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The Programmer Identity Crisis

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Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#161

Post by mupuff1234 »

rpcope1 wrote: post #151
mupuff1234 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that the problem is with Git and not the users?

How dumbed down does everything need to be? Git has warts for sure, but this whole ideas guy no actual understanding of anything is how you get trainwrecks. There is no free lunch, and you're going to pay one way or another for not understanding the tools of the craft, and that not everything can be ridiculously simple.

But it's not that people don't grasp the concept of merge conflicts, it's just that the UX of git is bad.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#162

Post by lubujackson »

Etheryte wrote: post #89
strix_varius wrote: post #57

To me, the most salient point was this: > Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who cl…

In my opinion this is another case where people look at it as a technical problem when it's actually a people problem. If someone does it once, they get a stern message about it. If it happens twice, it gets rejected and sent to their manager. Regardless of how you authored a pull request, you are signing off on it with your name. If it's garbage, then you're responsible.

The solve is just rejecting the commit with a "clean this up" message as soon as you spot some BS. Trust is earned!

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#163

Post by bloppe »

Macha wrote: post #146
Etheryte wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion this is another case where people look at it as a technical problem when it's actually a people problem. If someone does it once, they get a stern message about it. If it happens twice, it gets rejected and sent to their manager. Regardless of how you authored a pull request, you are signing off on it with your name. If it's garbage, then you're responsible.

The problem is leadership buy in. The person throwing the LLM slop at github has great metrics when the leadership are looking at cursor usage, lines of code, PR numbers, while the person slowing down to actually read wtf the other people are submitting is now so drowning in slop that they have less time to produce on their own. So the execs look at it as the person complaining "not keeping up with the times".

If leadership is that inept, then this is likely only 1 of many problems they are creating for the organization. I would be looking for alternative employment ASAP.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#164

Post by muldvarp »

aeblyve wrote: post #115

This process has been affecting most of the world's workers for the past several centuries. Programming has received a special treatment for the last few decades, and it's understandable that HN users would jump to protect their life investment, but it need not. Hand-coding can continue, just like knitting co-exists with machine looms, but it need not ultimately maintain a grip on the software productive process. It…

I think there is only a very narrow band where LLMs are good enough at producing software that "hand-coding" is genuinely dead but at the same time bad enough that (expensive) humans still need to be paid to be in the loop.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#165

Post by codyb »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #161
rpcope1 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How dumbed down does everything need to be? Git has warts for sure, but this whole ideas guy no actual understanding of anything is how you get trainwrecks. There is no free lunch, and you're going to pay one way or another for not understanding the tools of the craft, and that not everything can be ridiculously simple.

But it's not that people don't grasp the concept of merge conflicts, it's just that the UX of git is bad.

It's pretty great if you understand how to do resets, interactive rebases, understand the differences between merges and rebases, keep your commit history fairly clean, and just work with the tool. I haven't had a problem with Git since I spent a day going through the git book something like 10 years ago.

Meanwhile this is in a discussion about tools which people spend incalculable amounts of hours tuning, for reference. The number of articles on Hacker News about how people have tuned their LLM setups is... grand to say the least.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#166

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #153
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should get a clear explanation of the problem and of the team expectations the first time it happens. If it happens a second time? A stern talk from their manager. A third time? PIP or fired. Let your manager be the bad guy. That's part of what they're for. Your manager won't do that? Then your team is broken in a way you can't fix. Appeal to their manager, first, and if that fails put your resume on the street.

> Let your manager be the bad guy. That's part of what they're for. > Your manager won't do that? Then your team is broken in a way you can't fix. If you apply this standard, then most teams are broken.

"A big enough system is always failing somewhere" - can't remember who said it

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#167

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #107
jay_kyburz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A closer analogy would be a chef who chooses to have a robot cut his tomatoes. If the robot did it perfect every time I'm sure he would use the robot. If the robot mushed the tomatoes some of the time, would he spend time carefully inspecting the tomatoes? or would he just cut them himself?

Even if the robot did it perfectly, you'd still have posts like these lamenting the loss of the craft of cutting tomatoes. And they're not wrong! I guess I don't understand posts like this IF you think you can do it better without LLMs. I mean, if using AI makes you miserable because you love the craft of programming, AND you think using AI is a net loss, then just...don't use it? But I think the problem here that al…

There are chefs but they are not us. Though it will upset many to hear it, what we are is fast food workers, assembling and reheating prepackaged stuff provided to us. Now a machine threatens to do the assembling and reheating for us, better and faster than we on average do.

The chefs coming up with recipes and food scientists doing the pre-packaging will do fine and are still needed. The people making the fast food machine will also do well for themselves. The rest of us fast food workers, well, not so much...

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#168

Post by casey2 »

Programmer isn't a real thing, all these classes of people are made up. The biggesdt difference between an iPad Toddler and Dijkstra is that the toddler is much more efficient at programming.

Sure you can discover things that aren't intuitively obvious and these things may be useful, but that's more scientist than anything to do with programming. programming + science = computer science programming + engineering = software engineering programming + iPad = interactive computing programming + AI = vibe coding Don't equate programming with software engineering when they are clearly two distinct things. This article would more accurately be called the software engineers' identity crisis. Maybe some hobby engineers (programming + craft) might also be feeling this depending on how many external tools they already rely on. What's really shocking is how many software engineers claim to put in Herculean effort in their code, but ship it on top (or adjacent if you have an API) of "platforms" that could scarcely be less predictable. These platforms have to work very hard to build trust, but it's all meaningless cause users are locked in anyway. When user abuse is rampant people are going to look for deus ex machina and some slimy guy will be there to sell it to them.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#169

Post by bloppe »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #148
strix_varius wrote: post #57

To me, the most salient point was this: > Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who cl…

> All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.” Now I don't do code reviews in large teams anymore, but if I did and something like that happened, I'd allow it exactly once, otherwise I'd try to get the person fired. Barring that, I'd probably leave, as that sounds like a horrible experience.

Ya, there's not much you can do when leadership is so terrible. If this kind of workflow is genuinely blessed by management, I would just start using Claude for code reviews too. Then when things break and people want to point fingers at the code reviewer, I'd direct them to Claude. If it's good enough to write code without scrutiny, it's good enough to review code without scrutiny.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#170

Post by muldvarp »

RamtinJ95 wrote: post #135
jimbokun wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of few truer identity crises than having a craft you have spent years honing and perfecting automated away.

I fully agree with that statement, but I dont agree with the premise that, that is whats happening currently.

It's the explicitly stated goal of several of the largest companies on the planet which put up a lot of money to try to reach that goal. And the progress over the past few years has been stunning.
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