261–270 of 401 posts
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Yeah, v1 is sloppy, then I tell the LLM to clean it up. Every 1 prompt of building tends to require 1-5 prompts of clean up. Simple, fast, clean good code. The chasm between "Software Developer" and "Software Engineer" is getting wider. Articles like this and the comments under it give away who is an Engineer and who is just a coder.
The chasm is 1-5 prompts wide?
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I mean, go look at the author's linkedin and github. They're a "dev" with 20 years of 1 year of experience. Not a software "engineer" There's a big difference between the two and LLMs are increasing the chasm. The Software devs are crying out because the LLMs can already do their full job. Software engineers are happy because the LLMs are removing a large chunk of the job that's low value. Software dev using an LLM i…
There is no universally accepted distinction between developer and engineer. Even if so, dev or engineer, both can be low or high skill. Their job title doesn't tell how sloppy or good their LLM usage will be.
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It's different because LLMs can generate code that immediately needs to be refactored at speeds that were unfeasible before. There was a practical limit on the amount of technical debt that could be created in a day before, now that limit is 10x or 100x higher. It can be generated far faster than it can be fixed.
Then code factoring was never the key problem was it? It was organizational discipline Again this is the same problem previously…organizational lack of discipline means you get some diva to build some un maintainable thing and then you have to go back and refactor it later The problem is the same the speed is different I acknowledge but both our organizational problems and have nothing to do with writing code or tech…
> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…
I don't think handmade shoes are the right comparison, unless you're talking about software that's meant to be used by just one person.
The more apt comparison might be to the engineers building and maintaining the manufacturing equipment in the shoe factory. It's a degree removed from the consumer, but there's definitely still craftsmanship involved there.
As much as it's true that a novice will generally use AI to build a sloppy mess, I've also had success unsloppifying through some careful prompting.
Yeah, v1 is sloppy, then I tell the LLM to clean it up. Every 1 prompt of building tends to require 1-5 prompts of clean up. Simple, fast, clean good code. The chasm between "Software Developer" and "Software Engineer" is getting wider. Articles like this and the comments under it give away who is an Engineer and who is just a coder.
I have found this to be very effective as well. However, it's so easy to do, I can't imagine they won't build it in.
The harnesses will improve and the loop of "self-review, judge what needs clean up, do the refactoring, repeat until clean" will get included in the one-shot. They are already doing this somewhat, they'll just get a lot better at it and as the models get faster and cheaper to run, the refactoring churn at the end of each task won't even create a noticeable delay.
I do not think the high-level "taste" knowledge that I've built up -- when to break something off into its own service, what to put in the DB vs cache vs queues vs blob storage, how to isolate important logic in pure functional layers so it can be tested and validated independently -- is any more "unlearnable" to AI than the stuff I previously considered impressive that's now one-shottable like "write a Prolog implementation from scratch".
> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…
Software engineers are not artists nor shoemakers. They are factory makers. A good analyst makes a hand-crafted, custom report in a day. A programmer makes a factory that makes thousands of reports per second for a thousand clients. I am yet to find a factory at HomeGoods. Now the kind of factories we make might change, but isn't it the fun part?
No, I don't think it's the fun part. Judging by the number of people glooming over LLMs, not many people seem excited about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no universally accepted distinction between developer and engineer. Even if so, dev or engineer, both can be low or high skill. Their job title doesn't tell how sloppy or good their LLM usage will be.
This isn't about distinction between literal titles. But continue missing the point.
> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…
Slightly agree. :) I don't think handmade shoes are the right comparison, unless you're talking about software that's meant to be used by just one person. The more apt comparison might be to the engineers building and maintaining the manufacturing equipment in the shoe factory. It's a degree removed from the consumer, but there's definitely still craftsmanship involved there.
> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…
I don't think craftsmanship is dead, but I do think we've built a lemon economy. The thing that creates the lemon markets is that you can't really distinguish quality until after purchase. This is extra hard with software because the average population is tech illiterate. It's even hard to distinguish when people are tech literate (and not all of HN is). Same thing with cars, most people can't tell the difference, so…