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The peril of laziness lost

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Re: The peril of laziness lost

#11

Post by simianwords »

lapcat wrote: post #10
simianwords wrote: post #7

This 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.

It doesn't change the fact that much of what (I think) he prides in himself in is getting commoditised.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#12

Post by nixpulvis »

suzzer99 wrote: post #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.

I've been advocating for writing everything twice since college.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#13

Post by ObscureScience »

johnfn wrote: post #5

As 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…

"Value generation" is a term I would be somewhat wary of.

To me, in this context, it's similar to drive economic growth on fossil fuel.

Whether in the end it can result in a net benefit (the value is larger than the cost of interacting with it and the cost to sort out the mess later) is likely impossible to say, but I don't think it can simply be judged by short sighted value.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#14

Post by alemwjsl »

johnfn wrote: post #5

As 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…

It isn't worth the time. I am not going to read the 200k LOC to prove it was a bad idea to generate that much code in a short time and ship it to production. It is on the vibe coder to prove it is. And if it is just tweets being exchanged, and I want to judge someone who is boasting about LOC and aiming to make more LOC/second. Yep I'll judge 'em. It is stupid.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#15

Post by 8note »

fao_ wrote: post #8
johnfn wrote: post #5

As 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-t…

> included multiple test harnesses (!)

ive seen plenty of real code written by real people with multiple test harnesses and multiple mocking libraries.

its still kinda irrelevant to whether the code does anything useful; only a descriptor of the funding model

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#16

Post by mplappert »

I very much agree; I think laziness / friction is basically a critically important regularizer for what to build and for what to not build. LLMs remove that friction and it requires more discipline now. (Wrote some of this up a while ago here: https://matthiasplappert.com/blog/2026/laziness-in-the-age-o...)

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#17

Post by singron »

I have noticed LLMs have a propensity to create full single page web applications instead of simpler programs that just print results to the terminal.

I've also struggled with getting LLMs to keep spec.md files succinct. They seem incapable of simplifing documents while doing another task (e.g. "update this doc with xyz and simply the surrounding content") and really need to be specifically tasked at simplifying/summarizing. If you want something human readable, you probably just need to write it yourself. Editing LLM output is so painful, and it also helps to keep yourself in the loop if you actually write and understand something.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#18

Post by II2II »

johnfn wrote: post #5

As 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…

Given the framing of the article, I can understand where the opposite direction comment is coming from. The author also gives mixed signals, by simultaneously suggesting that the "laziness" of the programmer and code are virtues. Yet I don't think they are ignoring value generation. Rather, I think they are suggesting that the value is in the quality of the code instead of the problem being solves. This seems to be an attitude held by many developers who are interested in the pursuit of programming rather than the end product.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#19

Post by tmoertel »

johnfn wrote: post #5

As 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…

> 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.

But the true metric isn't either one, it's value created net of costs. And those costs include the cost to create the software, the cost to understand and maintain it, the cost of securing it and deploying it and running it, and consequential costs, such as the cost of exploited security holes and the cost of unexpected legal liabilities, say from accidental copyright or patent infringement or from accidental violation of laws such as the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. The use of AI dramatically decreases some of these costs and dramatically increases other costs (in expectation). But the AI hypesters only shine the spotlight on the decreased costs.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#20

Post by flumpcakes »

The more people boast about AI while delivering absolute garbage like in the example here, the more I feel happier toiling around in Nginx configurations and sysadmin busy work. Why worry about AI when it's the same old idiots using it as a crutch, like any new fad.
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