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Fuck it, make it anyway

joelotter.com

341–350 of 613 posts

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#341
There is nothing stopping anyone doing things their way, LLMs or not.

I suppose you can balance between using them if the paycheck job is asking for them, and enjoy your craft outside your 9-5.

I’ve been reading more and more of this tone, and I do wonder what those devs writing these blogs do and where do they work. I’ve been a software engineer for more than 25 years, and the challenge was never the cording, it was always the human communication and understanding the outcome.

Yes LLMs can help none devs create things now, but show me a company that will allow AI generated code by none devs to go to prod.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#342

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…

One of the big points of art is expressing something to other people . Tired of this sort of shallow dismissal where wanting recognition, or for your art to reach people is cast as a kind of vanity that real artists ought to get over.

And why can't that apply to people who use generative AI? Expression isn't about seeking recognition, in the sense of clout or popularity, it's simply a matter of "I want other people to be able to see what I see."

If I compare what I'm able to produce by hand, and what I'm able to get the computer to spit out, it's pretty clear to me which is closest to what's in my head. So why do I have to be ashamed of that?

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#343
post #190
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who needs a SaaS when you can just ask AI to write a private one just made for you?

There is a small web service I need with a price tag of $39 one time payment. I’m current doing it myself for the last 1.5 hours, because I thought it would be fun. 2 minutes ago I upgraded to $120 subscription of Codex. Reasonable thing was to pay $39 and forget about it.

As much as I hate subscriptions, one time payment for ongoing access to a web service never lasts.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#344

I think it's about how AI is being used across every field. For software developers, it helps you complete work at a pace that's much quicker. For artists, scientists and mathematicians it comes down to protecting the field from a set of collaborative agents who can possibly achieve anything. What companies can do is restrict the usage to certain fields and keep the others immune. This should be universal so the comp…

I understand what you are saying, but it's completely impractical in a world where applying those constraints leads to established leaders imposing those constraints on developing countries or economies. Today its the G7 applying penalties against other countries or pressuring them not to develop industries that pollute even though it would elevate their quality of life, or Russia invading Ukraine because they can and Ukraine gave up it's nuclear capability, or the threat of Iran developing a nuclear weapon being the pretext for a war of aggression.

Tomorrow it's a major power invading another country for training a model of mass destruction.

It's untenable to expect other societies to not compete to avoid subservience to another powerful country.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t see the analogy? AI is not preventing the craftsman programmer from coding. Your compiler hasn’t stopped “yielding fruit”, so to speak. The correct analogy would be, your mom can also just go to the supermarket and get much cheaper mass-produced tomatoes; which is… exactly the current situation?

I agree. If grandma grows her own tomatoes she can only try four tomato-related recipes. If she goes to the grocery store she can try thirty.

The AI is enabling a lot more experimentation with software. The AI supplies the tomatoes (infrastructure / grunt work), grandma tries her recipes (the software / business idea).

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#346
This is the Eros vs Thanatos debacle.

Those who are driven by Eros want to enjoy the duration of a process: to have a delicious meal, make love, plant and care for that tree, build that house, and live.

The adepts of Thanatos want things done right now: to get satiated, have an orgasm, shade away that damn Sun, cover their sorry asses from elements, and die.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's an element of truth to what you're saying in respect to the feelings of frustration that people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade. What I also think they are thinking (because I am one of them) is not that we can produce value easier and quicker. It's that there's a devaluing of education and expertise to the po…

Any organization that vibecodes a significant amount of software in-house instead of buying it will not be reducing developer headcount. I'd bet on it. The CTO or EngDir will not be able to run 10x10 agent-cli sessions, or review 50 vibe coded PRs per week, no matter how capably autonomous the agents become.

Sounds like a failure of imagination to me (I hope you're right). It doesn't have to be the CTO, it can be anyone who will sit there for the cheapest cost to read output while assuming the risk of it all working until they retire. Sounds glorious

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#348
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. The feeling I get is that…

> The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value. This is sort of meaningless; the purpose of _every_ job is to produce value. The reason I chose to be a software engineer is because I enjoy solving the kinds of problems that it involved, not because it would allow me to deliver value to companies. Changing what a programmer does is _changing the job_, an…

I don't see it as "do a job because adding value" or "do a job because enjoying the activity".

I think these discussions need to consider if we're speaking in a professional or personal context.

Professionally, I 100% agree and understand that if I'm working as a solutions architect, an engineer, a devops person, a security person, a programmer or any of the other sort of roles I've had, I'm there to get the job done/add value. From that position I can see the value in AI as a tool that lets me get the job done quicker.

Personally speaking, as the nerdy person who actually enjoyed exploring computers since they were able to talk/walk, I'm devastated because I know that if it was so easy for the answers and solutions on a computer to be offered up by AI when I was a kid, I probably never would have spent so much time and had so much fun exploring. Obviously the same could be said about other answer machines that popped up like Google or Wikipedia, but they all still required specific understanding and synthesis to turn into valuable or fun solutions.

But it's the combination of the personal and professional things that also bother me. Modern agentic AI does in hours what tech companies paid eccentric nerds lots to do over days, weeks or months: explore and understand a system (just fun) and then based on that, sensibly improve it (fun and adds value for users).

Agentic AI in tech diminishes the value of eccentric nerds by doing something only they could do, but quicker and increasingly better, and maybe even cheaper. As a mildly eccentric nerd, I can both smile that the world is getting their features faster and more effortlessly, and feel sad that there's less of a reason for me to have fun and/or get paid lots at work because I am less valuable/special now.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#349
If I were an artist, I wouldn't really care that a machine took over the role of drawing lines on paper, and as a programmer, I don't care that the machines are taking the role of writing code.

The thing that actually matters is understanding the problem domain, and thinking about and visualizing the program I am trying to make, so I am happy to be doing less drudge work so I can focus on what really matters.

I've been doing quant research for the past year, and the amount of time (and tedium) LLMs have saved me is huge.

LLMs aren't even AI, if this amount of disruption is causing difficulty, having actual AI will give these people breakdowns.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#350
post #72

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…

This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. The feeling I get is that…

"has AI broken that stranglehold?"

Whatever AI is, it _is_ a huge democratizing influence in all fields.

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