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Fuck it, make it anyway

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581–590 of 613 posts

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#581

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #128
whstl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once told me "Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book." People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI. There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete". But that was the reality before, with the str…

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…

Let's plug AI into the parent's post and see where that takes us.

> "Used to be you had to reason things out using your brain. Then we got LLMs, then AI. Complaining that using your own brain was better seems like nonsense. I'm old enough to have had to use my intelligence and my education to figure out solutions and if the engineering challenge was too hard, I had to really work at it. I don't want to go back."

That is where "LLM is no different from a calculator, bro" argument falls down hard; it's one thing to lose your arithmetic skills but it's quite another to lose your reasoning and learning skills. We are already seeing students who use LLMs to do their schoolwork failing to get properly educated (and they themselves acknowledge it), so this isn't some kind of made up hyperbole.

The only thing that separates humans from animals is their reasoning and their intelligence. If some people want to give that up to climb down the evolutionary ladder, well, have fun with that.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#582

Post by johnnyanmac »

properbrew wrote: post #563
jodrellblank wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we strip away all the layers of onion, we are not left with a Platonic ideal onion, we're left with nothing. Removing every chore, task, craft, friction from life does not leave an ideal perfect life, it leaves nothing. Some people are feeling closer to that nothing than others. A human who liked caring for horses, feeding them, brushing them, comforting them during thunderstorms, blanketing them in cold weather,…

I can see the analogy, but fundementally that human liked caring for animals, they didn't like transporting the goods as effectively as possible, if they did then sitting in a box optimising delivery time would make them feel useful and respected. The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would ma…

>The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would make them feel even more fulfilled.

Yes. And instead they are stuck in the role of slop doula, unable to afford the luxury of being able to perform a furfilling role in society.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#583

Post by bigmadshoe »

someguynamedq wrote: post #412
bigmadshoe wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't bring anything to life. You just described it.

Completely arbitrary distinction. Effort is not more valuable than the results of the effort. This is a mindset that will keep you trapped.

I completely disagree. The mindset that leaves you trapped is focusing on the destination and not the journey. I will never paint like Michaelangelo but it feels good to apply myself to the pursuit of painting, even if the resulting paintings aren't good.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#584

Post by bigmadshoe »

someguynamedq wrote: post #426
bigmadshoe wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

If I can tell a hammer to build a house, go have lunch, and come back to a finished section, then yes, I'm not really building anymore am I?

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#585

Post by bigmadshoe »

someguynamedq wrote: post #423
bigmadshoe wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

It isn't enjoyable to me. Middle managing a team of engineers is something people get paid high six figures for. That isn't my passion.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#586

Post by johnnyanmac »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #418
sashank_1509 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's as much as opening up what we _could_ do, it's opening up time so that more can be done. Slop is too generic of a complaint. Do LLMs write code exactly how I would? No. Is my way right? Probably not. But what LLMs are great at are pre-emptively thinking about edge cases that I forget when writing the code. I'm surprised as how many fewer weird bugs come back to me now after a release. Should I have…

>So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself).

"correct" code is not "good" code. We see this quite a bit with the analogue of AI-generated text. Having all your grammar and spelling correct does not make for a more compelling read.

like, a correct, tested class doesn't necessarily stand up to integrating into a million line legacy code. Executives don't understand this, but this is the value being shedded as they try their 4th or 5th wave of attempts to take the programmer out of programming.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#587

Post by johnnyanmac »

dgabriel wrote: post #571
bluefirebrand wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project. > I really don't get the hate I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums,…

> I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it. It's possible that wishing instant death on people may make you unpopular. But also, maybe you're a poet or artist now. No one makes money of the years of toil it takes to become an expert at that craft, either. If…

>If the craft is important, then the money is secondary

the money is secondary. Sadly, rent is primary.

Give me enough to retire and I'll happily spend the rest of my days on my craft. Until then, the options are combining your craft, minmaxing your career to minimize work (too late for me), or to do something else that pays the bills for the next 30 years. And the cost to retrain isn't cheap either.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#588

Post by johnnyanmac »

sigseg1v wrote: post #530
bluefirebrand wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value. Yes obviously. But consider: In the past my employer and I were aligned. We agreed that in order for me to create more value for them I also had to enrich myself by learning new stuff so I could use that learning to better provide value to them Now that i…

Why would you stop learning new things? I lead a team of developers as part of my current role, reviewing and approving what they work on (in addition to doing development and architecture design as well) and from my experience, the difference in someone who has spent time building up their skills in how to do agentic development with AI is so insane. One person can build more than an entire team in some cases, while…

>Why would you stop learning new things?

I'm always learning new things. The things I learn jsut happen to no longer align with what current speculative crazy investors want.

>the difference in someone who has spent time building up their skills in how to do agentic development with AI is so insane.

and what if I do not need agentic development for my creations? my domain is not one where "building more" is the bottleneck. I don't need to ship faster, I nee to ship more deliberately

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#589

Post by johnnyanmac »

Chris2048 wrote: post #458
pessimizer wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book." Other people think that books are a communication tool that you use in order to communicate something, and that something is the thing that is actually important. They may suffer from writing a book, and be embarrassed that they've written a book. Enjoying the process is fine. It's a hobby, however, not a form of nobility, and enjoying it…

> books .. communicate something > convince or to inform. It's literally the pretext for all communication ok, so what does a dirty novel, or some other pulp fiction convince or inform you of?

Sex is communication too. It speaks to whatever escapism you desire or taboo you want to happen before your eyes.

You can call the popular "taken off my feet by the mysterious handsome Werewolf that will fight to the death for me" trite. But readers into that have a pretty clear message they want to receive.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#590

Post by johnnyanmac »

hgoel wrote: post #209
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 get it, you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do. As if you'd be happy to just write anything as long as you were allowed to manually type everything out. On top of that there's the "did you enjoy the craft or did you enjoy the compliments" framing. Are people who use pre-existing l…

If you want it broken down as simple as I can: My ultimate goal is "make a fun game". Turns out LLM's can't just do that for you, so I reject them for now.

There is a goal, LLM's cannot achieve that goal, despite what others want to claim of it. Maybe it can save some time, but not anywhere close to these magical 20x speedups others speak of. because coding is not the bottleneck of "make a fun game".

I hope that simplification helps on why I am opposed to LLMs as of now.

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