501–510 of 559 posts
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Where are these well engineered products made with care? I would love to use more tech like that. Unfortunately most sites and apps have been low quality and getting worse since well before AI coding became a thing. Examples: Lowes, Home Depot, American Airlines - all shockingly bad for companies of that size.
Apple used to be the standard bearer for that. These days I'm not so sure.
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I don't see it the same way. I see it as akin to building a machine which can do the cooking for you. There is a lot of experimentation in terms of how you can construct that machine and how you can set it up, and for some people the payoff is in exactly this process.
> I see it as akin to building a machine which can do the cooking for you. More like buying a microwave and frozen food. Unless you are actually training the LLMs.
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Where are these well engineered products made with care? I would love to use more tech like that. Unfortunately most sites and apps have been low quality and getting worse since well before AI coding became a thing. Examples: Lowes, Home Depot, American Airlines - all shockingly bad for companies of that size.
Apple used to be the standard bearer for that. These days I'm not so sure.
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It certainly doesn't feel like craftsmanship has gained any kind of higher social standing in our time though. The Zeitgeist of the modern times seems to be one of 'try to do the cheapest sellable thing while paying people the least possible'. Real craftsmanship, the kind that leaves you in awe and feels like an exceptional display of human capacity, seems to be relegated, from my point of view, to a minority of well…
Every craftsman I know expresses discomfort that the only way they can turn a profit is to sell goods to wealthy people.
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Imagine, if you will, wanting a narrow application to assist you personally in some side hobby, that is data driven but would take weeks or months to set up. Now imagine it's done in hours (and not even purely focused hours) and does everything you need it to do in an instantly verifiable and rewarding way. Imagine doing this on the regular for all of your various use cases. And then imagine not trying to sell or mar…
Nothing says engineer mindset like calling people "something wrong with them, perhaps on the spectrum of OCD. With a tinge of arrogance or narcissism" and "emotions and irrationality"
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…
> If you're a tinkerer, you don't care much for 1 and 5, and you see 2-4 as the whole point of programming. I'm a tinkerer. I'd be happy to just write code and throw it away. Coding is like solving sudokus. I could skip steps 1 and 5 forever. [...] The 5 phases look kind of symmetric. The outermost layer (1 and 5) are the entrepreneurial steps. Even if you deeply into tinkering, 1 can be an insanely exciting and rewa…
Yes, but I think there's really two different definitions of point 1. It's "figure out what non-software problem you can solve with software" vs "figure out what technical problem to solve".
As the tinkering type, I also find 1 very rewarding but using the latter definition. Exploring a sizable code base and finding the part that, if simplified, cascades to a lot more simplification, that's very exciting. Figuring out what problem some companies or people have that could be solved? Very hard, very unexciting, not rewarding.
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One of the great things about hobbies is that you can enjoy them whatever way you want. But honestly is it not more accurate to say that you are now a hobbyist prompter, rather than a hobbyist programmer? I get the "its just a tool" mentality and I guess LLMs can be used that way, but if you are not touching a line of code yourself then it seems less analogous to using power steering and more analogous to just taking…
Sure, I’m both a professional and hobbyist prompter. But then, that’s been true for decades, since I made the switch from engineering to product. Only difference is I’m prompting LLMs rather than engineering teams. But honestly it’s not all that different, except that in the hobby flavor I can write specs that would take tens or hundreds of engineers to implement. Maybe it all comes down to semantics: does “programmi…
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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.
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Your comment seems unnecessary aggressive. Did I offend you in any way? I just gave my perspective.
Yea the wording that it was some way or another “for you” came across as aggressiveness so I responded in kind.