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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

#381

Post by ABoltzmannMush »

_luci_ wrote: post #368
ransom1538 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Because people that enjoy programming for programming's sake don't want an LLM to do the programming for them - isn't it obvious? " How do we filter out these people during an interview?

why would you want to filter these people out? surely those that consider programming more than just a "means to an end" are going to be much more valuable employees, consider they are much more likely to be skilled at their craft? im genuinely interested in why you'd want to filter these people out!

I want to find people who have already had all their passions and emotions stamped out by the endless grind already, so that they will tell an AI to do what I tell them for 996 without complaint. These people who "care" about things just get in the way and want time off and such.

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

#383

Post by FeepingCreature »

GPerson wrote: post #376
FeepingCreature wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I do agree that AI is a problem in this sense: programmer skill as a hiring differentiator is becoming a lot less legible these days. It just feels personally odd to be the reason you do the thing. When I encountered my first programmable computer I very quickly realized that I wanted to do more of it, and not too much later that this was the thing I would spend the rest of my life doing. That it was also very…

That’s my experience, starting at 10 years old and trying to figure out how the the moving pictures were in the screen. I didn’t say that was the reason though. A person has a lot of wants and needs right? I’m not following why it’s strange to want to be skilled and engage with the craft itself based on that part of the message to be honest. Maybe I’m misunderstanding. I tried to convey in my first post that I’m gonn…

That's fair, I think I read something into your comment that wasn't really in there...

Personally speaking, the feeling of "getting the thing and then having the thing" - the personal todo app, the custom apps - is why I do anything in programming. Programming is the project where I can speak a spell and then I get a nice thing. That's very cool, and I do like the process, but at the end of the day the nice thing is what I'm doing it for- it's not a side benefit, it's the payoff. I get a burst of happiness every time that the thing quietly does its thing that I wouldn't have had otherwise. So to me, the LLM mostly just feels like I suddenly got a lot of friends who are willing to help me get the thing and also have a very complementary skillset. So it's an improvement, and then there's also a reward at the end!

Example: I'm playing Satisfactory right now, with a mod that puts a computer in the game that can control game events. I use the computer to do cargo train routing in the game, ie. it runs a program that scans target cargo depots and looks for items that are below a level, and then dispatches trains to find these items and bring them to the destination. Which I once would have written by hand, but was now done entirely by Sonnet. I did have to put plenty of effort into guiding Sonnet to the approach that worked, and I put several AIs together, and this felt a lot like "explaining something" which is a process I enjoy uncomplicatedly anyways. And I think, to be honest, the enjoyment I would have gotten out of the programming part once, was very largely "type-2 fun"- an annoyance followed by a nice reward. Now I'm getting the nice reward for free and can focus on actual industrial and rail network design. And I still get a burst of happiness every time I see a train busily speed off to a new destination. So far as I can tell, at least for me it's all upside.

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

#384

Post by _luci_ »

shiomiru wrote: post #251
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…

There's also the economic problem that programmers had until recently been highly regarded because steps 2-3 were hard. "Open source" solved this partially by utilizing the labor such (relatively) well-paid people gave away "for the love of it", but it was not nearly enough to put most out of work. Now there is a plagiarism machine built on top of decades of this work that seemingly solves 3 and promises to solve 2 (…

100% agreed, especially that last line. What I do not understand is why so many people are entirely okay with this change. I'm not interested in working with LLM's and after having been forced to work with LLM's at my current job, I can pretty confidently say that this will not end well for most of these companies. The people in charge pushing for this new tech do not understand the rammifications, nor do they understand the risk they are exposing themselves too. My boss expects more and more productivity with each passing day, while questioning why I'm not using as many tokens each week as he does. The software quality has gone down the drain, and it's beyond tiring that I have to pretend that my boss is just as competent at coding with his slop machine as I am after spending the last decade learning how to code, both as a hobby and for work.

It is upsetting to see our work stolen and our livelihoods threatened by a group of (mostly) incompetent, arrogant assholes who are convinced that the "computer that lies" is somehow a better programmer than the programmers it stole knowledge from. I've already started looking for a way out of this industry, and I'm genuinely worried for the fall-out this will have for the tech industry and the economy as a whole.

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

#385

Post by frozenseven »

_luci_ wrote: post #379
frozenseven wrote: post #375

LLM-first development is the future. If you don't like it then, yes, you should quit.

Yeah you're right, it IS entirely fair to suddenly and quickly push the group that built your industry out of the industry. They should all just find new jobs, because that's very easy and simple. Thankfully we have bright minds like you to replace the talent lost, because with AI you can truly do anything your heart desires! Obvious sarcasm aside, these LLMs have been trained (without consent!) on our hard work, on…

[flagged]

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

#386

Post by alt227 »

Schnitz wrote: post #166

Because people that enjoy programming for programming's sake don't want an LLM to do the programming for them - isn't it obvious? It's just like with any other hobby, people who like car racing created rules that force you to drive yourself, even though they'd get faster lap times with electronic driver aids. People who enjoy grappling created rules that force you to grapple, even though striking could win a fight fa…

I used to write code all day, solving maths and logic problems which is what my brain loves to do, and so I loved my job.

Now I talk to a robot all day, trying to figure out how best to tell it whats in my brain. I no longer do maths and logic and instead I think about language and questions all day, holding in depth conversations and thinking up responses. This is something my brain naturally doesnt like to do and so I fatigue quickly in the day compared to my old job.

I want to do maths and logic again :(

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

#387

Post by barbazoo »

Tade0 wrote: post #338
shiomiru wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the economic problem that programmers had until recently been highly regarded because steps 2-3 were hard. "Open source" solved this partially by utilizing the labor such (relatively) well-paid people gave away "for the love of it", but it was not nearly enough to put most out of work. Now there is a plagiarism machine built on top of decades of this work that seemingly solves 3 and promises to solve 2 (…

I'm not concerned. Never in my life have I experienced stakeholders just going "hmm, yes - this is enough software for our purposes - we won't be needing your services any more". There's always another feature that can be implemented or a new problem to be solved. Tools only ever accelerated the pace at which we were able to follow this insatiable hunger for more software. Right now people are getting fired left and…

I can imagine that this will lead to an explosion in software where we didn't see software before. Much smaller business now have the ability to build something themselves, not with a team of highly paid software developers but a single programmer maune.

Big business is going to struggle with building software for a while. Writing code is often not the hard part there already, coordination, larger understanding of the system is I think.

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

#388

Post by vidarh »

GPerson wrote: post #337
vidarh wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not sure how people get joy out of constantly vibe coding new projects. It feels like binge watching Netflix shows. I get joy out of it because it solves actual problems I have that I don't have time to solve manually, or don't want to. E.g. I just recently had Codex add a mechanism for two-level virtual desktops because I wanted groups of them. An hour later I had two-level virtual desktops in my wm that worke…

For me that’s a slippery slope. It’s not really clear what parts of my hobby project are the good parts and what parts are unfulfilling. When I start including AI too much I end up feeling that none of it is fulfilling. When I do things manually I feel pride in the details however, even though those same details on another day would make me feel like I’m wasting my precious life. I spent 2 months having Opus build a…

To me it's very easy: If I want to do a change by hand for the joy of doing that, I do. But if I want a piece of functionality now and don't want to set aside time to build it, I let an agent do it.

It boils down to whether I dream about the outcome or how to do it.

E.g. I have no emotional attachment to my window manager - I wrote it (by hand, originally) because I wanted a specific set of functionality, not because I particularly wanted the experience of writing one.

I've recently made lots of changes to it with Opus because I wanted another set of functionality and was elated not to have to spend time doing it manually because what I wanted was the functionality.

I'm now a very happy user of a better window manager than I was before.

Conversely, I have dozens of projects I stay closer to, because I care about the code and don't particularly care if that means I might have to wait for years to get to something usable, if ever.

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

#389

Post by GPerson »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #383
GPerson wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s my experience, starting at 10 years old and trying to figure out how the the moving pictures were in the screen. I didn’t say that was the reason though. A person has a lot of wants and needs right? I’m not following why it’s strange to want to be skilled and engage with the craft itself based on that part of the message to be honest. Maybe I’m misunderstanding. I tried to convey in my first post that I’m gonn…

That's fair, I think I read something into your comment that wasn't really in there... Personally speaking, the feeling of "getting the thing and then having the thing" - the personal todo app, the custom apps - is why I do anything in programming. Programming is the project where I can speak a spell and then I get a nice thing. That's very cool, and I do like the process, but at the end of the day the nice thing is…

I actually think that’s a great use of AI, and sounds similar to some of my use cases.

“And I think, to be honest, the enjoyment I would have gotten out of the programming part once, was very largely "type-2 fun"- an annoyance followed by a nice reward.”

Yea I’ve had similar thoughts. Other thoughts have been something like “I’ll have different types of projects and try to be thoughtful in advance about what this is doing for me. If it’s about the building up a system manually and slowly, and having that kind of experience, then I’ll only use the AI maybe as a primary source gatherer or maybe in some limited sense.” And “Okay well this is an MMO and even though in the past I would have wanted to program this plug-in, I guess I’m middle aged now and there’s only so much time and I’d probably be really excited about using my programming energy on these dozen other things I’ve always wanted to work on, and having the thing would be a strict positive compared to not having the thing, so I’ll have the AI make this plug-in which makes the game (which is about play) more fun.”

Programming is a lot of things, so the ambiguity of language probably causes a lot of conflict here.

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

#390

Post by yunwal »

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…

I enjoy the process of solving problems with LLMs. I understand it's chaotic (what many people call non-deterministic), and that doesn't appeal to some people, but solving problems with statistics is problem solving just the same. Just because medicines don't work with 100% reliability doesn't mean Jonas Salk didn't solve a problem. The same is true with LLM solutions that don't work 100% of the time.

I think most people will come around to this way of thinking once the pro-LLMers stop pretending like the statistics don't exist too (i.e. that ML is the solution to any problem, despite how unreliable it is).

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