I'm also happier riding a horse than driving a car.
So I'll take the horse to work from now on.
I am happier writing code by hand
311–320 of 334 posts
Re: I am happier writing code by hand
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It isn't. Coding is to software engineering, what calculation is to math. A necessary but insufficient condition. It is that, but to Computer Science, its lofty academic cousin. To Software Engineering coding is an essential part.
Ok, fine, if you gonna be nitpicky, it's a calculation to an electrical engineer. > To Software Engineering coding is an essential part. Not really. You can be a Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer and do very little coding, but lots of code review and testing. The point is, if you're just banging out code, then you're a software developer. If you use the engineering design process (research, requirements, design…
>Not really. You can be a Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer and do very little coding, but lots of code review and testing.
Those are usually software astronauts and dead weight. But of course they think highly of themselves.
I'd take someone who does that and codes a hell of a lot, like Linus or Lattner anyday of the week.
Re: I am happier writing code by hand
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, fine, if you gonna be nitpicky, it's a calculation to an electrical engineer. > To Software Engineering coding is an essential part. Not really. You can be a Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer and do very little coding, but lots of code review and testing. The point is, if you're just banging out code, then you're a software developer. If you use the engineering design process (research, requirements, design…
> Not really. You can be a Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer and do very little coding, but lots of code review and testing. Those are usually software astronauts and dead weight. But of course they think highly of themselves. I'd take someone who does that and codes a hell of a lot, like Linus or Lattner anyday of the week.
> I'd take someone who does that and codes a hell of a lot, like Linus or Lattner anyday of the week.
Funnily enough, I had Linus in mind as a sort of no-coding Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer. He famously said he doesn't code anymore [1].
So I guess he's dead weight by your logic, right?
Re: I am happier writing code by hand
#314I'm also happier riding a horse than driving a car. So I'll take the horse to work from now on.
Have you seen Wall-e and those fat fucks on robowheelchairs?
In other words, it's entirely okay to use a forklift to lift heavy weights, but please go to the gym.
Re: I am happier writing code by hand
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not really. You can be a Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer and do very little coding, but lots of code review and testing. Those are usually software astronauts and dead weight. But of course they think highly of themselves. I'd take someone who does that and codes a hell of a lot, like Linus or Lattner anyday of the week.
> I'd take someone who does that and codes a hell of a lot, like Linus or Lattner anyday of the week. Funnily enough, I had Linus in mind as a sort of no-coding Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer. He famously said he doesn't code anymore [1]. So I guess he's dead weight by your logic, right? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Gd9t7FQqI&t=8m54s
>Funnily enough, I had Linus in mind as a sort of no-coding Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer. He famously said he doesn't code anymore [1].
That's after he coded his ass out for 20 years. And he's doing reviewing and merging, which is not some lofty "software architect" function, but deals directly with written code.
Re: I am happier writing code by hand
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd take someone who does that and codes a hell of a lot, like Linus or Lattner anyday of the week. Funnily enough, I had Linus in mind as a sort of no-coding Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer. He famously said he doesn't code anymore [1]. So I guess he's dead weight by your logic, right? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Gd9t7FQqI&t=8m54s
> Funnily enough, I had Linus in mind as a sort of no-coding Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer. He famously said he doesn't code anymore [1]. That's after he coded his ass out for 20 years. And he's doing reviewing and merging, which is not some lofty "software architect" function, but deals directly with written code.
I've met more Software Architects that coded their asses off for 10+ years than pure-type astronauts. Does that make them real software architects?
Re: I am happier writing code by hand
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also enjoy walking more than driving, but if I had to travel 50 miles every day for my job, I would never dream of going on foot. Same goes for AI for me. If I can finish a project in half the time or less, I still feel enough accomplishment and on top of that I will use the gained free time for self actualisation. I like my job and I love coding and solving challenging problems, but I also love tons of other stuff…
I don’t really understand your point about AI freeing up your time to do other stuff at your job. Does your employer let you work less hours since you’re finishing projects sooner? Mine certainly doesn’t, and I’d rather be coding than doing the other parts of my job. But maybe I’m misunderstanding why you were trying to say? I also would rather a project take longer and struggle through it without using AI as I find…
Maybe think of it this way: If your job is delivering mail and the only transport you have is a horse, your life would probably suck a lot. You'd barely be home and you still wouldn't cover that much distance. Now, if someone gave you a car for your job, you would not just cover a lot more distance and deliver a lot more mail (=happy employer), you would also get to sleep at home every day and not be exposed to the weather all the time (=happy employee).
This is how all industrialisation/automation works in general. A lot more stuff gets produced and people still get to have more quality of life. Code is just another product in the end. Your employer will get more product and you will get to worry about less when you're at home. Imagine you could be a 10x engineer as a normal guy without working 100 hour weeks. And the true 10x guys who still work 100 hours will be able to change the world.
Re: I am happier writing code by hand
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
People on here keep trotting out this "AI-generation is not deterministic." (more properly speaking, non-deterministic) argument on here … And my retort to you (and them) is, "Oh yeah, and so?" What about me asking Claude Code to generate a factorial function in C or Python or Rust or insert-your-language-of-choice-here is non-deterministic ? If you're referring to the fact that for a given input LLMs (or whatever) b…
I personally have jested many times I picked my career because the logical soundness of programming is comforting to me. A one is always a one; you don’t measure it and find it off by some error; you can’t measure it a second time and get a different value. I’ve also said code is prose for me. I am not some autistic programmer either, even if these statements out of context make me sound like one. The non-determinism…
> A one is always a one; you don’t measure it and find it off by some error; you can’t measure it a second time and get a different value.
Linus Torvalds famously only uses ECC memory in his dev machines. Why? Because every now and again either a cosmic ray or some electronic glitch will flip a bit from a zero to a one or from a one to a zero in his RAM. So no, a one is not always a one. A zero is not always a zero. In fact, you can measure it and find it off by some error. You can measure it a second time and get a different value. And because of this ever-so-slight glitchiness we invented ECC memory. Error correction codes are a thing because of this fundamental glitchiness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory
We understand when and how things can go wrong and we correct for that. Same goes for LLMs. In fact I would go so far as to say that someone doesn't even really think like how a software/hardware engineer ought to think if this is not nearly immediately obvious.
Besides the but-they're-not-deterministic crowd there's also the oh-you-find-coding-painful-do-you crowd. Both are engaging in this sort of real men write code with their bare hands nonsense -- if that were the case then why aren't we still flipping bits using toggle switches? We automate stuff, do we not? How is this not a step-change in automation? For the first time in my life my ideas aren't constrained by how much code I can manually crank out and it's liberating. It's not like when I ask my coding agent to provide me with a factorial function in Haskell it draws a tomato. It will, statistically speaking, give me a factorial function in Haskell. Even if I have never written a line of Haskell in my life. That's astounding. I can now write in Haskell if I want. Or Rust. Or you-name-it.
Aren't there projects you wanted to embark on but the sheer amount of time you'd need just to crank out the code prevented you from even taking the first step? Now you can! Do you ever go back to a project and spend hours re-familiarising yourself with your own code. Now it's a two minute "what was I doing here?" away from you.
> The non-determinism has nothing to do with temperature; it has everything to do with that fact that even at temp equal to zero, a single meaningless change can produce a different result. It has to do with there being no way to predict what will happen when you run the model on your prompt.
I never meant to imply that the only factor involved was temperature. For our purposes this is a pedantic correction.
> Coding with LLMs is not the same job. How could it be the same to write a mathematical proof compared to asking an LLM to generate that proof for you?
Correct, it's not the same. Nobody is arguing that it's the same. And it's wrong that it's different, it's just different that it's different.
> These are different tasks that use different parts of the brain.
Yes. And so what's your point?
Re: I am happier writing code by hand
#319I suspect this is like the invention of the car. Some people just love riding horses, so they’ll keep doing it as a hobby. The rest of us are fine with a car.
Re: I am happier writing code by hand
#320Coding with AI falls in one of three categories: 1. The thing to be written is available online. AI is a search engine to find it, maybe also translate it to the language of choice. 2. The thing (system or component or function) is genuinely new. The spec has to be very precise and the AI is just doing the typing. This is, at best working around syntax issues, such as some hard-to-remember particular SQL syntax or so…
There's another category (possibly a subset of 1), the implementation is novel but set of requirements is known and has a set of conformance tests so tight that the LLM can basically brute force its way to a solution. See e.g. the Claude Compiler thing. In this case it's less "search engine + translator" and more of "brute force search".
How is a C compiler novel? There are so many open source C compilers. If you can download a bunch of different open source projects and they all work then it is not a novel problem, it is as solved as you can get already.