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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#221

Post by wiseowise »

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…

> and a major goal of every single good programmer I've known has been to make themselves obsolete.

I’ve always heard this mantra when coders were thinking they’re untouchable, not so much now.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#222

Post by simianwords »

wiseowise wrote: post #220
simianwords wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

this is a category error that i specifically called out in my comment.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#223

Post by simianwords »

wiseowise wrote: post #219
simianwords wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

at least where i have worked, you need to identify the context. certain projects require good readable code and certain projects require you to iterate fast and explore.

in my experience very few projects were serious enough that required such scrutiny in code.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#224

Post by wiseowise »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #168
PaulHoule wrote: post #23

You can use gen AI entirely in the spirit of craft. For instance if you need to consume, implement or extend some open source software you can load it up in an agent IDE and ask “How do I?” questions or “how is it that?” questions that put you on a firm footing.

You don't need AI for this, we've had search engines and good online resources for decades

False. Have you even used google in the last 6 years or so? The results are so bad that I stopped using it altogether. It pops up sometimes when I mistype something in a search bar, but that’s it.

And don’t make me laugh about “good online resources”. SO went downhill and is just a graveyard at this point where everything is frozen in time. It has some good discussions (that LLMs ingested), but that’s it.

You can hate LLMs all you want, but they’re godsend for interactive discussion with the material.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#225

Post by wiseowise »

simianwords wrote: post #194

The split is about people who care about the commerce behind software development vs people who care about the craft. Commerce camp understands tradeoffs needed in a competitive environment. Cutting corners where possible, not being dogmatic about unit tests and clean code an so on. If you notice - the craft people rarely think about commerce because coding is an artistic expression.

Your generalization are as useful as me saying that people in the first camp are just sloppy workers who dump their subpar code on others in hope that they’ll never need to touch it again.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#226

Post by Gud »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #210

The real split is between people that believe technological progress is good by itself and by the law of nature it always makes life better and easier, and people that know the history and know that stuff like 8 hours workday wasn't spat out of steam machine - it had to be fought for through political struggle, because actual "natural" consequence of increased productivity was increase in workload.

The real split is between the capital owners, who live on our labour, typically through inheritance of a piece of paper that says they own a percentage of what I make.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#227

Post by wiseowise »

cableshaft wrote: post #216
vaylian wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 fe…

> 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.

Seems like a nightmare.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#228

Post by jigglypuff-mab »

This resonates. I've noticed my own relationship with coding shifting in ways I didn't expect.

The grief isn't really about losing the craft—it's about losing the context where that craft made sense. When I started, "good code" meant something specific: elegant abstractions, clever patterns, the kind of stuff you'd show off in a code review. Now? The best code might be the prompt that gets an agent to write 500 lines of solid boilerplate in 30 seconds.

What's weird is I'm not even sad about it. I'm more... untethered? Like the identity I built around "being a good programmer" is dissolving, and underneath there's just... someone who likes making things work.

Maybe that's the real split: people who tied their identity to how they worked vs. people who tied it to what they built.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#229

Post by Garlef »

I like both worlds: Tinkering and vibe coding.

My shift in perspective is really: Not all code deserves to be hand-crafted. Some stuff can be wonky as long as it does it's job.

(And I think the wonkyness will reduce in vibe-coding as harnesses improve)

Re: Grief and the AI split

#230

Post by FuckButtons »

simianwords wrote: post #223
wiseowise wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

at least where i have worked, you need to identify the context. certain projects require good readable code and certain projects require you to iterate fast and explore. in my experience very few projects were serious enough that required such scrutiny in code.

Sounds like you’ve never had a prototype become foundational infrastructure before, or dealt with someone else’s.
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