The peril of laziness lost
bcantrill.dtrace.org
The peril of laziness lost
1–10 of 148 posts
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#2oh this hits all the right notes for me! I am just the demographic that tried to perl my way into the earliest web server builds, and read those exact words carefully while looking at the very mixed quality, cryptic ascii line noise that is everyday perl. And as someone who had built multi-thousand line C++ systems already, the "virtues" by Larry Wall seemed spot on! and now to combine the hindsight with current LLM snotty Lord Fauntleroy action coming from San Francisco.. perfect!
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#3> Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.
Maybe this was true when Programming Perl was written, but I see the opposite much more often now. I'm a big fan of WET - Write Everything Twice (stolen from comments here), then the third time think about maybe creating a new abstraction.
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#4> Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less. Maybe this was true when Programming Perl was written, but I see the opposite much more often now. I'm a big fan of WET - Write Everything Twice (stolen from comments here), then the third time think about maybe creating a new abstraction.
>WET - Write Everything Twice
I've always heard this as the "Rule of three": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_progra...
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#5As dumb as it is to loudly proclaim you wrote 200k loc last week with an LLM, I don’t think it’s much better to look at the code someone else wrote with an LLM and go “hah! Look at how stupid it is!” You’re making exactly the same error as the other guy, just in the opposite direction: you’re judging the profession of software engineering based on code output rather than value generation.
Now, did Garry Tan actually produce anything of value that week? I dunno, you’ll have to ask him.
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#6Man, I cannot imagine how nice it must to be to work with leadership like this, who just gets it.
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#7This is a person clearly grieving that his hard earned knowledge in his field is now not that valuable.
It is * exactly * the same as a person who spent years perfecting hand written HTML, just to face the wrath of React.
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#8As dumb as it is to loudly proclaim you wrote 200k loc last week with an LLM, I don’t think it’s much better to look at the code someone else wrote with an LLM and go “hah! Look at how stupid it is!” You’re making exactly the same error as the other guy, just in the opposite direction: you’re judging the profession of software engineering based on code output rather than value generation. Now, did Garry Tan actually…
Yeah! It's not like code quality matters in terms of negative value or lives lost, right?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_IT_scandal
Furthermore,
> As for the artifact that Tan was building with such frenetic energy, I was broadly ignoring it. Polish software engineer Gregorein, however, took it apart, and the results are at once predictable, hilarious and instructive: A single load of Tan’s "newsletter-blog-thingy" included multiple test harnesses (!), the Hello World Rails app (?!), a stowaway text editor, and then eight different variants of the same logo — one of which with zero bytes.
Do you think any of the... /things/ bundled in this software increased the surface area that attacks could be leveraged against?
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#9LLMs not being lazy enough definitely feels true. But it's unclear to me if it a permanent issue, one that will be fixed in the next model upgrade or just one your agent framework/CICD framework takes care of.
e.g. Right now when using agents after I'm "done" with the feature and I commit I usually prompt "Check for any bugs or refactorings we should do" I could see a CICD step that says "Look at the last N commits and check if the code in them could be simplified or refactored to have a better abstraction"
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#10This is a person clearly grieving that his hard earned knowledge in his field is now not that valuable. It is * exactly * the same as a person who spent years perfecting hand written HTML, just to face the wrath of React.
> This is a person clearly grieving that his hard earned knowledge in his field is now not that valuable.
He's co-founder and CTO of his own company, so I think he's doing fine in his field.