31–40 of 131 posts
The "it's my craft" developers seem to often disparage the "it's a means to an end" people as not being good at programming.
One solution: do NOT just program for work. If it's not work related - where management can dictate how you work - you can whatever you want, and if what you want is to keep writing software and not outsource your brain to an AI, absolutely do so.
Fine that doesn't change the fact for a lot of people they felt they had "if you love what you do you don't work a day in your life" and now they don't. They aren't wrong to feel a sense of deep loss.
These kind of inevitability articles always citing the same bloggers are just there to support AI. They never address: - Real developers like Rob Pike who hate AI. - The IP theft that powers the models. - The actual useful output of LLMs that is very low. - The fact that 99.9999% of useful software was produced before AI. - The fact that "nostalgic developers" are not interested in "writing" code, but understanding a…
The 'make it go' people that I worked with usually didn't understand many of the underlying code, and the 'craft' people always need to fix it. Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers.
Meanwhile, Undertale, one of the most celebrated video games, famously has a 1000+ line switch statement and AI had nothing to do with it. Sometimes you have to bang out something that works, just to even get the chance to be annoyed at how bad it is for next version.
My understanding is that the switch statement was for npc character conversation text. That seems pretty reasonable, even in enterprise SaaS for something like translations. It might not be as easy to maintain in other circumstances.
We, software developers, as a profession took over countless crafts. It started with people doing calculations by hand, then moved on to people typing on typewriters and continued from there. People used to edit films with scissors and scotch tape. People used to place lead fonts on a matrix to print news articles. Databases used to be little cards made carefully by people whose job it was to organize and modify them. It’s a bit indecent for a developer to complain that LLMs took away the pleasure of molding a clay made of bits, while the robots we enabled to build took the actual clay off of potmakers actual hands.
And what the author forgets to mention is that we got it good. Oh boy. As a software developer, I can work in any field I want. I started on video compression. I moved to finance. I make games in my spare time. I make plugins for music. And I get to be paid way more than my neighbor who’s a heart surgeon. I can work remotely 100%. I can go to a nice beach in Thailand, work 2 hours in the morning and enjoy the rest of the day, and still make more than the median salary in France, where I live.
The grief is not the loss of the craft alone, it’s the loss of that craft that paid for your house.
As they said: software is eating the world. Well, it is now eating itself. It’s only fair.
The author is right though, human societies need to ask themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice all the crafts on the altar of productivity and convenience.
The Amish decided they didn’t want to. It’s a bit of a weird choice, but it is a choice.
There is indeed a painful dissonance here. I like this new world, but feel sorrow for the loss of something. I try to remember how empowering AI is. It is already allowing millions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years. No longer do they have to feel constrained by software creators who have made choices for them. Now it is their tool through-and-through, and they can c…
People want software that just works, they'll pay for it, they don't want to use their computers to build their own software. That idea is just software and computer geeks (said affectionately) projecting their own desires on a larger community.
To use an analogy, back in the days of film cameras and before 1 hour labs, the "craftsman" photographer would carefully frame the shot, carefully setting the exposure, aperture and focus. The most meticulous would take notes in a notebook. There were only 36 frames to a roll of film and all going well, the photographer had to wait a couple of days to get back the proof sheet. Those were the days when expert photogra…
If that were true there would be no wedding photographer's or any sales of high end DSLR's. The barrier of entry may have fallen but the need for real experts and tools still exists.
I expect AI's will cause a similar shift, lower barrier to entry but still requiring the hand of the expert in critical situations.
Using an LLM for coding is like using a Electric shaver. It is unpredictable and you have to keep going over the same area in hopes that it will pick up the remaining few stubs of hair. Boring, irritating but very convenient. Use a straight razor, which is predictable and you feel time flying and you end up with perfect shave.
These kind of inevitability articles always citing the same bloggers are just there to support AI. They never address: - Real developers like Rob Pike who hate AI. - The IP theft that powers the models. - The actual useful output of LLMs that is very low. - The fact that 99.9999% of useful software was produced before AI. - The fact that "nostalgic developers" are not interested in "writing" code, but understanding a…
"IP Theft" is a loaded term that has already been determined to be unfounded in US law.
Alsup stated that models were one of the most transformative uses of content he may ever see in his lifetime, and deemed it fair use.
No matter how you slice it, this technology and capability isn't going away, and that goal post quickly shifts when it's pointed out that "ethically trained" AI gets as much hate as anything else.