161–170 of 245 posts
This is hilarious and insane and amazing.
I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impress…
I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impress…
I'm developing concern for Steve. He's been a well known developer and writer in the industry for years now (See his popular 'Google Platforms Rant' essay from years ago) [0]. Now, Yegge's writing tilts towards the grandoise... see his writing when joining Grab [1] and Sourcegraph [2] respectively versus how things actually played out. I prefer optimism and I'm not anti AI by any means, but given his observed behavio…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> raw coding is now a solved problem Surely this was solved with fortran. What changed? I think most people just don't know what program they want.
You no longer have to be very specific about syntax. There's now an AI that can translate your idea into whatever language you want. Previously, if you had an idea of what the program needed to do, you needed to learn a new language. This is so hard that we use language itself as a metaphor: It's hard to learn a new language, only a few people can translate from French to English, for example. Likewise, few people ca…
Reactionarily? Sure. Maybe AI has some role to play there. Maybe you can ask the chatbot to modify settings.
I am no fan of chatbots. But i do have empathy for the people responsible for them when their users start complaining that programs don't do what they want, despite the chatbots delivering precisely the code demanded.
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If you give every idiot a worldwide heard voice, you will hear every idiot from the whole world. If you give every idiot a tool to make programs, you will see a lot of programs made by idiots.
Steve Yegge is not an idiot or a bad programmer. Possibly just hypomanic at most. And a good, entertaining writer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge Gas Town is ridiculous and I had to uninstall Beads after seeing it only confuse my agents, but he's not completely insane or a moron. There may be some kernels of good ideas inside of Gas Town which could be extracted out into a better system.
I don't think he's an idiot, there are almost no actual idiots here on HN in my opinion and they don't write such articles or make systems like Steve Yegge. I'm only commenting about giving more tools to idiots. Even tools made by geniuses will give you idiotic results when used by actual idiots, but a lot of smart people want to lower barriers of entry so that idiots can use more tools. And there are a lot of idiots who were inactive just because they didn't have the tools. Famous quote from a famous Polish essayist/futurist Stanisław Lem: "I didn't know there are so many idiots in this world until I got internet".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You no longer have to be very specific about syntax. There's now an AI that can translate your idea into whatever language you want. Previously, if you had an idea of what the program needed to do, you needed to learn a new language. This is so hard that we use language itself as a metaphor: It's hard to learn a new language, only a few people can translate from French to English, for example. Likewise, few people ca…
The hard part of software development is equivalent to the hard part of engineering: Anyone can draw a sketch of what a house should look like. But designing a house that is safe, conforms to building regulations, and which wouldn't be uncomfortable to live in (for example, poor choice of heat insulation for the local climate) is the stuff people train on. Not the sketching part. It's the same for software developmen…
Sure, but now I need to be fluent in prompt-lang and the underlying programming language if you want me to be confident in the output (and you probably do, right?)
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the Wright brothers sold me a subscription to a supersonic jet and I've got a bundle of matchsticks and some canvas.
On the other hand, flight is ubiquitous and has changed everything.
Which is to say, the commercial aviation industry could permanently collapse tomorrow and it would have only a marginal impact on most people's lives, who would just replace planes with train, car, or boat travel. The lesson here is that even if normal people experience some tangential beneficial effects from LLMs, their most enduring legacy will likely be to entrench authority and cement the existing power structures.
Gas Town wasn't satire?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hard part of software development is equivalent to the hard part of engineering: Anyone can draw a sketch of what a house should look like. But designing a house that is safe, conforms to building regulations, and which wouldn't be uncomfortable to live in (for example, poor choice of heat insulation for the local climate) is the stuff people train on. Not the sketching part. It's the same for software developmen…
> Programming is just shifting to a language that looks more like Jira tickets than source code. Sure, but now I need to be fluent in prompt-lang and the underlying programming language if you want me to be confident in the output (and you probably do, right?)
You save all the time that was wasted forcing the language into the shape you intended. A lot of trivial little things ate up time, until AI came along. The big things, well, you still need to understand them.