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AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

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Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#11

Post by rafterydj »

TrackerFF wrote: post #4

There used to be a time when you needed to be very skilled woodworker in order to make nice cabinets. There still are, but the number of machine / CNC made cabinets outnumber artisanal 100% hand-made cabinets by some incredible number. For every masterpiece made by a Japanese cabinet maker, imagine how many Ikea cabinets there are out there... And that's how I believe software engineering will end up. Hand crafted co…

Counterpoint: a cabinet has always been a cabinet and nobody expects it to be anything but a cabinet. Rarely are software projects as repeatable and alike to each other as cabinets are.

Software is codified rules and complexity, which is entirely aribtrary, and builds off of itself in an infinite number of ways. That makes it much more difficult to turn into factory output cabinetry.

I think more people should read "No Silver Bullet" because I hear this argument a lot and I'm not sure it holds. There _are_ niches in software that are artisanal craft, that have been majorly replaced (like custom website designers and stock WordPress templates), but the vast majority of the industry relies on cases where turning software into templates isn't possible, or isn't as efficient, or conflicts with business logic.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#12

Post by TrackerFF »

therein wrote: post #6
TrackerFF wrote: post #4

There used to be a time when you needed to be very skilled woodworker in order to make nice cabinets. There still are, but the number of machine / CNC made cabinets outnumber artisanal 100% hand-made cabinets by some incredible number. For every masterpiece made by a Japanese cabinet maker, imagine how many Ikea cabinets there are out there... And that's how I believe software engineering will end up. Hand crafted co…

It is an analogy that only passes the initial glance. Especially since the CNC made cabinets are not full of design flaws. Your analogy would only make sense if these CNC cabinets were generated by CNC AI that may or may not follow the sensibilities of a human designer. Or if the inexperienced carpenters using CNC machines just described the design verbally to the CNC machine instead of carefully encoding their desig…

Surely you can see the point though - that there are numerous of trades that previously involved mastery of tools, a process of designing custom products for customers, and were made to last for decades, centuries even.

But many of those have long since been automated away, because customers are more than happy to purchase cheaper products, made almost entirely by machines.

"AI-free" development will be a tiny niche in the coming years and decades. And those developers will not get paid any extra for doing it the old way. Just like artisanal workers today.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#13

Post by hellisothers »

rafterydj wrote: post #11
TrackerFF wrote: post #4

There used to be a time when you needed to be very skilled woodworker in order to make nice cabinets. There still are, but the number of machine / CNC made cabinets outnumber artisanal 100% hand-made cabinets by some incredible number. For every masterpiece made by a Japanese cabinet maker, imagine how many Ikea cabinets there are out there... And that's how I believe software engineering will end up. Hand crafted co…

Counterpoint: a cabinet has always been a cabinet and nobody expects it to be anything but a cabinet. Rarely are software projects as repeatable and alike to each other as cabinets are. Software is codified rules and complexity, which is entirely aribtrary, and builds off of itself in an infinite number of ways. That makes it much more difficult to turn into factory output cabinetry. I think more people should read "…

Counterpoint: I forget where I originally read this thought but consider compilers. At one point coding was writing assembly and now it’s generally not, sometimes some people still do it but it is far from the norm. Now, usually, you “write code” in an abstraction (possibly of an abstraction) and magic takes care of the rest.

While I imagine “make an app that does X” won’t be as useful as “if … else” there is a middle ground where you’re relinquishing much of the control you currently are trying to retain.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#14

Post by dingdingdang »

I mean, yes. And also; it's the age old problem that arises every time a new technology arrives in full: it requires a steadier-than-priorly hand in order to not have ballistic effects on society. This goes for books over what-my-betters-told-me, swords over flint-blades, automotive cars over horse-carts and indeed; ALL technology. New tech of any real substance invariably carry the need for cultural shift towards a more advanced stance that allows for the gainful use of said technology at scale.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#15

Post by TrueTom »

gwynforthewyn wrote: post #2

I've been seeing teammates go from promising juniors to people who won't think, and I've tried hard here to say what I think they're going wrong. Like the great engineers who came before us and told us what they had learned, Rob Pike, Jez Humble, Martin Fowler or Bob Martin, it's up to those of us with a bit more experience to help the junior generation to get through this modern problem space and grow healthily. Fir…

I have to disagree. The same people who won't think existed in previous generations as well. The only difference was, they blindly regurgitated what Bob Martin et. al were saying.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#16

Post by dgfitz »

TrackerFF wrote: post #12
therein wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an analogy that only passes the initial glance. Especially since the CNC made cabinets are not full of design flaws. Your analogy would only make sense if these CNC cabinets were generated by CNC AI that may or may not follow the sensibilities of a human designer. Or if the inexperienced carpenters using CNC machines just described the design verbally to the CNC machine instead of carefully encoding their desig…

Surely you can see the point though - that there are numerous of trades that previously involved mastery of tools, a process of designing custom products for customers, and were made to last for decades, centuries even. But many of those have long since been automated away, because customers are more than happy to purchase cheaper products, made almost entirely by machines. "AI-free" development will be a tiny niche…

What’s the saying, software projects are never finished, only abandoned.

Cabinets are finished.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#17

Post by treetalker »

rafterydj wrote: post #11
TrackerFF wrote: post #4

There used to be a time when you needed to be very skilled woodworker in order to make nice cabinets. There still are, but the number of machine / CNC made cabinets outnumber artisanal 100% hand-made cabinets by some incredible number. For every masterpiece made by a Japanese cabinet maker, imagine how many Ikea cabinets there are out there... And that's how I believe software engineering will end up. Hand crafted co…

Counterpoint: a cabinet has always been a cabinet and nobody expects it to be anything but a cabinet. Rarely are software projects as repeatable and alike to each other as cabinets are. Software is codified rules and complexity, which is entirely aribtrary, and builds off of itself in an infinite number of ways. That makes it much more difficult to turn into factory output cabinetry. I think more people should read "…

No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accident in Software Engineering: https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.p...

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#18

Post by blitztime »

For better or worse I’ve been finding it difficult to stay motivated at times for sharpening my craft. I’m currently reading Learning Go 2nd and it’s cool learning the idiomatic ways to write code in a language. However part of me feels like even if I strive to write “clean code”, now the bottleneck seems to be shifting to reviewers time and expertise.

So I fear I’m fighting a losing battle. I can’t and don’t want to review everything my coworkers put out, and code has always been a means to an end for leadership anyways so it seems difficult to justify carving out time for the team as a whole to learn, especially in the age of genAi.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#19

Post by rafterydj »

logicprog wrote: post #9

This is a really good post. I'm a naturally controlling person, and I care about my craft a lot, so even in my recent dabbling (on a ~3000 LOC project) with agentic coding, one of the things I naturally did from the start was not just skim the diffs that the AI generated, but decide for myself what technologies should be used, describe the logic and architecture of the code I wanted in detail — to keep my mental mode…

Interesting. Would you mind elaborating a bit on your workflow? In my work I go back and forth between the "stock" GUIs, and copy-pasting into a separated terminal for model prompts. I hate the vibe code-y agent menu in things like Cursor, I'm always afraid integrated models will make changes that I miss because it really only works with checking "allow all changes" fairly quickly.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#20

Post by al_borland »

hellisothers wrote: post #13
rafterydj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: a cabinet has always been a cabinet and nobody expects it to be anything but a cabinet. Rarely are software projects as repeatable and alike to each other as cabinets are. Software is codified rules and complexity, which is entirely aribtrary, and builds off of itself in an infinite number of ways. That makes it much more difficult to turn into factory output cabinetry. I think more people should read "…

Counterpoint: I forget where I originally read this thought but consider compilers. At one point coding was writing assembly and now it’s generally not, sometimes some people still do it but it is far from the norm. Now, usually, you “write code” in an abstraction (possibly of an abstraction) and magic takes care of the rest. While I imagine “make an app that does X” won’t be as useful as “if … else” there is a middl…

As complexity in a program increases, getting to the level of detail of defining the if...else becomes important. Using plain English to define the business logic, and allowing AI to fill in the gaps, will likely lead to a lot of logic errors that go uncaught until there is a big problem.

For the AI to avoid this, I'd imagine it would need to be directed not to assume anything, and instead ask for clarification on each and every thing, until there is no more ambiguity about what is required. This would be a very long and tedious back and forth, where someone will want to delegate the task to someone else, and at that point, the person might as well write their own logic in certain areas. I've found myself effectively giving sudocode to the LLM to try to properly explain the logic that is needed.

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