chairs.

No job site would tolerate someone bringing a hand saw to cut rafters when you could use a circular saw, the outcome is what matters. In the same vein, if you’re too sloppy cutting with the circular saw, you’re going to get kicked off the site too. Just keep in mind a home made from dimensional lumber is on the bottom of the precision scale. The software equivalent of a rapper’s website announcing a new album.

There are places where precision matters, building a nuclear power plant, software that runs an airplane or an insulin pump. There will still be a place for the real craftsman.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#248

Post by KronisLV »

lokar wrote: post #220
KronisLV wrote: post #206

I like writing code that I don't have time pressure around, as well as the kind where I can afford to fail and use that as a learning experience. Especially the code that I can structure myself. I sometimes dread writing code that's in a state of bad disrepair or is overly complex, think a lot of the "enterprise" code out there - it got so bad that I more or less quit a job over it, though never really stated that pu…

I wonder if some of the divide in the LLM-code discourse is between people who have mostly/always worked in jobs where they have the time and freedom to do things correctly, and to go back and fix stuff as they go, vs people who have mostly not (and instead worked under constant unrealistic time pressure, no focus on quality, API design, re-factoring, etc)

I’m pretty sure that the answer to that question is positive: those who have worked with code that sparks joy won’t like interacting with it closely being taken away, whereas the people for whom the code they have to work with inspires misery will be thankful for the opportunity to at least slight free themselves from the shackles of needing to run in circles for two weeks to implement a basic form because everything around it is a mess.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#249

Post by AstroBen »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #246
AstroBen wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsuccessful projects: way less than 10 years Successful projects: quite often much longer than 10 years Code quality doesn't matter until lots of people start using what you wrote and you need to maintain/extend/change it God it's a depressing thought that whatever work you do is just a throwaway no-one will use. That shouldn't be your end goal

> God it's a depressing thought that whatever work you do is just a throwaway no-one will use I didn't say that. In fact if your code doesn't significantly change over time it probably means your project wasn't successful.

Maybe we're talking about different things?

That's one of the biggest benefits of software quality and the long-term investment: how easy is your thing to change?

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#250

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

sgarland wrote: post #21
candiddevmike wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do that professionally for much longer. If you can't code by hand professionally anymore, what are you being paid to do? Bring the specs to the LLMs? Deal with the customers so the LLMs don't have to?

This is what I don’t understand: why highly-paid SWEs seem to think that their salaries will remain the same (if they even still have a job) if their role is now a glorified project manager.

You have to move up the stack and make yourself a more valuable product. I have an analogy…

I’ve been working for cloud consulting companies/departments for six years.

Customers were willing to pay mid level (L5) consultants with @amazon.com by their names (AWS ProServe) $x to do one “workstream”/epic worth of work. I got paid $x - Amazon’s cut in cash and RSUs.

Once I got Amazon’ed, I had to get a staff level position (senior equivalent at BigTech) at a third party company where now I am responsible for larger projects. Before I would have needed people - now I need code gen tools and my quarter century of development experience and my decade of experience leading implementations + coding.

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