I prefer the term "classically trained programmer." :-)
Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
31–40 of 72 posts
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#32Couldn't take an article seriously that started with the author claiming that code he writes by hand is "100% correct" Bruh
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Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#33Couldn't take an article seriously that started with the author claiming that code he writes by hand is "100% correct" Bruh
I also write 100% correct code, it does exactly what I wrote it to do (not compile).
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software is ephemeral. Very little of it lasts for long. And if it does, it's legacy banking or some ossified terrible thing people are afraid to touch - not something revered. Every piece of software today will be rewritten. By 2100 much of it will be dead and gone. Like punch cards that have rotted away.
Your bank's mainframe would like to know your location.
survivorship bias. while something like 20% of code in production today runs on mainframes, that probably represents <0.1% of all code ever written
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#35I would call myself an artisanal programmer. Software Engineers are some of the least likable people I've ever met and being associated with them is cringe. Questions like, "Why are you using Notepad++ instead of using VSCode with 100+ plugins?" in a very condescending manner gets old very quickly. They need the title of Engineer because deep down they are very insecure. On the plus side, they're usually promoted ver…
Exactly, when the real question is "why are you using notepad++ instead of emacs, you philistine?"
Because nobody showed him vi?
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#36I would call myself an artisanal programmer. Software Engineers are some of the least likable people I've ever met and being associated with them is cringe. Questions like, "Why are you using Notepad++ instead of using VSCode with 100+ plugins?" in a very condescending manner gets old very quickly. They need the title of Engineer because deep down they are very insecure. On the plus side, they're usually promoted ver…
> I would call myself an artisanal programmer. Software Engineers are (...) very condescending (...) They need the title of Engineer because deep down they are very insecure.
Jokes really do write themselves sometimes...
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#37Engineering is about creating something that serves a purpose, while operating within a set of constraints. Part of that is realizing that "100% correct/reliable in all circumstances" is an unrealistic goal, since implementation time and cost is one of those constraints.
A good engineer will acknowledge this tradeoff between robustness and cost and behave accordingly. For example, if you're working on safety critical or very foundational systems like OSes, medical tech, etc you should bias very heavily in favor of robustness. If you're not, this can easily be an act of overengineering. The engineer's job is to find the right spot along the cost-correctness curve for the thing they are building.
This has always been true, and LLMs just change certain parts of the equation. For example, code writing is far less of a bottleneck than before, so "we can just try with a throwaway impl and see if this works" is suddenly economically viable. It also turns out that many things, in practice, don't need to be as correct as some of us may have believed.
We can still enjoy making quality things, but doing so is often an act of artisanship rather than engineering.
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#38Weirdly, I thought the terms would be reversed… I think of a craftsman as someone who values quality over quantity, and makes everything beautiful and long lasting, while an engineer is more about productivity and tolerances and efficiency. A craftsman makes better quality but doesn’t scale the way an engineer and the factory process does, although mass produced goods sacrifice quality for quantity.
In food contexts when I see "artisinal" I usually just think of rich white people buying the same stuff in nicer packaging and typography for twice the price.
The actual artisans don't need to advertise themselves as artisans, they just sell shit.
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#39Weirdly, I thought the terms would be reversed… I think of a craftsman as someone who values quality over quantity, and makes everything beautiful and long lasting, while an engineer is more about productivity and tolerances and efficiency. A craftsman makes better quality but doesn’t scale the way an engineer and the factory process does, although mass produced goods sacrifice quality for quantity.
In food contexts when I see "artisinal" I usually just think of rich white people buying the same stuff in nicer packaging and typography for twice the price. The actual artisans don't need to advertise themselves as artisans, they just sell shit.
Actual artisans largely make "shit" and mostly leave the selling to others.
There are always exceptions, of course, and people that seek out crafted goods often want to climb over counters and into workshops .. but the crafting time tends to outweigh the selling time by a magnitude or two.
The true crossovers are the artisans that make crafting a performance and sell by making, eg: Lino Tagliapietra - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luU1mlCZc8U
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#40Couldn't take an article seriously that started with the author claiming that code he writes by hand is "100% correct" Bruh
I've gone back over most of my contributions to open source using LLMs and honestly, even though it was my best work at the time, there are big gaps that they find right away. The myth that we've been shipping perfect code for years, but you can't trust LLMs, is just subjective blindness. People can't see the issues that they can't see, definitionally. You can absolutely use the exact techniques we used to use in "th…
I think the issue people run into is that the types of errors the LLM makes are ones humans wouldn’t make, like having a basic misunderstanding of the goal of the software and making silly logic errors that technically work, but don’t serve the correct purpose.
This can be seen more clearly with self-driving cars as an example. A self-driving car may be safer than a human driver, but when the self-driving car plows into the side of a semi truck in broad daylight… that’s generally not a mistake a human would make. Humans and AI have different failure modes, so when AI fails where we generally wouldn’t, it really stands out and gets judged harshly.