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Fuck it, make it anyway

joelotter.com

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Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#421

Post by someguynamedq »

pastel8739 wrote: post #287
x3haloed wrote: post #164

This is 80% ego talking and 20% fear of change. The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this. OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.” The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in…

What in the world? I’ve built a thing by hand before and enjoyed the process of doing it. I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’ve also built many things with AI and enjoyed them much less. I think the reason so many people are frustrated is that they _know_ they are falling behind, they _know_ the thing that they like doing is not something they can easily get employed to do. That sucks. Do you actually believe that p…

The problem is that you're not putting as much effort into building things with AI as you were by hand. If you were, it would still be satisfying

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#422

Post by orangecat »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #317
socalgal2 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just see it as tool. Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense. I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back. Construction w…

This is a terrible example. Cars qualitatively opened up something that humans could never do before. Same with the computer. What about LLMs? LLMs just replace what you were already doing, but don’t qualitatively open up all that much in the frontier. A million lines of LLM slop? Arguably LLMs close the frontier, rely too much on it and your ability to think hard and long ends up getting crushed.

Cars qualitatively opened up something that humans could never do before.

Not really, we explored almost the entire world on foot and horseback. Cars and trains "just" make it easier.

A million lines of LLM slop?

As they say, quantity has a quality all its own. Over the last few years I was working on a side project that needed a lot of tedious logic of the form "if X then Y, unless both A and B, in which case either P or Q depending on the phase of the moon". I gave Claude the problem, it independently came up with a nearly identical architecture to what I had already built, then tore through all the scenarios and produced thousands of unit tests along with validation and fuzzing scripts. The code isn't terribly elegant, and was never going to be. But it works and it's shipping, and that wouldn't have happened anytime soon without AI.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#423

Post by someguynamedq »

bigmadshoe wrote: post #246
x3haloed wrote: post #164

This is 80% ego talking and 20% fear of change. The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this. OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.” The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in…

"But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared." I think you (and almost everyone in this thread) are missing an important point here: even without relying on external input on our work, we feel less proud of the work we produce by hand when we know we could have prom…

Then why wouldn't you build it with AI?

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#424

Post by someguynamedq »

beej71 wrote: post #292
x3haloed wrote: post #164

This is 80% ego talking and 20% fear of change. The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this. OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.” The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in…

> Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction. I think this cuts close to the heart of it. "That knowledge has no value" isn't an easy pill to swallow for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is that your value as a developer has gone down. You're not going to get paid for coding, and the market is getting flooded with peop…

Using LLMs to write code is only boring if you're only trying to make the same boring things you were capable of doing when writing it by hand.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#425

Post by raincole »

dofm wrote: post #200
CuriouslyC wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're projecting, and there are plenty of people in crafts who are using AI output as an input to their own works who are having a blast. AI images make amazing collages/photobash inputs, and AI music is useful to sample or use as inspiration for parts you're stuck on. These people just keep quiet about their use because of the witch hunts being persecuted by people who are afraid of change. AI use in creative field…

> You're projecting, No, I'm actually not. I'm an active creative portrait photographer and I take part in photographic communities with people much, much better than me, I am surrounded by dozens of gigging and working musicians, songwriters and composers in my friend group (and play a couple of instruments myself); I know painters and illustrators of great ability (though I am not that kind of artist). I listen to…

> photographer

"Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it." -- The Crayon, one of the oldest art magazines.

It turns out humans have been devaluing the newer ways to create art since forever.

> you might as well place a grey rectangle

There are so many literally {color} rectangles hanging in contemporary art museums. Here is a grey one: https://zandergalerie.com/exhibitions/la-couleur-du-renoncem...

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#426

Post by someguynamedq »

bigmadshoe wrote: post #247
aeon_ai wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to probably be downvoted because the truth is hard and the collective human ego is self-reinforcing, but I think you are correct. 'Quality' is a function of filling in the gaps of the new tools, not eschewing them entirely.

A point is coming very soon where coding agents are not tools but are just your replacement. If you prompt a coding agent to make you something then go have lunch, you didn't make anything, it did.

"You didn't build that house, your hammer did"

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#427

Post by thunderfork »

DidntUseIt wrote: post #297
rogerrogerr wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> file sharing > LLMs It’s probably worth doing a very thorough audit of how you’re handling user-uploaded files, it’s full of non-obvious footguns.

I bet you don’t know the MIME type for MS Word doc off the top of your head. Do you? So why would I take your advice on this topic? I bet there are 1000 other things you don’t know about file uploads. The LLM does know, and if I think it looks weird I can research it manually. It’s called: Being of normal functioning intelligence And caring about the product and the work (and the money!)

Off the top of my head, I know there's more than one ;)

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#428

Post by someguynamedq »

goonersallofyou wrote: post #53

> the output doesn’t feel like mine, and I take no pride in what it produces. So much this. I don't understand how some people seem to have no self awareness or shame in saying "I build X" where "X" was entirely prompted by an LLM. It's like ordering a meal from door dash and calling yourself a chef.

No, it's like ordering a meal from door dash and saying "I got food." Using a tool does not mean you didn't do the thing you used the tool to do.

You're conflating "I made X" with "I personally did every part of X with no help," which is really not something to brag about as much as it is something that might fulfill your own personal sense of value.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#429

Post by MrScruff »

goonersallofyou wrote: post #53

> the output doesn’t feel like mine, and I take no pride in what it produces. So much this. I don't understand how some people seem to have no self awareness or shame in saying "I build X" where "X" was entirely prompted by an LLM. It's like ordering a meal from door dash and calling yourself a chef.

I don't agree. That would imply they asked for a piece of software and the LLM one-shotted it, but that's absolutely not what's happening in the vast majority of cases. If two people vibe code the same tool from the same high level desciption the results are going to be quite different.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#430

Post by someguynamedq »

sicktriple wrote: post #244
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would absolutely make sense for someone who enjoys cycling to buy a pedal-assist e-bike, especially if they e.g. moved to a hillier area, sustained an injury, or just started having their strength/stamina decline with age. (incidentally, the proliferation of unregistered/unlicensed motorcycles marketed as "e-bikes" has done enormous damage to the viability of e-bikes as a general category)

It's called metaphor. Please reserve your erm akshully's for someone else.

It's actually a valid extension of your metaphor that introduces nuance that substantially weakens your point
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