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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

#431

Post by waffletower »

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 (…

It sickens me when people use the word plagiarism to describe LLMs. Particularly when they use words and language that they themselves have plagiarized -- words like "love" and "economic" -- where do you draw the line? No, we haven't figured out how to fairly compensate everyone -- the frontiers aren't even trying. Spotify does at least try in their domain (and fails badly). Regardless of how the entitled get paid, the plagiarism label isn't fair and is diametrically opposed to Fair Use. Fair Use allows the commons to build on its history. Those against are typically parroting IP conglomerate conservatism and localized greed. I see immense benefit from the distillation of all available knowledge with an LLM interface. A recent article posted here says it perfectly "AI rewards expertise". I see vast benefits -- am willing to pay a significant monthly fee -- and sense that many are simply blind to and inarticulate about the growing force multiplier potential of modern AI.

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

#432

Post by GPerson »

newswasboring wrote: post #397
GPerson wrote: post #200

Programming is nice because you have lots of different scales of structure to think about, and your program slowly comes together. You see it improving over time as a result of your efforts. You also build your skills and learn. It’s really a nice activity. AI systems basically change that whole formula. I’m not sure how people get joy out of constantly vibe coding new projects. It feels like binge watching Netflix s…

> Programming is nice because you have lots of different scales of structure to think about, and your program slowly comes together. Programming is nice cause of this for you. Other people have other preferences. When I got my first LED to blink, I wasn't thinking about the elegance of my code. Same for when moved sprites or made a async stateless compute system for MATLAB analysis. There are people who are driven by…

Programming has a lot of nice features and accurately capturing them all in a hacker news comment isn’t that easy, so maybe you could have some consideration for that in the future. I also want effects to happen in the world. I also like the slow process of craft.

I’m anticipating not a very far away future when “implement gta 6” will not be that different from torrenting gta 3 in the 2000s. The current agent era feels very ephemeral. You’re choosing to interpret some version of AI based programming that you enjoy with what I think is the common interpretation of vibe coding. If you like your process then go ahead with it. I’m not stopping you.

You seem to want the AI supported gratification and the feeling of process and craft. So make your process and think of it however you like. There’s literally nothing I can or would do to get in your way.

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

#433

Post by win311fwg »

pigpop wrote: post #423
GTP wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Farmers aren't really paid, they sell goods at market prices.

"Programmers aren't really paid, they sell services at market prices." — I guess nobody gets paid?

As a farmer myself, when I give someone something I produced and they give me back something in return, I consider myself to be paid. If I did not receive much value in return for what I gave, I'd reasonably consider myself to have not been paid well. I have never met a farmer that would consider that usage unusual. Payment refers to a transaction within the realm of a human activity. The good or service that is being traded between humans is immaterial. While you are free to define words as you see fit, your assertion doesn't really reflect how this is actually used in practice, generally. The rest of the earlier comment makes it clear that the commenter understands how a farm business works.

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

#434

Post by willtemperley »

I'm against LLM usage in conversation, e.g. when discussing issues in open-source. It's like half-hearing a conversation, I'm missing the context that the other person has with their robot. Second, the person has usually at best half-understood the issue.

Provided the code does the job, it seems immaterial whether it was hand-written or LLM generated, provided it does the job and isn't straight-up plagiarism. The latter is admittedly a hard thing to judge.

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

#436

Post by antonvs »

ryandvm wrote: post #41
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.

Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that. The people like me that sort of just stumbled into this career as a result of spending the evenings of our youth trying to get the computer to do interesting things don't seem to have as much appr…

That attitude isn’t universal to everyone who enjoys tinkering and making computers do interesting things. I just had lunch yesterday with one of the most tinkering people I know, who as a side hobby teaches kids to program using robotics etc. to make it interesting for them. Like me, he’s having a blast using LLMs.

LLMs are amazing tools for learning new skills and technology. I’ve recently moved into an ML adjacent role, am learning tons that I never knew before, and I’m delivering working systems more quickly.

One thing that’s been an eye-opener is how many details I miss in the code I write. LLMs can almost always suggest improvements, and usually, it’s quite obvious that they’re right. But this is making me a better developer, even though I already have decades of experience.

LLMs don’t force you to vibe code everything. You can use them as precisely or as vibe-ishly as you want. They can be a skill amplifier rather than a skill replacer, if you use them as such.

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

#437

Post by kbelder »

pigpop wrote: post #284
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 (…

Maybe I'm just old but people talking about being in programming for "status" or to be "highly regarded" really irks me. I'd rather see the entire field burnt to the ground and replaced by robots than to have it become a status profession like lawyering.

Well put.

We need to make lawyering more like programming, in the sense that it should be open to the everyman... not make programming credentialed and licensed like a professional guild.

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

#438

Post by antonvs »

xdavidliu wrote: post #362

> these communities don’t care if your code works at all, but instead care that you know why and how it works. not literally true, and I doubt the author meant to say this. The communities do not only care about if your code works at all, but also that you know why and how. It's sort of like in math classes where you need to show the work, not just the answer. Surely the answer being correct, while not being sufficie…

Right. The answer is necessary but not sufficient.

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

#439

Post by Nextgrid »

Bewelge wrote: post #425
Nextgrid wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am talking more about the knowledge of the code rather than an objective/subjective measure of code "quality".

Code might be bad by some objective/subjective measure, but if you (or the author) can understand, navigate and work on it, that's often better than good quality code that nobody understands because it was written by an agent, especially under the time pressure of an ongoing incident where you need to fix it now.

Even if the good code is easy to understand, you still need to read it and take it in, something you don't need to do because you got it implicitly by writing said code.

> to know that you're not going to remember it in the long term

From my personal experience, while I will not remember code character by character, a quick look is all it takes to refresh my memory and get the general gist of it and what the context was at the time, something I don't have if I'm reading someone else's (or an agent's) code.

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

#440

Post by somenameforme »

hlynurd wrote: post #400
derektank wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would all die in a week if we went without water, yet water is cheaper per gallon than gasoline or printer ink or perfume. It’s a question of scarcity and supply curves. Water, even clean water, is not particularly scarce if you leverage industrial systems to purify it. Other products require much more complicated supply chains and are produced at a much smaller scale than water, which makes them more rarer and mo…

You're explaining how things are but the parent is indicating that's not how things should be.

He's not describing how but why. And at a fundamental level it's something that can't be overcome. If you can only have 10 of one thing, yet can have 5000 of another, and both have even remotely comparable levels of demand/necessity/etc, then the 10 is always going to end up much more valued.

Even take some sort of idealized anarcho-communal society. Imagine two people have a dispute and threaten to leave over it. One's a highly skilled doctor, and the other's a garbage collector. Our equal society's going to suddenly become just as unequal as any other simply because the doctor leaving would have a much greater negative effect than the garbage collector. And that reality would permeate in the day-to-day happenings, creating classes even in an idealized classless society.

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