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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#121

Post by nojito »

wesammikhail wrote: post #22
arrowsmith wrote: post #2

Speak for yourself. I don't miss writing code at all. Agentic engineering is much more fun. And this surprises me, because I used to love writing code. Back in my early days I can remember thinking "I can't believe I get paid for this". But now that I'm here I have no desire to go back. I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords!

Speak for yourself. If you find the agentic workflow to be more fun, more power to you. I for one think writing code is the rewarding part. You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.

>You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.

So just tell the LLM about what you're thinking about.

Why do you need to type out a for loop for the millionth time?

Re: We mourn our craft

#123

Post by Ronsenshi »

croes wrote: post #98
bnchrch wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. This sums up my own feeling. I joined this craft and love this craft for the simple ability to build beautiful and useful things. This new world makes me more effective at it. And this new world doesn’t prevent me from crafting elegant architectures either.

Wait 5 years and your skills are down

I don't think 5 years is necessary. I think after two years of this agentic orchestration if you rarely touch code yourself skill will degrade to the point they won't be able to write anything non-trivial without assistance.

Re: We mourn our craft

#124

Post by jstanley »

stevejb wrote: post #110
fastasucan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was, for me, never about the code. Then it wasn't your craft.

Isn't this like saying that if better woodworking tools come out, and you like woodworking, that woodworking somehow 'isn't your craft'. They said that their craft is about making things. There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?

The only confusion is in the use of the term "woodworking".

For the power tool user, "woodworking with hand tools" isn't their craft.

For the CNC user, "woodworking with manual machines" isn't their craft.

Re: We mourn our craft

#125

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tock wrote: post #66
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s never been easier for you to make a competitor So what is stopping you other than yourself?

Billions of dollars?

You don't need billions of dollars to write an app. You need billions of dollars to create an independent platform that doesn't give the incumbent a veto over your app if you're trying to compete with them. And that's the problem.

Re: We mourn our craft

#126

Post by SquibblesRedux »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #91
wlindley wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.

And yet.. my car was surrounded by 5 self-driving cars with no people in them on the way to work on Thursday.

Just like in "I, Robot?"

Re: We mourn our craft

#127

Post by AstroBen »

stevejb wrote: post #110
fastasucan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was, for me, never about the code. Then it wasn't your craft.

Isn't this like saying that if better woodworking tools come out, and you like woodworking, that woodworking somehow 'isn't your craft'. They said that their craft is about making things. There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?

It's feeling much closer to hiring a woodworker to make you something, not woodworking tools

Re: We mourn our craft

#128

Post by yunwal »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #48
massysett wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary. Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.

The "reverse dictionary" is called a "thesaurus". Wikipedia quotes Peter Mark Roget (1852): > ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed Digital reverse dictionaries / thesauri like https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ can take natural language input, and afaict are strictly better at this task than LLMs. (I didn't know these tools existed when I wrote the rest of this comme…

A thesaurus is not a reverse dictionary

Re: We mourn our craft

#129

Post by SoftTalker »

Ronsenshi wrote: post #123
croes wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait 5 years and your skills are down

I don't think 5 years is necessary. I think after two years of this agentic orchestration if you rarely touch code yourself skill will degrade to the point they won't be able to write anything non-trivial without assistance.

Depends how long you've done it, and how much the landscape has changed since then. I can still hop back into SQL and it all comes back to me though I haven't done it regularly at all for nearly 10 years.

In the web front-end world I'd be pretty much a newbie. I don't know any of the modern frameworks, everything I've used is legacy and obsolete today. I'd ramp up quicker than a new junior because I understand all the concepts of HTTP and how the web works, but I don't know any of the modern tooling.

Re: We mourn our craft

#130

Post by [deleted] »

iambateman wrote: post #9

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learn…

[deleted]
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