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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#211

Post by cableshaft »

g-b-r wrote: post #108
hungryhobbit wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. There's always been two camps ... on everything! Emacs vs. vi. Command-line editor vs. IDE. IntelliJ vs. VS Code. I could do like twenty more of these: dev teams have always split on technology choices. But, all of those were rational separations. Emacs and vi, IntelliJ and VS Code ... they're all viable options, so they boil down to subjective preference. By definition, anything subjective will…

A huge portion of the pro-AI crowd is motivated by irrational hype and delusion. LLMs are not a tool like an editor or an IDE, they make up code in an unpredictable way; I can't see how anyone who enjoyed software development could like that.

Pretty much anyone who's not you, will make code in an unpredictable way. I review other people's code and I go 'really, you decided to do it that way?' quite often, especially with coders with less years of experience than me.

That's kind of how this is starting to feel to me, like I'm turning more into a project manager that has to review code from a team of juniors, when it comes to A.I. Although those juniors are now starting to show that they're more capable than even I am, especially when it comes to speed.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#212

Post by bandrami »

g-b-r wrote: post #108
hungryhobbit wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. There's always been two camps ... on everything! Emacs vs. vi. Command-line editor vs. IDE. IntelliJ vs. VS Code. I could do like twenty more of these: dev teams have always split on technology choices. But, all of those were rational separations. Emacs and vi, IntelliJ and VS Code ... they're all viable options, so they boil down to subjective preference. By definition, anything subjective will…

A huge portion of the pro-AI crowd is motivated by irrational hype and delusion. LLMs are not a tool like an editor or an IDE, they make up code in an unpredictable way; I can't see how anyone who enjoyed software development could like that.

Certainly those of us who maintain and administer it don't like that

Re: Grief and the AI split

#213

Post by wiseowise »

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…

> What exactly is so exciting?

Money, opportunity, status. It is all status games. Think of it as a nuclear war on old order and new players trying to take the niche. Or maybe commies killing whites and taking over Russia?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#214

Post by sonofhans »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #98
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…

> nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful. To this day I remember being delighted by Perl on a regular basis. I wasn't concerned with the aesthetics of it, though I was aware it was considered inscrutable and that I could read & write it filled me with pride. So yea, programming Perl was delightful.

Yes, this is what I thought, too. I did program in Perl because it was beautiful. No other computer language compares so favorably with human language, including in its ambiguity. Not everyone considers this a good feature :)

Re: Grief and the AI split

#215

Post by wiseowise »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #53
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 strongly disagree. There's always been two camps ... on everything! Emacs vs. vi. Command-line editor vs. IDE. IntelliJ vs. VS Code. I could do like twenty more of these: dev teams have always split on technology choices. But, all of those were rational separations. Emacs and vi, IntelliJ and VS Code ... they're all viable options, so they boil down to subjective preference. By definition, anything subjective will…

[dead]

Re: Grief and the AI split

#216

Post by cableshaft »

vaylian wrote: post #191
koenschipper wrote: post #187

I think I'm in the middle, at first I was definitely against using any AI because I loved the craft. But over the past 12-18 months I've been using it more and more. I still love to code just by hand for an fun afternoon. But in the long-term, I think you are going to be left behind if you refuse to use AI at all.

"Left behind" in terms of speed or are there other aspects that people are missing out on?

Speed has a lot to do with it, yeah.

A.I. is now often doing in 5-10 minutes what would take me hours on my own for any given task (well based on the last couple of weeks at least, I wasn't doing much agent based A.I. coding before that).

I was pretty much having a real-time conversation with my superiors, showing them updates just a couple of minutes after they suggested them, for a feature the other day, getting feedback on how something should look.

Something that would have taken me an hour or more each time they wanted a change or something new added.

Now that cuts both ways, as it started to seem like they were expecting that to be the new normal and I started to feel like I had to keep doing that or make it seem like I'm not actually working. And it gets exhausting keeping up that pace, and I started worrying when anything did take me extra time.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#217

Post by XenophileJKO »

bandrami wrote: post #199
allenu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the real divide is over quality and standards. I think there are multiple dimensions that people fall on regarding the issue and it's leading to a divide based on where everyone falls on those dimensions. Quality and standards are probably in there but I think risk-tolerance/aversion could be behind some how you look at quality and standards. If you're high on risk-taking, you might be more likely to forego…

This. My aversion to LLMs is much more that I have low risk tolerance and the tails of the distribution are not well-known at this point. I'm more than happy to let others step on the land mines for me and see if there's better understanding in a year or two.

I think there is more to it than that.

I am a high quality/craftsmanship person. I like coding and puzzling. I am highly skilled in functional leaning object oriented deconstruction and systems design. I'm also pretty risk averse.

I also have always believed that you should always be "sharpening your axe". For things like Java delelopment or things where I couldn't use a concise syntax would make extensive use of dynamic templating in my IDE. Want a builder pattern, bam, auto-generated.

Now when LLMs came out they really took this to another level. I'm still working on the problems.. even when I'm not writing the lines of code. I'm decomposing the problems.. I'm looking at (or now debating with the AI) what is the best algorithm for something.

It is incredibly powerful.. and I still care about the structure.. I still care about the "flow" of the code.. how the seams line up. I still care about how extensible and flexible it is for extension (based on where I think the business or problem is going).

At the same time.. I definately can tell you, I don't like migrating projects from Tensorflow v.X to Tenserflow v.Y.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#218

Post by FabianCarbonara »

For me AI unlocked building things I just couldn't before. My creativity and ingenuity now have an outlet that wasn't possible without agentic coding tools. That's genuinely exciting. But I also keep wondering: how long until the level of abstraction I'm working at now gets automated too?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#219

Post by wiseowise »

simianwords wrote: post #190
wiml wrote: post #114

I think the article misunderstands completely. "Craft" coders are chasing results too — we're just chasing results that last and that can be built upon. I've been in this game for a while, and a major goal of every single good programmer I've known has been to make themselves obsolete. Yes, I enjoyed meticulous hand crafted assembly, counting cycles and packing bits, but nobody had to talk me into using compilers. Ye…

You are repeating the same thing. You think having good maintainable good is important - more than the first camp. That does not mean you are correct. This mindset is useful only in serious reusable libraries and open source tools. Most enterprise code involves lots of exploring and fast iteration. Code quality doesn’t matter that much. No one else is going to see it. When the craft coders bring their ideology to thi…

> Code quality doesn’t matter that much. No one else is going to see it.

This is just false for anyone who has worked in the industry for any meaningful amount of time. Do you seriously never encountered a situation where a change was supposedly easy on the surface, but some stupid SoB before you wrote it so bad that you want to pull your hair out from trying to make it work without rewriting this crap codebase from scratch?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#220

Post by wiseowise »

simianwords wrote: post #196
suddenlybananas wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your target is the wrong target myself. Now what?

If more people think like you we won’t have jobs because company won’t make profit

If people think like you we won’t have jobs because everyone would fucking die when cars, MRI machines, nuclear power plans and ICBMs, airplanes, infra, payments start misbehaving. Now what?
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