Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.fogus.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 557 posts

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

#511

Post by polyterative »

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 love programming.I have been doing it nonstop for the last ten years. I'm immensely happy of being able of increasing the scope of my projects a hundredfold. I am very happy of being able to ship ten major projects in my lifetime instead of only one.

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

#512

Post by hunterpayne »

inigyou wrote: post #497
hunterpayne wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did someone seriously just down-mod a farmer in a sub-discussion about running a farm? PS To the "clear-thinking" guy at the top of this thread...this is why...you only think your thinking is clear. If its a topic you know nothing about, devs (not necessarily you) tend to assume there isn't anything to know and that's almost never true.

Did you seriously just appeal to authority yourself ?

I'm not the farmer who posted...so no.

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

#513

Post by aleph_minus_one »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #506
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Even if you deeply into tinkering, 1 can be an insanely exciting and rewarding step: for example "how could an abstraction look like in which 2-4 become trivial special cases for many classes of programming problems?". 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 t…

> 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".

In my opinion these variants are not very different:

For example keep in mind that physics is basically a descipription of the software that runs reality, which automatically gives you are huge portfolio of potential problems. :-)

For mechanical engineering, observe that the advances in 3D printing and home CNC milling mean that a lot of problems that were previously in the domain of mechanical engineering now become partly software problems.

Or for more "human" problems: If you are very trained in mathematics, you start to see mathematical structures in a lot of "more human" problems (or areas that are not associated with "software") basically all the time. If you find these mathematical structures that you see interesting, it is often possible to turn them into software.

Thus, "figure out what non-software problem you can solve with software" vs "figure out what technical problem to solve" is rather a litle bit like "in mathematics: do you prefer analysis or algebra?" - yes, they (often) represent a different style of thinking and many mathematicians do have their preferences, but in the end both analysis and algebra is mathematics.

--

So, I disagree with your point

> Figuring out what problem some companies or people have that could be solved? Very hard, very unexciting, not rewarding.

In my opinion the boring part is not finding or solving problems that companies or people have. As I wrote: after some time, you often start to see highly interesting, often very novel mathematical patterns in these problems (of course not always, but it is not an uncommon situation). Why are these patterns often so novel and interesting? A heuristic answer in my opinion is: if they weren't, someone would typically already have implemented them in software. :-)

The really annoying part is rather convincing the people/company of your solution (which can be considered to be part of step "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.").

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

#514

Post by jujube3 »

_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…

Making your code open source was consenting to have people (and AIs) read it and learn from it. As an open source developer myself, I always understood that.

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

#515

Post by calvinmorrison »

sph wrote: post #457
jckahn wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good analogy. Also I hate cooking; it feels like a chore and waste of time. Given the means, I prefer to have someone else do it for me so I can focus on more interesting things.

If the analogy is good, does it mean AI boosters hate programming, and feel like it's a chore and waste of time? Yet they keep calling themselves programmers. I dislike cooking; I don't call myself a chef, nor go on cooking forums saying they're all idiots for churning butter as a hobby, and telling them they are luddite dinosaurs just because I bought myself an Instant Pot.

I for one have spent my career calling myself not a programmer but others think I'm half decent enough

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

#516

Post by deterministic »

dosisking wrote: post #422
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.

If that kind of comment makes you feel better about yourself that's fine by me :)

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

#517

Post by barbazoo »

Tade0 wrote: post #481
barbazoo wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

My cowork buddy is living this reality - he's an independent analyst and previously he needed to shell out significant cash to have certain scripts (largely scrapers, social media API integration etc.) done, now it's all just a prompt away.

I love it. It makes me feel like I have super powers. I wish it wasn't so resource intensive.

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

#518

Post by win311fwg »

inigyou wrote: post #498
win311fwg wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most programmers are of the capital holding class too. At very least they will own a computer, which is all the capital you need for 99% of what programmers do. There are exceptions, but there are also exceptions in farming.

The capital holding class isn't anyone who holds capital. It's anyone whose main function in society is based on holding capital. Think of a landlord.

Land isn't traditionally considered capital. The buckets are normally land, labor, and capital. The closest thing we broadly see to someone whose function is holding capital is someone who owns stock in the stock market. It is likely that most programmers own stock. If I were a betting man, I expect that programmers have more impact on capital than farmers do. But we still have to split hairs over what "main" means.

One interpretation, which is what I suspect most would go to, is where one's income is primarily derived from owning stock. So, in other words, old, retired people. But I don't think anyone here was thinking about the retired. The discussion was about people actively producing food and software.

Another possible interpretation is about impact. If those stocks didn't exist, a lot of the capital wouldn't have been able to be created, and thus there wouldn't have been jobs to go with it; meaning that owning the capital makes it one's main function as without it one wouldn't have a job to go to. But I can already hear you furiously typing how that isn't a satisfactory take. I'd agree.

Maybe it's about attention? Someone who actively watches over to their capital would be seen as it being their main function, while someone who leaves their capital ownership up to a financial advisor so they don't have to think about it wouldn't. But then we're back to the computer. Most programmers watch over that capital, if nothing else. That doesn't really work either.

The only remaining interpretation I can come up, given the connotations often associated with landlord, is a group of people not like by another group of people. But that doesn't have anything to do with capital at all, so... Consider me stumped on what this has to do with the discussion (if we are to ignore the explicit sarcasm involved).

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

#519

Post by sodapopcan »

jckahn wrote: post #361
draftsman wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing code without an LLM is akin to cooking a meal yourself, as opposed to something in between hiring a private chef and pulling a slot machine lever. When I cook a meal for myself or my loved ones, I become deeply familiar with the ingredients and the recipe. I am a good cook. Every decision, small and large, I make myself. Using feedback, I can tweak the components and the process. However, if I order food and…

This is a good analogy. Also I hate cooking; it feels like a chore and waste of time. Given the means, I prefer to have someone else do it for me so I can focus on more interesting things.

Like what?

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

#520

Post by win311fwg »

hunterpayne wrote: post #492
win311fwg wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hav…

Did someone seriously just down-mod a farmer in a sub-discussion about running a farm? PS To the "clear-thinking" guy at the top of this thread...this is why...you only think your thinking is clear. If its a topic you know nothing about, devs (not necessarily you) tend to assume there isn't anything to know and that's almost never true.

No, nobody would seriously press a button that does nothing but increment/decrement an integer. Imagine the thought process that would have to go into thinking that was something worthy of one's time and attention. Not even those who struggle with clear thinking would be able to come up with a story so outlandish and contrived as to start seeing it as an activity to want to get involved in.

It is easy to accidentally press the button and not notice, though.

Post reply on HN