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I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

jamesdrandall.com

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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#671

Post by fabianholzer »

WoodenChair wrote: post #504

Ironically this post comes across to me as written by an LLM. The em-dashes, the prepositions, the "not this, that" lines. As a college instructor, I can usually tell. I put it through GPTZero and it said it's 96% LLM written. GPTZero is not full-proof but I think it's likely right on this one and I find it very ironic.

I find this knee-jerk reaction, that everything that shows certain stylistic choices is put under the suspicion of "might be generated", to have become a tedious cliché.

Unless the author had live-streamed the writing process, how could we know? Humans have been exposed to LLM generated texts on nearly all channels for more than three years, so by now it would be a surprise if there had not been a reciprocal reaction. Writers imitate what they read, the tools we shaped might have started to shape us.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#672

Post by tarsinge »

nunez wrote: post #505
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My job for the last 8 years has involved Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading…

Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that. Many of these people made many of the countless things we take for granted every day (networking, operating systems, web search; hell, even the transformer architecture before they got productized!). Seeing software development --- and software engineering by proxy --- get redu…

> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.

No, it's more like some folks like me are passionate about building/creating things that are useful or enjoyable, not about the tooling itself. I learned to use computers because I wanted to make things with them, like music. I got into programming because I wanted to create video games and apps. I enjoy programming because I'm passionate about the end result, but not about programming itself. Look at other engineering disciplines, do civil engineers complain that they are not paving the roads themselves?

I don't find it's a new mentality on Hacker News, to me it was always about broadening the hacker mentality outside of programming. Maybe it's more like the Venn diagram of people passionate about computers and programming for the sake of it and software engineers and builders used to completely overlap, but it is starting to drift, so the fact that we belong to different crowd is becoming more apparent.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#673

Post by skydhash »

visarga wrote: post #640
skydhash wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had claude make a tool that scans a file or folder, finds all symbols, and prints them with line number. ctags?

Almost, mine uses less tokens repeating filenames.

Why not an awk filter then?

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#675

Post by abustamam »

saithound wrote: post #610
saghm wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news, AI coding assistants aren't a magic button that give you the final result without having to play the game at all. You'll still need to make plenty of moves on your own at your job, and you're free to use or not use them as much as you want outside them. Your job was never to play chess though in this analogy though, which is where it misses pretty hard; you were being paid to produce software, and the proc…

> you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it. Yes, the people who write articles like the one in this post understand this. Previously, they could do it and get paid while doing a thing they loved. Now that process is no longer economically viable: they can get paid, or they can do the thing they loved. They lost something, so they mourn the loss. At least they would, but a bunch of…

I don't see anyone interrupting anyone here. It's people sharing their experiences and thoughts on a public forum. Invariably people will agree or disagree with the point presented in the original post (or comment). That's every HN discussion ever.

Nothing stops people from mourning the loss of their job essentially changing from before their eyes and they no longer love it. That's a valid reason to be sad. Mourn it! Share your sadness with others. But don't be surprised when people who are experiencing the same thing are not sad and share their experiences.

If you want to join an AI/anti-AI echo chamber, there's plenty of places on the Internet that will gladly agree with your opinion and you can have shared joy or sadness. HN isn't that place, nor do I ever want it to become an echo-chamber.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#676

Post by pklausler »

gitlinuxgreat wrote: post #464
_aavaa_ wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point I think that this has been true, though maybe not quiet a strongly as strongly worded as your quote says it. The original statement was "Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it…

Using a LLM to program is simply another abstraction level. Just how C was to assembly.

The transition from assembly to C, as I remember it, didn't involve using automated IP theft of scraped licensed source code to generate slop that no human has understood up until it's thrown at a code reviewer, though.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#677

Post by saghm »

abustamam wrote: post #657
akdev1l wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before there was some understanding that at least they wrote and understood their own garbage code Now it is not true. Someone can spend a few minutes generating a non-sense change and push for review. I will have to spend a non-trivial amount of time to even know it’s non-sense. This problem is already impacting projects like curl who just recently closed their bug bounty because of low-effort AI generated PRs

I see comments like this a lot. In fact, I've run into it in my own side projects that I work on by myself -- what is this slop and how do i fix it? I only have myself to blame. I can't speak to open source orgs like curl, but at least at the office, the company should invest time in educating engineers on how to use AI in a way that doesn't waste everyone's time. It could be introducing domain-specific skills, rules…

> Engineers who waste other engineers' time reviewing slop PRs should just be fired. AI is no excuse to start producing bad code. The engineer should still be responsible for the code they ship.

Yeah, this is the unfortunate truth about what's going on here in my opinion. The underlying problem is that some workplaces just have bad culture or processes that don't do enough to prevent (or even actively encourage) being a bad teammate. AI isn't going to solve that, but it's also not really the cause, and at the end of the day, you're going to have problem at a place like that regardless of whether AI is being used or not.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#678

Post by saithound »

abustamam wrote: post #675
saithound wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it. Yes, the people who write articles like the one in this post understand this. Previously, they could do it and get paid while doing a thing they loved. Now that process is no longer economically viable: they can get paid, or they can do the thing they loved. They lost something, so they mourn the loss. At least they would, but a bunch of…

I don't see anyone interrupting anyone here. It's people sharing their experiences and thoughts on a public forum. Invariably people will agree or disagree with the point presented in the original post (or comment). That's every HN discussion ever. Nothing stops people from mourning the loss of their job essentially changing from before their eyes and they no longer love it. That's a valid reason to be sad. Mourn it!…

Sure. And since the comment I originally responded to is "giving advice" to these people without taking the effort to understand their position, I feel alright reminding them that they're tone-deaf.

Doesn't mean I want an echo chamber, we're all having fun here. But those who wish to give advice should understand the position of those they're advising, otherwise they'll just embarrass themselves.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#679

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

nunez wrote: post #499
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology. On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated…

Those levels bake in the expectation of "codez real gud" at FAANG/MANGA/whatever style tech companies since the technical complexity of their operations is high and a high skill bar needs to be hurdled over to contribute to most of those codebases and make impact at the scale they operate at. One's ability to reverse a binary tree (which is a BS filter, but it is what it is) hasn't been an indicator of ability in som…

Fundamentals will become more important as the industry bifurcates into a small but irreplaceable pool of software engineers who do know the fundamentals and an ocean of dime-a-dozen LLM operators.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#680

Post by abustamam »

saithound wrote: post #678
abustamam wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anyone interrupting anyone here. It's people sharing their experiences and thoughts on a public forum. Invariably people will agree or disagree with the point presented in the original post (or comment). That's every HN discussion ever. Nothing stops people from mourning the loss of their job essentially changing from before their eyes and they no longer love it. That's a valid reason to be sad. Mourn it!…

Sure. And since the comment I originally responded to is "giving advice" to these people without taking the effort to understand their position, I feel alright reminding them that they're tone-deaf. Doesn't mean I want an echo chamber, we're all having fun here. But those who wish to give advice should understand the position of those they're advising, otherwise they'll just embarrass themselves.

That's a fair point; there's a difference between expressing an opinion and giving advice.
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