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Fuck it, make it anyway

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Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#81

Post by spicyusername »

FreePalestine1 wrote: post #38
spicyusername wrote: post #3

Still, every day, I say to myself out loud, "this is crazy". It's one of those platitudes that everyone knows, "the only constant is change", but everything feels like it's going be forever anyways. Your parents will live forever. Your kids will stay young forever. You'll be at this job forever. You'll keep doing this routine you did this week forever. Quotes, or advice, or history books are just too abstract until y…

The problem with what you're saying is there has never been a technology that has the potential to disrupt the workforce at this scale. There is also no clear pathway to "this opens up more jobs". This is not a tool the same way an electric saw is a tool. An electric saw replaces a physical thing that we do (manually sawing), but AI replaces our thinking and intelligence.

There didn't use to be a "workforce".

Then there was a time when the "workforce" was mostly actual slaves.

There was a time when entire cities all died of sickness, 100% mortality.

Yes, more change has happened. And more is coming. Just how it is. The post WWII era was the exception. Ride the wave.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#82

Post by thaumasiotes »

reticulates wrote: post #5

Long before generative AI we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution. YC marched to the drum. Execution! Execution! Execution! Do things that don’t scale, do the hard things, build something people want. And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, progra…

> And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!

This reminds me of a different theme in the programming world.

There was always a feeling that development spends time on meetings long past the point when the app could have been finished. And I remember a comment here on HN (which I can't find now) saying how, if you're on a team at IBM working to develop something for a client, you will feel that you could just go ahead and finish whatever functionality you're supposed to be developing.

And if you sneak in after hours and do that, you'll be met with the message that you aren't being helpful, that you've got to wait for the business to determine that that functionality really is what the client wants, that the app needs to be described a certain way to get signoff from other decision makers, etc. Anything annoying that you can imagine.

But the overall takeaway that I saw was that developers tend to be frustrated that business processes are slower than the act of producing the software, and they feel held back by that.

Given that background, it's not clear why generating more code per unit time is valuable at all. That's something developers wanted to do all along, and they were told they shouldn't. More code per developer would make sense, but why more code per time?

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#83

Post by npilk »

aniviacat wrote: post #66
MachineMan wrote: post #10

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longe…

I don't think that fully captures the situation. My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes. However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do…

In this analogy, your mother probably gets enjoyment out eating the tomatoes herself, or maybe giving a few to friends. Technology wouldn't cause her plants to stop growing. But she couldn't support herself full-time as a tomato grower competing against large farms with hydroponics.

So maybe the extension is that professional SWEs who work at big corporations will need to use AI to 'keep up', but hobbyists can still get enjoyment out of their own work at hobby scale without using AI (similar to the point in TFA).

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#84

Post by rglover »

I think the middle way is best here: use AI so you understand how best to apply it to your work but don't deprive yourself of the joy of doing stuff by hand. And if you so desire: just write by hand.

Very unlikely to apply to any job moving forward (i.e., they've equated AI with a competitive advantage, even if the results are not technically competitive), but a job isn't you and you are not a job. And if you're like me, where building stuff is your business, I highly recommend using your skills to build something that makes money (without freaking out about how the thing is built) and then use that to pay for your life and work on code however you'd like in the off hours.

Frustrating? Absofuckinglutely. But you can either spin out or keep progressing, however slowly. My wife and I have been talking about a growing renaissance movement as people where we live (normal, everyday people) go in on other locals for using AI for stuff. Just saw one on Reddit the other day where a local venue got chewed out for using AI for their event flyer.

That doesn't mean AI goes away or everyone "wakes up," but it does mean that it's not this universally loved thing. I personally think that will be the shape of the future too: some places in the world will be all-in while others will opt-out. If you truly want to be a pure craftsman, it's worth looking for where those places and people are and consider relocating. Environment has a huge impact on your ability to think well and clearly; don't underestimate proximity to AI making it seem more threatening than it actually is (and don't just dismiss that as delusion or wishful thinking).

Also don't forget: the economics of AI are unhealthy and this first wave of AI will likely be washed out, followed by a "plateau of productivity" for a few survivors (think how the internet looked from ~2002-2009). Again, just my opinion but I don't think the overall outlook is terrible if you don't allow yourself to be disconnected from your craft and find others who feel the same.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#85

Post by IshKebab »

You can still control the output LLMs produce. Obviously you can one-shot "make me a fun game" but I think there's a whole spectrum from pure vibe coding - you literally never look at the code, through controlling the direction and skimming the code all the way to reviewing every single line and manually editing parts.

Also I think the quality of the models has made a big difference to my attitude. Until Astra they were kind of "meh, a junior engineer could do this but I wouldn't be happy with it" but with Astra I feel like it's reached the point where it's competent and it just lacks taste in some ways. It's even done some clever things that I might not have thought of.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#86

Post by cachvico »

lacedeconstruct wrote: post #51
user43928 wrote: post #4

I liked building apps and helpful tools before AI came around. I've been doing so for 15 years, 10 of them professionally. Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun. What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want. I stopped reviewing the code at all. People on here are often saying how that's…

>My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it. May I ask what does this app do ? 200k is like GTA vice city level, is like sqlite level, If its a financial tracker or a to-do list or an agent coordinator I am going to kill myself

Vice City was released nearly 25 years ago! Also it's a game, so it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. If you count the unique 'features' (or systems) of Vice City, you might find it's a comparable count to the number of features of a medium-sized mobile app.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#87

Post by weatherlite »

Everyone should do whatever makes them happy. Whether anyone will care much about your hand crafted software ...im leaning mostly no, perhaps very very niche programming communities. How do you even prove to people the software was hand written? And why should they care? Its not like music or art where wondering and caring what Kurt Cobain was thinking when he wrote the song is a big part of the experience. I'm skeptical I'll wonder what went through the head of the guy who wrote Excel or some crud app. I just want the thing to work it is not art for me.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#88

Post by SoftTalker »

user43928 wrote: post #65
lacedeconstruct wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it. May I ask what does this app do ? 200k is like GTA vice city level, is like sqlite level, If its a financial tracker or a to-do list or an agent coordinator I am going to kill myself

I'm not going to share exact details about my paid app, but you could think media management, with a lot of extra features, an in-app browser with custom controls, and multiple AI powered features with on device processing.

You're selling an app, but don't want to share any details, or even name it?

Call me suspicious.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#89

Post by ideashower »

dofm wrote: post #70

This. This is more or less precisely how I feel. Other creative fields have already begun to get a handle on how AI is a soul-deadening thief of joy in their fields. I have hope for illustrators and painters and photographers and musicians and makers. With those friends and in those communities I see people who have already done the thinking, can already express their feelings, and are already making commitments to d…

I don't know. Maybe it's the people doing software dev that are yet to reckon with it to a degree -- or have found themselves on opposite sides of denial.

I think industry is quite clear that AI is helpful to their bottom line. At the end, that's all that matters to them. That SWEs cannot, say, unionize to prevent this shift in labor-elimination or articulate any other coherent way of countering the industry's desire to push forward with AI-assisted coding, shows me that there's an understandable desire to preserve this golden egg of being a high paying SWE. But that ship is setting sail, and becoming rarefied.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#90

Post by FridgeSeal »

9dev wrote: post #28
bob1029 wrote: post #7

> I’ve spent years learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that might have been a waste of time? Generative AI is really awful at building games that are fun to play. It is a masterclass at reproducing Minecraft clones and shiny HDRP demo scenes in one shot. But, unless you are a total novice at game dev, you should be able to see through these cheap tricks for what they are. 99% of the…

Are you saying Assassin's Creed 87 or Far Cry 32 aren't cheap clones of its own previous incarnations? The gaming industry is, to a huge extent, just an optimisation problem for MBAs running the major publishers. Most gamers don't really value creativity, but easy rewards and familiar tropes in eternal regurgitation. AI is going to be able to pump out a never-ending stream to satisfy that market rather sooner than la…

Yeah those games exist, and most gamers don’t want them. We’ve not been able to convince the industry to stop bothering to make them, so they still do dumb stuff like, making Concorde, then realising nobody wants it.

Indie and non-triple-A studios keep having wind, because they’re the ones producing interesting and fun games which people _actually want to play_.

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