Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Programmer Identity Crisis

hojberg.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 317 posts

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#171

Post by oblio »

Ekaros wrote: post #92
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.

Maybe the process should have actual two stage pull requests. First stage is you have to comment the request and show some test cases against it. And only then next person has to take a look. Not sure if such flow is even possible with current tools.

Build the PR and run tests against it. Supported by all major CI/CD tools.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#172

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

bloppe wrote: post #163
Macha wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the issue isn't recognizing malign influence within your current organization... it's an issue throughout the entire industry, and I think what we're all afraid of is that it's becoming more inevitable every day, because we're not the ones who have the final say. the luddites essentially failed, after all, because the wider world was not and is not ready for a discussion about quality versus profit.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#173

Post by bloppe »

debo_ wrote: post #68

As an aside, I've been using copilot code review before handing off any of my code to colleagues. It's a bit pedantic, but it generally catches all the most stupid things I've done so that the final code review tends to be pretty smooth. I hate to suggest that the fix to LLM slop is more LLMs, but in this case it's working for me. My coworkers also seem to appreciate the gesture.

I agree that LLMs are great for a cursory review, but crucially, when you ask copilot to review your code, you actually read and think about everything copilot tells you in the response. The biggest issues arise because people will blindly submit AI-generated code without reading or thinking about it.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#174

Post by jay_kyburz »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #167
senordevnyc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You'll be doing fine too, just doing other work.

And you can see it coming so there is plenty of time to prepare.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#175

Post by svat »

kazinator wrote: post #22
almosthere wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's comical too because the only reason AI uses emdashes is because it was so common before AI.

It's utterly uncommon in the kind of casual writing for which people are using AI, that's why it got noticed. Social media posts, blogs, ... AI almost certainly picked it up mainly from typeset documents, like PDF papers. It's also possible that some models have a tokenizing rule for recognizing faked-out em-dashes made of hyphens and turning them into real em-dash tokens.

Not uncommon even on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722

On my own (long abandoned) blog, about 20% of (public) posts seem to contain an em dash: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/?s=%E2%80%94 (going by 4 pages of search results for the em dash vs 21 pages in total).

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#176

Post by psunavy03 »

gdulli wrote: post #140
psunavy03 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's sillier is people associating em-dashes with AI slop specifically because they are unsophisticated enough never to have learned how to use them as part of their writing, and assuming everyone else must be as poor of a writer as they are. It's the literary equivalent of thinking someone must be a "hacker" because they have a Bash terminal open.

You're overthinking it. LLMs exploded the prevalence of em-dashes. That doesn't mean you should assume any instance of an em-dash means LLM content, but it's a reasonable heuristic at the moment.

> That doesn't mean you should assume any instance of an em-dash means LLM content

No, it doesn't. But people are putting that out there, people are getting accused of using AI because they know how to use em dashes properly, and this is dumb.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#177

Post by nothrabannosir »

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…

> This process has been affecting most of the world's workers for the past several centuries.

It has also been responsible for predicting revolutions which never failed to materialize. 3D printing would make some kind of manufacturing obsolete, computers would make about half the world's jobs obsolete, etc etc.

Hand coding can be the knitting to the loom, or it can be industrialized plastic injection molding to 3D printing. How do you know? That distinction is not a detail--it's the whole point.

It's survivorship bias to only look at horses, cars, calculators, and whatever other real job market shifting technologies occurred in the past and assume that's how it always happens. You have to include all predictions which never panned out.

As human beings we just tend no to do that.

[EDIT: this being Pedantry News let me get ahead of an inevitable reply: 3D printing is used industrially, and it does have tremendous value. It enabled new ways of working, it grew the economy, and in some cases yes it even replaced processes which used to depend on injection molding. But by and large, the original predictions of "out with the old, in with the new" did not pan out. It was not the automobile to the horse and buggy. It was mostly additive, complementary, and turned out to have different use cases. That's the distinction.]

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#178

Post by crazygringo »

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.

This a million times. If you do this three times, that's grounds for firing. You're literally not doing your job and lying that you are.

It's bizarre to me that people want to blame LLMs instead of the employees themselves.

(With open source projects and slop pull requests, it's another story of course.)

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#179

Post by yodsanklai »

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.”

After you made your colleagues upset submitting crappy code for review, you start to pay attention.

> LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive,

Unless you noticed that code has to be removed, and you instruct the LLM to do so.

I don't think LLMs really change the dynamics here. "Good programmers" will still submit good code, easy for their colleagues to review, whether it was written with the help of an LLM or not.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#180

Post by aeblyve »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #177
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…

> This process has been affecting most of the world's workers for the past several centuries. It has also been responsible for predicting revolutions which never failed to materialize. 3D printing would make some kind of manufacturing obsolete, computers would make about half the world's jobs obsolete, etc etc. Hand coding can be the knitting to the loom, or it can be industrialized plastic injection molding to 3D pr…

> Hand coding can be the knitting to the loom, or it can be industrialized plastic injection molding to 3D printing. How do you know? That distinction is not a detail--it's the whole point.

One could have made a reasonable remark in the past about how injection molding is dramatically faster than 3D printing (it applies material everywhere, all at once), scales better for large parts, et cetera. This isn't really true for what I'm calling hand-coding.

Obviously nothing about the future can be known for certain... but there are obvious trends that need not stop at software engineering.

Post reply on HN