Making
beej.us
Making
1–10 of 194 posts
Re: Making
#2We continue to grapple with AI and how it's impacting our lives by trying to find comfort in comparisons to the past, or to other things that we do. But the reality is, there's never been anything quite like this before, and it's forcing us to redefine how we value work, art, craftsmanship, and output. Sometimes, those redefinitions are extremely uncomfortable.
Re: Making
#3Very well said. I don’t like seeing hackernews submissions that are LLM generated.
The joy of hackernews was seeing applied human ingenuity, most of these weren’t successful products anyway. Just like I don’t watch computer chess games, we should have an easy way to distinguish AI generated software, art etc and then I can happily avoid them.
Re: Making
#4We continue to grapple with AI and how it's impacting our lives by trying to find comfort in comparisons to the past, or to other things that we do. But the reality is, there's never been anything quite like this before, and it's forcing us to redefine how we value work, art, craftsmanship, and output. Sometimes, those redefinitions are extremely uncomfortable.
How does this even contribute to the content posted?
The only thing being "redefined" is corporate agendas to push the bar of "good enough" lower to the point where it lies below cheap, and equals wasteful.
Re: Making
#5> What's the real difference in that gray area? I'm not sure. I think it hinges on something that has to do with making versus asking to be made, even if that line isn't particularly clear.
For me the difference is in the extent that I can reason about how changes in the input affect the observable behavior of the output. When the executable the compiler outputs doesn’t behave in the way I intended, then in 99.99% of cases this is completely on me, and, importantly, I could have predicted it from the source code. Conversely, I can analyze any such misbehavior by reasoning on the source code. This doesn’t hold to any remotely comparable extent for the relation between vibecoded programs and the prompts used to create them.
Re: Making
#6I agree with the article. I've never understood the notion of some LLM people saying you shouldn't care about the end result, and you should do it for its sake. It made me feel like a narcissist and that I was programming for showmanship, but I think making is inherent to (most) people's satisfaction and it's hard to tell something was made by you when all you did was prompting.
Maybe a hot take, but I do think, that even from seasoned developers, the idea they've been doing the 'logical' part so long they'd have it done anyway without AI and it'd only take more time is delusional, when, from personal experience, even when I code something I 'know' and I've 'done', I have to remember stuff, google what isn't ingrained in my brain, and so on.
I don't know if the author would consider this a part of making, but a single thing you build is, obviously, a mix of things you've built. I no longer sense this minor feeling of 'making' when I'm doing something. To make a logic that's part of a bigger system and see it running, thinking how it's gonna be once it's all done... I no longer feel that.
Re: Making
#7> What's the real difference in that gray area? I'm not sure. I think it hinges on something that has to do with making versus asking to be made, even if that line isn't particularly clear. For me the difference is in the extent that I can reason about how changes in the input affect the observable behavior of the output. When the executable the compiler outputs doesn’t behave in the way I intended, then in 99.99% of…
This seems like a very clear way of thinking about it.
In making something, you develop a tangible understanding of and opinions for how and why your creation is how it is.
I have a lot of vibecoded projects. I feel "ownership" in varying degrees proportional to the amount of care and depth I put into them.
Re: Making
#8This, I’ve completely lost interest in side projects outside of work since the emergence of LLMs. It does nothing for me any more
Re: Making
#9I have been using vi/vim for 30 years and I had no idea about using ^K-M to insert an em-dash.
Re: Making
#10Does a machinist who uses CNC qualify as a machinist?
Is his required knowledge of metals, assembly complexity, tolerances, just waved away because he doesn't turn the dials or change the tools any more?