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Computer Says No

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Re: Computer Says No

#11

Post by SamLeBarbare »

I really like the framing here (via Richard Sennett / Roland van der Vorst): craft is a relationship with the material. In software, that “material consciousness” is built by touching the system—writing code, feeling the resistance of constraints, refactoring, modeling the domain until it clicks.

If we outsource the whole “hands that think” loop to agents, we may ship faster… but we also risk losing the embodied understanding that lets us explain why something is hard, where the edges are, and how to invent a better architecture instead of accepting “computer says no.”

I hope we keep making room for “luxury software”: not in price, but in care—the Swiss-watch mentality. Clean mechanisms, legible invariants, debuggable behavior, and the joy of building something you can trust and maintain for years. Hacker News needs more of that energy.

Re: Computer Says No

#12

Post by armchairhacker »

The gist ("product becomes a black box") applies to any abstraction. It could apply to high-level languages (including so-called "low-level" languages like C), and few people criticize those.

But LLMs are particularly insidious because they're a particularly leaky abstraction. If you ask an LLM to implement something:

- First, there's only a chance it will output something that works at all

- Then, it may fail on edge-cases

- Then, unless it's very trivial, the code will be spaghetti, so neither you nor the LLM can extend it

Vs a language like C, where the original source is indecipherable from the assembly but the assembly is almost certainly correct. When GCC or clang does fail, only an expert can figure out why, but it happens rarely enough that there's always an expert available to look at it.

Even if LLMs get better, English itself is a bad programming language, because it's imprecise and not modular. Tasks like "style a website exactly how I want" or "implement this complex algorithm" you can't describe without being extremely verbose and inventing jargon (or being extremely more verbose), at which point you'd spend less effort and write less using a real programming language.

If people end up producing all code (or art) with AI, it won't be through prompts, but fancy (perhaps project-specific) GUIs if not brain interfaces.

Re: Computer Says No

#14

Post by trashb »

armchairhacker wrote: post #12

The gist ("product becomes a black box") applies to any abstraction. It could apply to high-level languages (including so-called "low-level" languages like C), and few people criticize those. But LLMs are particularly insidious because they're a particularly leaky abstraction. If you ask an LLM to implement something: - First, there's only a chance it will output something that works at all - Then, it may fail on edg…

I agree, there is a reason we settled on programming languages as a interface to instruct the machine. Ultimately it is a tool to indicate our thoughts as precise as possible in a certain domain.

People that don't understand the tools they use are doomed to reinvent them.

Perhaps the interface will evolve into pseudo code where AI will fill in undefined or boilerplate with best estimates.

Re: Computer Says No

#15

Post by ramon156 »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #9
zetanor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One with Windows 11?

Do you really think Windows 11 doesn't try to control the user, or say no to them? Are you sure you can't think of a commonly used operating system which doesn't? Name ends with "ux" , or maybe "BSD" ?

Chill, it was an obvious tongue-in-cheek comment

Re: Computer Says No

#16

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

ramon156 wrote: post #15
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think Windows 11 doesn't try to control the user, or say no to them? Are you sure you can't think of a commonly used operating system which doesn't? Name ends with "ux" , or maybe "BSD" ?

Chill, it was an obvious tongue-in-cheek comment

mine too, calm down

Re: Computer Says No

#17

Post by kitd »

> feeling resistance

In a software context, I wonder what the impact of the language used is on the sense of "resistance"?

Re: Computer Says No

#18

Post by tosti »

trashb wrote: post #14
armchairhacker wrote: post #12

The gist ("product becomes a black box") applies to any abstraction. It could apply to high-level languages (including so-called "low-level" languages like C), and few people criticize those. But LLMs are particularly insidious because they're a particularly leaky abstraction. If you ask an LLM to implement something: - First, there's only a chance it will output something that works at all - Then, it may fail on edg…

I agree, there is a reason we settled on programming languages as a interface to instruct the machine. Ultimately it is a tool to indicate our thoughts as precise as possible in a certain domain. People that don't understand the tools they use are doomed to reinvent them. Perhaps the interface will evolve into pseudo code where AI will fill in undefined or boilerplate with best estimates.

There are plenty of alternatives for programming than through written language. It's just that commercialization took the first thing that was available and exploited it. Same thing is happening with AI. Many innovations are doomed to become cursed. Computers are cursed. Medicine is cursed. Science is cursed. Everything sucks and that's just the way it is.

After the war when the dust settles, we'll start over. We might escape the death of the sun, but not the heat death of the universe. Therefore, none of the above matters and I'm rambling.

Re: Computer Says No

#20

Post by bushido »

I love the framing here.

However, I think what a lot of people don't realize is the reason a lot of executives and business users are excited about AI and don't mind developers getting replaced is because product is already a black box.

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