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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

#251

Post by thwarted »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #243
thwarted wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "I gotta eat" comment contingent is worse than the "rewrite it in rust" comment contingent.

Not every conversation about GenAI and slop is about your eating habits.

These are astroturfed bot comments, aren't they?

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#252

Post by FpUser »

candiddevmike wrote: post #10
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…

> 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?

>"If you can't code by hand professionally anymore"

Then you are simply fucked. The code you deliver will contain bugs which LLM sometimes will be able to fix and sometimes will be not. And as a person who has no clue you will have no idea how to fix it when LLM can not. Also even when LLM code is correct it can and sometimes does introduce gross performance fuckups, like using patterns that employ N-square complexity instead of N for example. Again as a clueless person you are fucked. And if one goes to areas like concurrency, multithreading optimizations one gets fucked even more. I can go on and on on way more particular reasons to get screwed.

For a person who can hand code AI becomes amazing tool. For me - it helps immensely.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#253

Post by askonomm »

pdimitar wrote: post #205
askonomm wrote: post #193

Seems like the author has a case of all or nothing. The real power in agentic programming, to me, is not in extremes, but in that you are still actively present. You don't give it world-size things to do, but byte-sized, and you constantly steer it. It's to be detailed enough to produce quality, and to be aware of everything it produces, but not so detailed that it makes sense to just write the code yourself. It's a…

I am with you and fully agree with your "it does not have to be an all or nothing" stance. A remark on one part of your comment: > What are you adding to the mix here? Your prompting skills? The answer to that is an unironic and dead-serious "yes!". My colleagues use Claude Opus and it does an okay job but misses important things occasionally. I've had one 18-hour session with it and fixed 3 serious but subtle and di…

Yup, totally! I'm also not against the evolution of software engineer to a software architect. We were on that direction already anyway with the ever increasing amount of abstraction in our libraries and tools. This also frees up my ability to do other things, like coordinate cross team efforts, deal with customer support issues, etc. As a generalist, I feel more useful and thus valuable than ever, and that makes me very happy.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#254

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

thwarted wrote: post #251
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "I gotta eat" comment contingent is worse than the "rewrite it in rust" comment contingent. Not every conversation about GenAI and slop is about your eating habits. These are astroturfed bot comments, aren't they?

Why else do you think I go to work everyday? Because I have a “passion” for sitting at a computer for 40 hours a week to enrich private companies bottom line or a SaaS product or a LOB implementation? It’s not astroturfing - it’s realistic

Would you be happier if I said I love writing assembly language code by hand like I did in 1986?

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#255

Post by FpUser »

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 are under delusion. Glorified project manager will not produce production quality code no matter what. At least not until we will have reached that holy grail of AGI. But if that ever happens the world will have way bigger problems to deal with.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#256

Post by OptionOfT »

acedTrex wrote: post #6

I will do what i know gives me the best possible and fastest outcome over the long term, 5-10 year period. And that remains largely neovim and by hand. The process of typing code gives me a deeper understanding of the project that lets me deliver future features FASTER. I'm fundamentally convinced that my investment into deep long term grokking of a project will allow me to surpass primarily LLM projects over the lon…

Yea, using agents and having them do work means not only a lot of context switching, I actually don't have any context.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#257

Post by xigoi »

dasil003 wrote: post #143
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.

Architects and engineers are not construction workers. AI can build the thing but it needs to be told exactly what to build by someone who knows how software works. I’ve spent enough time working with cross-functional stakeholders to know that the vast majority of PM (whether of the product, program, or project variety), will not be capable of running AI towards any meaningful software development goal. At best they…

> can build the thing but it needs to be told exactly what to build by someone who knows how software works.

How do you tell a computer exactly what you want it to do, without using code?

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#258

Post by mattmanser »

dasil003 wrote: post #188
mattmanser wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be stupid, if an AI can figure out how to arrange code, it can also figure out how to pick the right architecture choices. Right now millions of developers are providing tons of architecture questions and answers. That's all going to be used as training data for the next model coming out in 6 months time. This is a moat on our jobs as deep as a puddle. If you believe LLMs will be able to do complex coding tasks…

> [...] by asking the right questions [...] Now you've put your finger on something. Who is capable of asking the right questions?

It already asks questions in plan mode.

It's not a massive jump to go from, 'add a button above the table to the right that when clicked downloads and excel file', to 'The client's asking to dowbload an excel file".

If you believe the LLMs will graduate from junior level coding to senior in the next year, which they're clearly not capable of doing yet despite all the hype, there is no moat of going from coder to BA to PM.

And then you don't need middle management either.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#259

Post by bigstrat2003 »

yoz-y wrote: post #77
echelon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t think that the real dichotomy here. You can either produce 2-5x good maintainable code, or 10-50x more dogshit code that works 80-90% of the time, and that will be a maintenance nightmare. The management has decided that the latter is preferable for short term gains.

> You can either produce 2-5x good maintainable code, or 10-50x more dogshit code that works 80-90% of the time, and that will be a maintenance nightmare.

It's actually worse than that, because really the first case is "produce 1x good code". The hard part was never typing the code, it was understanding and making sure the code works. And with LLMs as unreliable as they are, you have to carefully review every line they produce - at which point you didn't save any time over doing it yourself.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#260

Post by runarberg »

tux1968 wrote: post #203
runarberg wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So instead of determinism being a binary you consider it a binomial distribution with p extremely close but not strictly equal to 1. I think this is a distinction without a difference, we all know what we mean when way say deterministic here.

I think the distinction without a difference is a tool being deterministic or not. Fundamentally, its nature doesn't matter, if in actual practice it outperforms everything else.

Be that as it may, moving the goalpost aside. For me personally this fundamentally does matter. Programming is about giving instructions for a machine (or something mechanical) to follow. It matters a great deal to me that the machine reliably follows the instructions I give it. And compiler authors of the past have gone to great lengths to make their compilers produce robust (meaning deterministic) output, as have language authors tried to make their standards as rigorous (meaning minimize undefined behavior) as possible.

And for that matter, going back to the band saw analogy, a measure of a quality of a great band saw is, in fact, that the blade won’t snap in half in the middle of a cut. If a band saw manufacturer produces a band saw with a really low binomial p-value (meaning it is less deterministic/more stochastic) that is a pretty lousy band saw, and good carpenters will know to stay away from that brand of band saws.

To me this paints a picture of a distinction that does indeed have a difference. A pretty important difference for that matter.

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