The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
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The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
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Re: The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
#2"There's plenty of space for "disposable and single use software." Sure, to a trained software engineer, this might be "bad code" but doing today's task has value, even if the code that performs that task isn't "accretive.""
Grant me the serenity to accept the bad code i shouldn't fix, the courage to change the code I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Re: The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
#3It could be that this person has something profound to say, but ... it's about AI. Sigh and swipe left.
Re: The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
#4Guys really pushing to remain relevant with the reverse centaurs shtick.
Re: The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
#5Guys really pushing to remain relevant with the reverse centaurs shtick.
Since when did the distinction between use-cases stop being relevant?
Re: The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
#6It could be that this person has something profound to say, but ... it's about AI. Sigh and swipe left.
Even if they're saying something bad about it?
Re: The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
#7There's a 'joke' that goes around occasionally that has some truth to it: "Excel is the world's most popular programming language." Occasionally it's 'Excel macros' or 'VBA' instead of just Excel.[1]
The core truth of it is that a massive amount, possibly most, of the world's software is not a carefully hand-crafted application in that lives in Github written by expert software developers. It's a heap of Excel functions in an XSLX file, with no tests, no source control, no PRs, and no real planning behind it. And it works for that one specific task that the person who built it needed at the time.
AI vibe-coding is probably filling in the middle-ground between that stuff and 'real' code - it does more than just building somehting to complete today's task, and it is accretive in the sense that someone can build on top of it, but it doesn't really look that way to someone used to working on 'proper' software.
[1] Further reading if you're interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27048672
Re: The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
#8It could be that this person has something profound to say, but ... it's about AI. Sigh and swipe left.
So many of the articles I've read are like this—some of them feel as though AI gets mentioned out of the blue. I think you need to separate the wheat from the chaff. The ideas are still good, the author is just distracted.
Re: The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
#9Guys really pushing to remain relevant with the reverse centaurs shtick.
[flagged]
Re: The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
#10There's a 'joke' that goes around occasionally that has some truth to it: "Excel is the world's most popular programming language." Occasionally it's 'Excel macros' or 'VBA' instead of just Excel.[1] The core truth of it is that a massive amount, possibly most , of the world's software is not a carefully hand-crafted application in that lives in Github written by expert software developers. It's a heap of Excel funct…
> AI vibe-coding is probably filling in the middle-ground [..] and it is accretive in the sense that someone can build on top of it
To me 'accretive work' means something you do at a lower level than your task at hand which by itself doesn't count progress, but rather lay the groundwork for it so it's compounding from there on. AI has nothing to do with this.