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I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

jerpint.io

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Re: I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

#11

Post by ggregoryarms »

eduardogarza wrote: post #5
anonymous908213 wrote: post #2

> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience. And by doing so, never gain experience of your own. It is a truly alien mindset to me to take pride in never understanding what code does , to be comfortable relying entirely on magic words provided to you by others. For me, the simple existence of a bug in…

Why do you sound so petty? Do you understand every single layer of the stack below you? Do you understand how your code gets translated down to C, assembly, machine code? How all that becomes electrical signals on a PCB? How the material properties work at the physical level and how its manufactured? Because if you don't, aren't you, myself and basically everyone relying on the 'magic' words of others? If you're tryi…

I suspect Newton is rolling in his grave at your words. Standing on the shoulders of giants also means respecting the giants. That means dedicating time to learning what they have to teach. Not treating them as a black box with no credit or consent, in the name of your own "glory".

Re: I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

#12

Post by anonymous908213 »

eduardogarza wrote: post #5
anonymous908213 wrote: post #2

> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience. And by doing so, never gain experience of your own. It is a truly alien mindset to me to take pride in never understanding what code does , to be comfortable relying entirely on magic words provided to you by others. For me, the simple existence of a bug in…

Why do you sound so petty? Do you understand every single layer of the stack below you? Do you understand how your code gets translated down to C, assembly, machine code? How all that becomes electrical signals on a PCB? How the material properties work at the physical level and how its manufactured? Because if you don't, aren't you, myself and basically everyone relying on the 'magic' words of others? If you're tryi…

> Do you understand how your code gets translated down to C, assembly, machine code? How all that becomes electrical signals on a PCB? How the material properties work at the physical level and how its manufactured?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and not really but I would absolutely learn about it if I had any ability to control it. As it is, knowing more about material properties would not allow me to improve my programs, and I do not have a hardware foundry so it would not allow me to improve the hardware either. If I happened upon 1 trillion dollars or so, though, I would certainly invest time in learning all of the technical details of hardware manufacturing with the goal of creating a better hardware stack than the ones that we currently have available to us.

I didn't understand nearly as much from the start of my programming journey, of course. But as others mentioned, that was a weakness, not a strength. The lack of understanding bothered me, and I was able to learn all of the things that I did because I was continuously pushing myself to learn and understand more. If I had settled for never trying to understand, to just accept my current knowledge as the limits of my knowledge forevermore, then obviously I never would have been able to. Over months and years, I was able to continuously expand my knowledge little by little until eventually knowing a lot, rather than stagnating in the same place forever. There are still things I don't understand, of course, and my learning journey continues even today.

Re: I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

#13

Post by andy99 »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #7

Why is it that AI glazing blog posts like this inevitably use a shitty AI generated image? I am absolutely sick to bits of seeing them

I call it “AI blindness”, people genuinely don’t see what’s bad about AI output, it happens across code, text, and images. Same as the title itself being X not Y AI slop.

Re: I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

#14

Post by ryan_n »

eduardogarza wrote: post #5
anonymous908213 wrote: post #2

> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience. And by doing so, never gain experience of your own. It is a truly alien mindset to me to take pride in never understanding what code does , to be comfortable relying entirely on magic words provided to you by others. For me, the simple existence of a bug in…

Why do you sound so petty? Do you understand every single layer of the stack below you? Do you understand how your code gets translated down to C, assembly, machine code? How all that becomes electrical signals on a PCB? How the material properties work at the physical level and how its manufactured? Because if you don't, aren't you, myself and basically everyone relying on the 'magic' words of others? If you're tryi…

I dont think parent comment was being petty. Not understanding what agents write, especially in larger and/or more complex code bases is a valid thing to be concerned about. It's not really about understanding assembly or machine code, and I think more about really understanding your code and how things fit together. That way when something goes wrong you have an idea of how to fix it.

"I dont write code anymore I just review what Claude Code writes" is, unfortunately, not a unique way to view coding with agents. About a million people have discussed it like this in the past year or so.

Re: I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

#16

Post by shiveenp »

I don’t understand the kind of mentality that takes to put out genuine slop like this. Use the LLM or the agents or the fancy way to call a markdown file a skill to do your job; but stop pretending that it makes you in any way exceptional.

The whole post says nothing, seems AI generated itself and on top of that, adds nothing of value - simply exists to increase the entropy in the world.

Re: I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

#17

Post by vbezhenar »

eduardogarza wrote: post #5
anonymous908213 wrote: post #2

> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience. And by doing so, never gain experience of your own. It is a truly alien mindset to me to take pride in never understanding what code does , to be comfortable relying entirely on magic words provided to you by others. For me, the simple existence of a bug in…

Why do you sound so petty? Do you understand every single layer of the stack below you? Do you understand how your code gets translated down to C, assembly, machine code? How all that becomes electrical signals on a PCB? How the material properties work at the physical level and how its manufactured? Because if you don't, aren't you, myself and basically everyone relying on the 'magic' words of others? If you're tryi…

I don't understand every single layer of the stack below me, but I consider it a weakness, not a strength.

Re: I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

#18

Post by kzalesak »

shiveenp wrote: post #16

I don’t understand the kind of mentality that takes to put out genuine slop like this. Use the LLM or the agents or the fancy way to call a markdown file a skill to do your job; but stop pretending that it makes you in any way exceptional. The whole post says nothing, seems AI generated itself and on top of that, adds nothing of value - simply exists to increase the entropy in the world.

I, on the other hand strongly resonate with this post. I am not a programmer by profession, but a programmer by need - I write tools to get stuff done, and this is exactly the missing link. I am able to craft algorithms, architectures and focus on the UI, and llms (mostly Claude) allow me to write the low-level that needs to be written that I inspect. What used to take days takes hours and allows us to solve issue we were previously not able to in our org.

Re: I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

#19

Post by furyofantares »

lifetimerubyist wrote: post #4
anonymous908213 wrote: post #2

> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience. And by doing so, never gain experience of your own. It is a truly alien mindset to me to take pride in never understanding what code does , to be comfortable relying entirely on magic words provided to you by others. For me, the simple existence of a bug in…

People get really defensive when I point out that they are proud of the things that they don’t know. Willful ignorance and anti-intellectualism is a cancer in anything it infiltrates and SWE is no different.

There was a snarky comment earlier saying, try implementing something that's too hard for you, THEN try going back to writing code by hand - implying agents are indispensable.

And I thought to myself that the most memorable parts of my career, the most rewarding parts, were when I took some task that was too hard for me, then, with great effort, became a developer for whom that task was no longer too hard for me.

Re: I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

#20

Post by derekp7 »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #7

Why is it that AI glazing blog posts like this inevitably use a shitty AI generated image? I am absolutely sick to bits of seeing them

Honest question. For the purpose of adding a throw-away visual to help set the tone of an article, is there really any difference between shitty AI slop vs shitty Photoshop slop? Either way it is obvious that this isn't a real studio photo, and that wouldn't be expected. I guess the better (or more traditional) article picture would be a hand illustrated piece that an in-house artist would throw together in maybe an hour or two, depending on the detail and desired quality.
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