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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#151

Post by scuff3d »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #148
scuff3d wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of guys at work have been raving about Claude. How quick they get stuff done, how great the code is, how working any other way is a waste of time. I just had the misfortune today to wade into one of their codebases. It's 60k lines of code for something that should have been simple, and it's an absolute fucking mess. I'm gonna have to rip out most of it and start over just to get it to do what we actually nee…

Devil's advocate: perhaps you are holding a hammer complaining about rivets. If you used AI to interact with the code instead, you wouldn't have to wade through the mess and might have gotten what you needed fairly easily, except you're using the wrong tool for the job

Bad code is bad code, doesn't matter how it was generated.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#152

Post by sockgrant »

g-b-r wrote: post #130
sockgrant wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree some people go to work to work, and claude is find / good for them, but I feel that characterization of us who are loving claude is disingenuous. I’m a creative, while I loved coding and honed my craft, it was creating that always had me hooked. Claude is creating on steroids. Not to mention, it can help you massively improve your code cleanliness. All of the little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the hi…

> it can help you massively improve your code cleanliness. All of the little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the high unit test coverage, nagging bug fixes, etc., they’re all trivial to do now. It can help if you write poor code without it, probably High unit test coverage only means something if you carefully check those tests, and if everything was tested

The only way Claude can help improve your code cleanliness is if you write poor code?

Code coverage means nothing if you didn't carefully check every test? "and if everything was tested" do you know what code coverage is?

not gonna engage the trolling

Re: Grief and the AI split

#153

Post by dinkumthinkum »

adriand wrote: post #45
simonw wrote: post #2

This sounds right to me: > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. Helps explain why some people are d…

I feel zero sense of sadness about how things used to be. I feel like the change that sucked the most was when software engineering went from something that nerds did because they were passionate about programming, to techbros who were just in it for the money. We lost the idealism of the web a long time ago and the current swamp with apex reptiles like Zuckerberg is what we have now. It became all about the bottom l…

I see developers talking about this idea of intense and unimaginable excitement about AI. It seems orgasmic for them, like something the hardest drugs couldn't fulfill them. I find it very strange. What exactly is so exciting? I'm not disagreeing but when you say "opportunities I'm racing towards," what does that mean? This idea of "racing towards" sounds so frenetic, I struggle to know what that could mean? What I see people doing with AI is making slop and CRUD apps and maybe some employee replacement systems or something but I don't see this transcendental experience that people are describing. I could see a mortgage collapse or something like that, maybe that's what is so exciting? I don't know.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#154

Post by dinkumthinkum »

ccosky wrote: post #128
sockgrant wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree some people go to work to work, and claude is find / good for them, but I feel that characterization of us who are loving claude is disingenuous. I’m a creative, while I loved coding and honed my craft, it was creating that always had me hooked. Claude is creating on steroids. Not to mention, it can help you massively improve your code cleanliness. All of the little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the hi…

I have a suite of Claude skills all about craftsmanship. Refactoring, renaming, deconstructing god classes, detecting deleted code, etc. I've never written better, more readable, more maintainable code in my life than I have with Claude. All of that is trivial and hardly takes any time at all to accomplish. Before moving to agentic AI, I thought I'd miss the craftsmanship aspect. Not at all. I get great satisfaction…

But, would you feel that same satisfaction out on the street?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#155

Post by k32k »

Roguelazer wrote: post #36
operatingthetan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is going to blow up. We are way past wringing our hands over agentic engineering. Every startup and all fast moving companies are onboard. They don't hand code anymore. There will not be some code quality crisis that will stop everyone in their tracks. I'm trying to cope with this too, but I don't think the best path is praying for failure.

That's absolutely not true. The places that have embraced "agentic engineering" are mostly garbage factories, and lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. I recognize that most of the people on this site are just trying to self-promote for their own gig, but the level of misinformation is sometimes just staggering.

Indeed, I feel this place has gone insane. There's no balance here.

You've got boosters and then you've got people who are panicking/fighting against anything pro-AI.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#156

Post by k32k »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #153
adriand wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel zero sense of sadness about how things used to be. I feel like the change that sucked the most was when software engineering went from something that nerds did because they were passionate about programming, to techbros who were just in it for the money. We lost the idealism of the web a long time ago and the current swamp with apex reptiles like Zuckerberg is what we have now. It became all about the bottom l…

I see developers talking about this idea of intense and unimaginable excitement about AI. It seems orgasmic for them, like something the hardest drugs couldn't fulfill them. I find it very strange. What exactly is so exciting? I'm not disagreeing but when you say "opportunities I'm racing towards," what does that mean? This idea of "racing towards" sounds so frenetic, I struggle to know what that could mean? What I s…

I think those comments are signalling something much deeper about the individual.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#157

Post by jaredcwhite »

I'm just not buying this framing. At all.

I'm not sure what it is I'm supposed to be mourning. I'm using my skills and continuing in my craft the way I have for several decades and the way I will continue to for several more. I eschew the LLMs not because they are threatening to me, but because they are unsound products built & promoted by people who are fundamentally sociopathic.

If I am to mourn, I can mourn the unveiling of deep ethical lapses across the entire tech industry. They were clearly there already, we just didn't realize that if you were to put any random assemblage of techies into a room, a decent handful of them are sadly unethical people lacking a moral compass. We know that now. They love LLMs, because they love power and they dislike having to forgo perceived "utility" by recognizing the importance of caring for others in a community.

While they do their utmost to demolish craft & artistry & tradition, I will be doing my utmost to preserve & defend all of those things. I am no stranger to boycotts, and I certainly don't suffer from FOMO. And I'm thankful I know a whole lot of people who feel much as I do.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#158

Post by bmd1905 »

g-b-r wrote: post #137
CharlieDigital wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of reviews is that the process of reviews is a feedback cycle where we can identify where our docs are short. We then immediately update the docs to reflect the correction. Over enough time, this gap closes and the need for reviews goes down. This is what I've noticed as we've continued to improve the docs: PRs have stabilized. Mid-level devs that just months ago were producing highly variant levels of qual…

> The objective is that at some point, there will be enough docs and improved models that the need for human reviews decreases while quality of code reaches a steady state that is more consistent than any human team of varying skill level could produce There will never be a point when human reviews will be less needed; you're doomed to ship something horribly insecure at some point, if you ever remove them; please do…

[dead]

Re: Grief and the AI split

#159

Post by antonvs »

epolanski wrote: post #71

There's no divide. Brilliant engineers, among the best software craftsmen out there are using AI daily and speeding up their processes. The author of Redis, antirez, stated a month ago he spent 2 weeks on Redis tinkering with LLMs...and it was just design phase, not a single line of code was authored. The ability to interrogate LLMs and have them criticize his ideas and edge cases sped up his process by month. He als…

Yeah. We’re seeing a lot of posts from people dealing with their emotions about AI, and trying to rationalize those emotions. Blaming a straw-manned group of other people who supposedly don’t share some quality the author values is an easy way to do that rationalization. The reductively binary classification is a sign that they’re indulging in something other than a serious analysis.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#160

Post by simonw »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #153
adriand wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel zero sense of sadness about how things used to be. I feel like the change that sucked the most was when software engineering went from something that nerds did because they were passionate about programming, to techbros who were just in it for the money. We lost the idealism of the web a long time ago and the current swamp with apex reptiles like Zuckerberg is what we have now. It became all about the bottom l…

I see developers talking about this idea of intense and unimaginable excitement about AI. It seems orgasmic for them, like something the hardest drugs couldn't fulfill them. I find it very strange. What exactly is so exciting? I'm not disagreeing but when you say "opportunities I'm racing towards," what does that mean? This idea of "racing towards" sounds so frenetic, I struggle to know what that could mean? What I s…

Getting a 53% performance boost on a 20+ year old codebase by running a bunch of experiments is pretty exciting to me: https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/pull/2056
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