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Believe the Checkbook

robertgreiner.com

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Re: Believe the Checkbook

#21

Post by skybrian »

RandallBrown wrote: post #7

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

I'm retired now, but I spent many hours writing and debugging code during my career. I believed that implementing features was what I was being paid to do. I was proud of fixing difficult bugs.

A shift to not writing code (which is apparently sometimes possible now) and managing AI agents instead is a pretty major industry change.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#22

Post by jgeada »

gowld wrote: post #11
RandallBrown wrote: post #7

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

I don't understand this thinking. How many hours per week did you spend coding on your most recent project? If you could do something else during that time, and the code still got written, what would you do? Or are you saying that you believe you can't get that code written without spending an equivalent amount of time describing your judgments?

All you did was changing the programming language from (say) Python to English. One is designed to be a programming language, with few ambiguities etc. The other is, well, English.

Speed of typing code is not all that different than the speed of typing English, even accounting for the volume expansion of English -> . And then, of course, there is the new extra cost of then reading and understanding whatever code the AI wrote.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#23

Post by layer8 »

gowld wrote: post #11
RandallBrown wrote: post #7

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

I don't understand this thinking. How many hours per week did you spend coding on your most recent project? If you could do something else during that time, and the code still got written, what would you do? Or are you saying that you believe you can't get that code written without spending an equivalent amount of time describing your judgments?

> Or are you saying that you believe you can't get that code written without spending an equivalent amount of time describing your judgments?

It’s sort of the opposite: You don’t get to the proper judgement without playing through the possibilities in your mind, part of which is accomplished by spending time coding.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#24

Post by SoftTalker »

0x3f wrote: post #17
drcode wrote: post #15

The bun acquisition is driven by current AI capabilities. This argument requires us to believe that AI will just asymptote and not get materially better. Five years from now, I don't think anyone will make these kinds of acquisitions anymore.

> This argument requires us to believe that AI will just asymptote and not get materially better. That's not what asymptote means. Presumably what you mean is the curve levelling off, which it already is.

This seems overly pedantic. The intended meaning is clear.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#25

Post by ryandrake »

kibwen wrote: post #14
gowld wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this thinking. How many hours per week did you spend coding on your most recent project? If you could do something else during that time, and the code still got written, what would you do? Or are you saying that you believe you can't get that code written without spending an equivalent amount of time describing your judgments?

"Writing code" is not the goal. The goal is to design a coherent logical system that achieves some goal. So the practice of programming is in thinking hard about what goal I want to achieve, then thinking about the sort of logical system that I could design that would allow me to verifiably achieve that goal, then actually banging out the code that implements the abstract logical system that I have in my head, then i…

The actual act of typing code into a text editor and building it could be the least interesting and least valuable part of software development. A developer who sees their job as "writing code" or a company leader who sees engineers' jobs as "writing code" is totally missing where the value is created.

Yes, there is artistry, craftsmanship, and "beautiful code" which shouldn't be overlooked. But I believe that beautiful code comes from solid ideas, and that ugly code comes from flawed ideas. So, as long as the (human-constructed) idea is good, the code (whether it is human-typed or AI-generated) should end up beautiful.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#26

Post by fwip »

zamadatix wrote: post #9

Something about the way the article sets up the conversation nags at me a bit - even though it concludes with statements and reasoning I generally agree quite well with. It sets out what it wants to argue clearly at the start: > Everyone’s heard the line: “AI will write all the code; engineering as you know it is finished... The Bun acquisition blows a hole in that story.” But what the article actually discusses and…

I mean, it smells an AI slop article, so it's hard to expect much coherence.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#27

Post by bigstrat2003 »

drcode wrote: post #15

The bun acquisition is driven by current AI capabilities. This argument requires us to believe that AI will just asymptote and not get materially better. Five years from now, I don't think anyone will make these kinds of acquisitions anymore.

> This argument requires us to believe that AI will just asymptote and not get materially better.

It hasn't gotten materially better in the last three years. Why would it do so in the next three or five years?

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#28

Post by faxmeyourcode »

While I agree with the premise of the article, even if it was a bit shallow, this claim made at the beginning is also still true:

> Everyone’s heard the line: “AI will write all the code; engineering as you know it is finished.”

Software engineering pre-LLMs will never, ever come back. Lots of folks are not understanding that. What we're doing at the end of 2025 looks so much different than what we were doing at the end of 2024. Engineering as we knew it a year or two ago will never return.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#29

Post by aaroninsf »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #10
RandallBrown wrote: post #7

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

I'll stare at a blank editor for an hour with three different solutions in my head that I could implement, and type nothing until a good enough one comes to mind that will save/avoid time and trouble down the road. That last solution is not best for any simple reason like algorithmic complexity or anything that can be scraped from web sites.

No shade on your skills, but for most problems, this is already false; the solutions have already been scraped.

All OSS has been ingested, and all the discussion in forum like this about it, and the personal blog posts and newsletters about it; and the bug tracking; and theh pull requests, and...

and training etc. is only going to get better and filtering out what is "best."

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