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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

#421

Post by DHolzer »

_luci_ wrote: post #384
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 (…

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 unders…

1.putting the "mostly" before "incompetent and arrogant asshole" really does nothing. you still called some undefined group of people assholes... i think that's generally uncalled for here on HN. 2.computer that lies might very well be a better programmer. I assume by better you mean it profuces correct and maintainable code, but there are a million ways to cut that cake in particular and i assume you are ignoring most other dimensions. 3. i tought myself coding for 10 years and then switched to professional work 5 years ago. it feels as if this was stolen from us. But its not - we never had any right to own and control this. times are changing, and while you might think you and all other devs have a moral high ground and can pop a can of beer and cheer anytime one of these supposed assholes messes up and would have been better off with a real programmer like yourself, you can do so from whatever new position you will find yourself in. Some part of what we call intelligence is "solved" and that leaves you with percieved morals and broken expectations - nothing more if you don't try to make something out of it. and i write thisw as much for you as i write it for myself to realize.

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

#422

Post by dosisking »

deterministic wrote: post #147

Not my experience at all. I love using LLM's when hobby programming! But then again I don't program as a hobby to impress others online. Maybe that's the difference?

The difference is probably that you are not that good at programming, and that the LLMs are better than you.

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

#423

Post by pigpop »

GTP wrote: post #378
Tanoc wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From having worked with farmers, the actual logistics of running a farm are very complex. Farming's no longer an easy job because the demand for productivity means you have to harness a whole stable of technologies and understand to some degree advanced finances, floral biology, geotechnics, and meteorology. And yet farmers still get paid little relative to the breadth of knowledge and skills required for running a f…

You're right, running now a farm that is profitable and can stay on the market is very different from doing so 200 years ago. But knowledge is just one aspect. The other aspect I mentioned is having less people in the field than what the market asks for. In the specific case of farmers, I think that modern farms are so much more efficient that we need way less than before, even if the world's population grew. So, whi…

Farmers aren't really paid, they sell goods at market prices. Modern farms are more similar to operating a manufacturing business than they are to a salaried position or profession. They don't earn high incomes compared to white collar professions but they do have high revenues and they pay themselves a reasonable middle class income on average with some added benefits from owning large assets and land. The important part about comparing farmers to programmers is that they are both now operating in highly competitive markets with high automation where a single individual can leverage their knowledge and ability using that automation to produce many times more what a person could using only their own labor.

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

#424

Post by jobigoud »

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…

LLMs can be very good at 2. Finding the best architecture, data structures, algorithms, looking on arXiv to see other ways to solve the problem, etc.

You have to work in design mode and stop it from pissing code. Describe the requirements as detailed as possible and refine them based on the responses. It's quite rewarding and helps structure the way you think about the problem.

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

#425

Post by Bewelge »

Nextgrid wrote: post #416
stackghost wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Having done step 2 & 3 by hand is the difference between being able to fix/extend it quickly with no further damage or fumbling around like an idiot and sometimes breaking more stuff in the process. Plenty of shitty spaghetti code has been written by human hands. LLMs can write good, maintainable code too, but they need to be kept on a shorter leash with focused goals.

I'm not talking about code quality (though indeed that could be a problem too), I'm talking about understanding the code - having written the code by hand means you don't need to rediscover it from scratch. (with human-written code I can reach out to the person who wrote it and let them deal with it, and they will have the understanding of said code, even if it is bad by quality measures. With LLMs there is nobody wh…

To be fair though:

"That code is horrible! Who the hell wrote this?!"

git blames

sees their own name

Isn't that an experience everybody makes? For me it was like a year into working professionally. And I feel it's part of being a professional to know that you're not going to remember it in the long term and therefore provide proper documentation of why you did what.

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

#426

Post by dzonga »

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…

> 3) You actually implement the solution.

even for an entrepreneur type - you need to understand the technology to get to good enough solution e.g if you don't know shit & just accepted what the llm gave you - u might end up with an unmaintainable mess. the llm might recommend you use some proprietary solution when an open source solution exists that works well for your use case.

plus llms tend to be wordy or make things complex more than necessary.

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

#427

Post by wat10000 »

elmer2 wrote: post #313
samiv wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's not clear how civilisation functions if humans become effectively useless and the only thing of value is one's ownership of wealth producing assets." You can get a hint of this by looking at the developing countries with high income inequality. Few rich people who typically own all the countries wealth (and access to it's natural resources) while everyone else lives in a slum.

This also happens as taxes and regulations sharply increase over time. California is a good example.

No it isn't. The median household income in California is over $100,000/year. The 20th percentile household income in California is still over $16,000/year, higher than the per-capita PPP GDP of places like Belize or Jamaica.

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

#428

Post by mistrial9 »

gliall_err wrote: post #288
kypro wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfortunately just the result of technological progress. People for centuries have crafted extremely hard to acquire skills over decades only to find their labour being made completely worthless due to automation or better alternatives disrupting their industry. Carpenters, hatters, cobblers, miners, weavers, calculators, etc... We can get mad about it, but it just is what it is. Ultimately for most people th…

This is a sophomoric oversimplification. The US and Europe might have lost a lot of craftsmanship knowledge at a social level. Yet, what is left is so far ahead of what has ever existed in countries in South America for example. And China has gained a lot. Witness that youtuber trying to make grill brushes in the US. These differences have an impact in terms of opportunities and competition. It's easy to sit at home,…

> Craftsmanship today is vastly more advanced than it ever was before industry.

yes, but no. Many craft skills used in jewelry, architecture and others are lost. For example, some goldsmithing techniques well-known in the 1700s are not reproducible today.

source: trained goldsmith

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

#429

Post by sunitram »

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 enjoy programming a lot, but still made the transition to using AI for my programming. It is a new tool that makes me much more efficient, I finally could continue working on my many open source projects that I couldn't touch for many years due to lack of time. My productivity is up, I'm pretty sure the code quality has improved, and I'm learning more than ever before; just in a different way.

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

#430

Post by theshrike79 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #140
_dwt wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty skeptical of people who are ADHD and claim to be getting boosted by LLMs. It's hell for my ADHD, personally. It's an infinite rabbit hole generator and distraction machine. I have to use browser extensions to filter out stuff like Stack Exchange suggestions for interesting topics, too. I have had to block Wikipedia in the past to avoid rabbit holes there I'm better now than I used to be but I am skeptical…

For me it's a dopamine machine. I get my doses of lacking dopamine from completing things.

Agents let me complete things in parallel all the time.

They also let me build tools that manage all the attention-grabbing things in my life. Something I've been meaning to do "tomorrow" for a good decade.

I've already built custom notification tools for all the "I'll just quickly check hn/lobste.rs/tildes/whatever" so that they'll tell me if there's something actionable, closing down the rabbit hole for me. My email is pre-filtered by an agent that pings me if there's something urgent. My IRC client is custom-built for the specific way I use it etc etc.

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