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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#61

Post by afavour »

operatingthetan wrote: post #57
torben-friis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of the popularity of the claim, I’ll bite. Both big tech and startups are now full of people working at 10x, features are written as fast as PMs can think them, monoliths self heal with agents buzzing over them. 10x means 10 times the outcomes in a given amount of time, so did you see the last iOS version pack a decade worth of features in a single release? Do you remember when meta moved their backend to ru…

I didn't say anything about increased productivity or 10x. Feel free to revise your strawman.

If there’s no increased productivity then what’s the point in spending all the money?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#62

Post by danjl »

PaulHoule wrote: post #23

You can use gen AI entirely in the spirit of craft. For instance if you need to consume, implement or extend some open source software you can load it up in an agent IDE and ask “How do I?” questions or “how is it that?” questions that put you on a firm footing.

> I was afraid the puzzle-solving was over. But it wasn't—it just moved up a level.

The craft can move up a level too. You still can make decisions about the implementation, which algorithms to use, how to combine them, how and what to test -- essentially crafting the system at a higher level. In a similar sense, we lost the hand-crafting of assembly code as compilers took over, and now we're losing the crafting of classes and algorithms to some extent, but we still craft the system -- what and how it does its thing, and most importantly, why.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#63

Post by ctoth »

Roguelazer wrote: post #56

The important thing to remember is that for a large number of people (in the US), "work" is a place where they do things that they hate for eight hours a day, for people they hate (surveys routinely show between 40% and 60% of people are "satisfied" with their jobs). Those of us who are in the tech industry because we like actually programming computers (the "craft-lovers", in the parlance of this blog post) have bee…

[flagged]

Re: Grief and the AI split

#64

Post by skeeter2020 »

kalalakaka wrote: post #6

[dead]

This better matches my experiences and feelings than the divide which the author discusses. The craft is in the entire building, not specifically the coding aspects. I want to do a great job building a house, and if AI helps or even completes some aspects while meeting standards that's awesome. The problem is it hasn't yet shown it can be trusted as a sub trade, and we've got people outsourcing the entire project to an army of agents. The result looks a lot like the condo I bought a few years ago.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#65

Post by yoyohello13 »

bigwheels wrote: post #38
torben-friis wrote: post #12

Lots of mentions of the term mourning... As they say in my country, don't sell the skin until you kill the bear. All I'm seeing around me is people dropping best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code! This is going to blow up. Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that…

I was still skeptical at the start of this year, but there seems to be a shift underway. Found the StrongDM Dark Factory docs in Feb and they've netted novel results that have been inspiring enough to keep studying and practicing. https://factory.strongdm.ai/techniques https://factory.strongdm.ai/products/attractor If you've found better or ancillary resources, please share.

Wow! My productivity increased 100x after i stated listening to ad bots.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#66

Post by operatingthetan »

afavour wrote: post #61
operatingthetan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say anything about increased productivity or 10x. Feel free to revise your strawman.

If there’s no increased productivity then what’s the point in spending all the money?

I didn't say there was or there wasn't. They just don't get to infer that I did and then attack that as my position.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#67

Post by School-Cotton »

People who say directing an AI is just "moving up another level of abstraction" are missing the point that it's a completely different kind of work. Everything from machine code to Haskell is a predictable deductive logical system, whereas AIs are not.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#68

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

I am enjoying crafting really good requirements documents. I use an iterative process. The implementation is the test of the requirements document. If it's not right, I adjust the doc, discard that implementation, and try again.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#69

Post by sarchertech »

I’ve heard this thesis a lot, but it’s almost always from the result chasers.

It doesn’t resonate with me because I am a result chaser. I like woodworking because I like building something that never existed before. I don’t mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me out. I don’t care about the process, I care about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the result.

I don’t care about the beauty of the code, but I do care that nearly every app I load takes longer than it did 15 years ago. I do care that my HomePod tells my wife it’s having trouble connecting to iPhone every 5th time she adds something to the grocery list. I care that my brokerage website is so broken that I actually had to call tech support who told me that they know it’s broken and you have to add a parameter to go back to the old version to get it to work.

I care that when I use the Claude desktop app it sometimes gives me a pop up with buttons that I can’t click on.

I’ve used Claude and Cursor enough to have what I think are valid opinions on AI assisted coding. Coding is not the bottleneck to produce a qualify product. Understanding the problem is the biggest bottleneck. Knowing what to build and what not to build. The next big one is convincing everyone around you of that (sometime this takes even more time). After that, it’s obsessively spending time iterating on something until it’s flawless. Sometimes that’s tweaking an easing value until the animation feels just right. Sometimes that’s obsessing over performance, and sometimes it’s freezing progress until you can make the existing app bulletproof.

AI doesn’t help me with these. At least not much. Mostly because the time I spend coding is time I spend understanding, diagnosing, and perfecting. Not the code. The product.

It does help crank out one off tools. It does help me work in unfamiliar code bases, or code bases where for whatever reason I care more about velocity than quality. It helps me with search. It helps me rubber duck.

All of those things does boost my productivity I think, but maybe somewhere in the order of 10% all in.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#70

Post by [deleted] »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #53
simonw wrote: post #2

This sounds right to me: > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. Helps explain why some people are d…

I strongly disagree. There's always been two camps ... on everything! Emacs vs. vi. Command-line editor vs. IDE. IntelliJ vs. VS Code. I could do like twenty more of these: dev teams have always split on technology choices. But, all of those were rational separations. Emacs and vi, IntelliJ and VS Code ... they're all viable options, so they boil down to subjective preference. By definition, anything subjective will…

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