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Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

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Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#261

Post by Der_Einzige »

_dwt wrote: post #122
juleiie wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think we’re on opposite sides but this is the first time I’ve seen someone in the wild share my suspicions that the LLM conflict is part of some vast ADHD vs autism hyperwar. At one point I was collecting posts I found where LLM boosters explicitly mentioned how it interacted with their ADHD.

Autism should not be framed as being "opposted" to ADHD. The correct axis is "Autistic" (Neurosis) as opposed to Psychosis. Opposite poles but with a little bit of horseshoe theory dynamics

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#262

Post by danielbln »

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #235
brookst wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but as usual nobody can agree on what "doing it yourself" means. Few cars are manual steering, manual brakes, manual transmission. Few grappling bodies go all Greek-naked. Few chess bodies forbid researching previous games or your opponent. The list is indeed endless, and every single person thinks they are using just the right amount of assistance; anything less is pointlessly difficult, anything more…

But LLM usage isn’t equivalent to power steering, it’s what a full kitchen is to a microwave. You can sure put effort into a microwave meal but it’ll always work against you and much of the time you’re better off just picking up a pan. Not to diminish your enjoyment, you’re completely entitled to it, I just think this is a bit of a false equivalence

An LLM is more akin to a staffed pro kitchen than a microwave.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#264

Post by dividedbyzero »

Schnitz wrote: post #207
djtango wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hobby should only become job if you enjoy the craft of it and if the profession / job rewards craftsmanship. People in it just for the money won't care about craft - you see the same thing in plumbing. And when there's enough money and scale on the line, craft becomes progressively more niche - that is why Ikea furniture is a thing. And you can even say that there is craft in Ikea, just not along the axes a tradition…

This is such a great point and raises existential career questions for everyone who got into a programming career because they love the craft. Either find your niche where craft will matter until you retire, leave the profession or accept that it’s now mostly about prompting. It’s almost like everyone’s being promoted into management or tech leading and can’t refuse…

We're not that far into this new era and I already see people go back to hand-writing the important bits and manually designing their architecture because it turns out that unless you have them spit out yet another boring web app, they aren't very good engineers at all, their errors and bad decisions are very hard to predict and accumulate over time, and the resulting mess becomes unmaintainable at some point, and it appears all the harness engineering in the world can only stave that off somewhat, not prevent it from happening. So perhaps IT won't become a monoculture of agent prompters after all.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#265

Post by red75prime »

tshaddox wrote: post #190
bawolff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of it though is that LLMs (especially in novice hands) create code that is more difficult to review and has subtler bugs. Code review is (for many) the least fun part of programming. Like imagine if your hobby was cooking, but you hated the cleanup. If you buy a robot that automates the fun part at the cost of making twice the mess, that is not a good trade off no matter how many extra cookies you end up…

Or imagine a club where everyone cooks together and then cleans dishes together. Then one day some people show up at a club meeting with cooking robots that create 10x the amount of dirty dishes and then don’t help clean up at all. I bet the other members wouldn’t be happy, even if the robots mostly cooked decent food.

Then robots begin cleaning dishes too. And the other members aren't happy, because what's the point, we are here not for the dishes, but for the process.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#266

Post by easyThrowaway »

alkonaut wrote: post #224

Programming has five phases effectively: 1) You figure out what problem to solve. 2) You figure out HOW to solve the problem. 3) You actually implement the solution. 4) You see the solution work, for yourself. 5) You ship/deploy/publish the program. This means you see people be happy users and/or you get paid for it and so on. If you're an entrepreneur type, you probably enjoy the first and last steps most, and you s…

The type of problem also makes a massive difference.

- Writing my tiny hobby gameboy emulator? Heck, Why I'd let Claude take away the fun part of implementing new features and then see Super Mario Land start and run step by step?

- Debugging why a legacy Wordpress store with more than 50 active plugins is returning an error 500 just to some random customers? Claude can 100% take the wheel, I'm good.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#267

Post by rob74 »

skydhash wrote: post #257
rob74 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding (2) figuring out how to do things at a higher level (e.g. the general architecture of an application) is pretty different from figuring out things at a lower level (e.g. how to fill text with a certain gradient in CSS - the stuff where years ago you would have spent hours reading documentation or browsing StackOverflow until you figured it out, if you weren't familiar with the topic). So you could use an LL…

> the stuff where years ago you would have spent hours reading documentation or browsing StackOverflow until you figured it out, if you weren't familiar with the topic Why is it always hours to consult docs? I find most answers within minutes (including if I have to read code) and it’s only take a bit longer when I want to understand the why’s. The key is to make sure you have the right questions. I see people strugg…

Ok, maybe you're one of the fortunate ones. With "if you weren't familiar with the topic", I meant the situation where you know what you want to do, but have no idea how exactly to accomplish it. Especially with frameworks, which generally have a quite rigid way to do things, if you're unfamiliar with that, it can take a while until you get anything done, despite good documentation.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#268

Post by dgellow »

andrewflnr wrote: post #223
dgellow wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And LLMs are what make so many jobs feel repetitive and brainless. Jobs that were engaging, interesting, from which people were learning, developing expertise over time, are now prompting + babysitting agents

Many jobs have been repetitive and brainless since long before LLMs. I hate AI as much as the next guy, but come on.

Lots of people job wasn’t. Now it is. A lot of people in software went into this field because they actually feel satisfied engaging with systems and their implementations.

Managing a fleet of agent is the exact opposite of what is engaging about software development.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#269

Post by socalgal2 »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #4

A hobby is something you enjoy the process of doing, not just the end result. Everybody likes a clean home, but cleaning is rarely a hobby. LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.

My hobby is making things. I used to make them with a screwdriver and a hammer and a handsaw. Then I bought a drill and got some screwdriving bits, an a pneumatic hammer and an arm saw. Now I can build things much much faster.

Similarly I've made lots of software projects. Over the last 15+ years I have over 250 github repos, the majority of them no one but me will be interested in but I had fun making stuff. LLMs let me make stuff faster just like the power tools. I'm still enjoying making stuff. I still direct, I still decide what to make, I still decide features, iterate on UX, etc, but at several X the speed of before. Loving it.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#270

Post by dgellow »

vasco wrote: post #215
dgellow wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And LLMs are what make so many jobs feel repetitive and brainless. Jobs that were engaging, interesting, from which people were learning, developing expertise over time, are now prompting + babysitting agents

The point is most people's jobs are like that. So it doesn't matter how interesting it was or that who did it before doesn't like it anymore because there's a queue of people lined up to do the brainless new version of the job.

It obviously does matter. The industry was built by people who care about the underlying details and want to engage with the hardware and software at a deep level. That has traditionally been the way people develop expertise - the exact thing you need to effectively use LLMs for anything else than boilerplate work. Ironically agentic stuff pull us away from from that
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