161–170 of 206 posts
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Having an AI-slop version of X for your own gratification is usually better than having no version at all.
I think for AI to become useful while minimizing it's harm, the interface as a whole needs to be reworked. Instead of having a loop of code generation followed by review. The initiative should be taken by the developer, AI should be a background thing, not one that's surfacing itself to the developer. For instance I was thinking of AI coding where the developer is writing the application interface, files, design, and…
Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudg…
My principles have nothing to do with whether or not AI is giving me extra productivity though. Even if AI made me 5000x more productive I still wouldn't want to use it out of principle. I think it is a deeply immoral technology that shouldn't exist
I also think that people who research and build AI are deeply immoral people who should be tried for crimes against humanity
Because I have no doubt in my mind that AI is leading us towards crimes against humanity. We are going to be culled the moment we are not useful anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, I'm responsible for our engineering team, and I'm the one starting to put some gentle pressure on the developers right now. Velocity used to be one of the bigger issues we had: Features used to be in development over weeks, while customers, product management, and engineers iterated on the feature, until it was finally deemed stable enough and shipped. With AI, we can shorten that cycle considerably, and get st…
So you struggled to improve velocity without AI tools, are you worried that using the AI tools as a crutch will just lead to a death spiral of bad code being shipped increasingly faster? I've only ever seen the AI adoption approach work on fully functional teams. The concern as well is that by forcing the AI onto developers, they eventually throw their hands up and say "well they dont care about code quality anymore,…
I know, from second hand experience, that long before coding LLMs became a thing, engineers would ship slop when it became clear that their superiors cared about deadlines uber alles (i.e. not shipping slop would be the same thing as quitting, but without the paycheck -- slop code is often a form of quiet quitting).
Most people would _prefer_ to be able to "program" their entire business from a spreadsheet. LLMs have enabled them to get involved, and they cannot understand why engineers reject this "help" (it is for the same reason that a pilot would reject a copilot that thinks he knows how to fly because he played a flight simulator or read Jonathan Livingston Seagull; flight simulators are used in training too, but they are not a substitute for actual piloting experience). This refusal and resistance feeds into the mistrust and resentment. We live in a world where managers and administrators do not understand what they are managing and administrating, nor do they think that this is part of their job description. In the worst cases, they believe their job is to extract compliance from their subordinates.
There is a _lot_ of alpha in being part of a company, where authorities understand how the internals of the business (including software and IT!) _actually_ function. (One engineer told me that clueless yet demanding managers are, for all intents and purposes, unwitting saboteurs, and that the best a company can do about this is get him a job interview at a competitor). In some sense, the economy is just a machine for transferring wealth from those who do not know something essential, to those who do know something essential. This can veer uncomfortably close to exploitation. If we want to avoid crossing that line, we need to cultivate an economy where a lack of understanding is not seen as an _opportunity for profit_, but rather _as an opportunity for illumination_.
I started my coding apprenticeship back in early 80s with a senior programmer who taught me to code in LSI-11 processor codes. I memorized the whole table of octal processor opcodes and learned how to compose them with data to write programs on PDP-11. I was able to understand what each exact 16-bit word in my program is doing. It was a great skill. But then the same guy taught me FORTRAN 83, and I suddenly understoo…
When you let the LLM do the programming, you’re a product manager, not a programmer.
Product managers can't produce viable programs ready to be deployed in production (yet). But maybe the will able to do it in the future. We don't know how far or close this future is. But I don't think it's not a bad idea in general.
> Boilerplate and scaffolding Have we really reached the limit of how much we can reliably automate these things via good old metaprogramming and/or generator scripts, without resorting to using unreliable and expensive statistical models via imprecise natural language? > Refusing to use AI out of principle is as irrational as adopting it out of hype. I'm not sure about this. For some people, holding consistently to…
When to use your mouse, when to use your keyboard, how to locate a file you want to look at in your terminal or IDE, how to find commands you executed last week, etc. It's all lacking. When devs struggle with these fundamentals, I suspect the desire to bypass all this with a singular "just ask the LLM" interface increases.
So when orgs focus on a "devs should use LLMs more to accelerate", I really wish the focus was more "find ways to accelerate", which could more reliably mean "get more proficient with your tools".
I think there's a lot of good that can be gained from formalizing conventions with templating engines (another tool worth learning), rather than relying on stochastic template generation.
I guess it reminds me of someone switching from a manual labor job to a desk job: you become at risk of physical issues from being more sedentary, but you can exercise after work or even some people have things like standing desks and such to keep active during the job
So there can be real risks but there should be ways to manage them
Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudg…
Completely resonate with this. There don't seem to be many of us, at least in my online bubble, but you're not alone. I believe and hope eventually we'll come around to valuing people who have put in the work - not just to understand and review output but to make choices themselves and keep their knowledge and judgement sharp - when we fully realize the cost of not doing so.
Of course, having learned a few languages, understanding data types, knowing to prompt it for idiomatic code and check against best practices, etc is vital to being able to do that. The basic skills need to be developed even if not everyone gets the same value out of being able to write code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely resonate with this. There don't seem to be many of us, at least in my online bubble, but you're not alone. I believe and hope eventually we'll come around to valuing people who have put in the work - not just to understand and review output but to make choices themselves and keep their knowledge and judgement sharp - when we fully realize the cost of not doing so.
I value people who put in the work. I also value being able to make a little one-off single use gadget without having to spend a week doing remedial python every few months. I can understand it once it's written but writing it is a separate skill. Of course, having learned a few languages, understanding data types, knowing to prompt it for idiomatic code and check against best practices, etc is vital to being able to…