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Fuck it, make it anyway

joelotter.com

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Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#221

Post by jvanderbot »

cmiles74 wrote: post #127
imdsm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. The feeling I get is that…

I’m sure there is some of that, people looking back at years of learning a skill, maybe even turning it into a productive career, and being upset that anyone can pay for an LLM tool and get output they believe is comparable. In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doin…

Everyone addresses this differently, but for me, I always grated at people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity.

It feels to me like suffering through programming built that knowledge, and so that knowledge was an indicator of taste and experience and persistence, but then it became cosplayed as people sought the knowledge itself in "patterns", or "features" rather than the experience of just building things.

The LLM thing just cuts the same way. It's probably not using your favorite pattern or language feature, or maybe it automatically is, but either way your annoyance is about it stems from the quality signals being discounted: You can't really assert experience through that kind of knowledge anymore if people are providing value while stepping around your hard-won lessons and using your favorite pattern or feature through LLMs. You saw this in the linkedin posts early on: All the programming influencers asserted their value by saying they wrote better quality code than the code the LLM wrote.

This is worst for junior devs. Making a clean, well factored codebase as a portfolio project was a near-instant win on the job market because it meant this person either suffered like you did, or they listened to seniors and walked the walk. That signal is absolutely gone now.

I think that dilution of signal explains almost all of the jr hiring freeze, actually: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-signalling.html

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#222

Post by DidntUseIt »

DidntUseIt wrote: post #92

Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a…

[flagged]

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#223

Post by whstl »

socalgal2 wrote: post #128
whstl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once told me "Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book." People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI. There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete". But that was the reality before, with the str…

I just see it as tool. Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense. I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back. Construction w…

I think the IK comment is interesting.

Tedious animation is something that animators I worked with also hated doing, and they were always after tools to accelerate their workflow, so they could focus on the high-level decisions.

I've also used and built lots of refactoring tools. I've been fanatic about them for decades.

Using LLMs for that isn't that different, maybe it was a bit less deterministic before, but lately... holy shit, they've become good at it.

But the "animation is dead" discussion would still bother me if I was an animator.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#224

Post by DidntUseIt »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #174
eklavya wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how I read it at all. Why do you think the latter group likes free stuff made for them?

I think it's more like the latter group likes the dopamine hit brought on my getting attention from release stuff.

I never even said what the product is, it's for my job.

Maybe you get a dopamine hit from comments like that.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#225

Post by noir_lord »

Tade0 wrote: post #184

I use LLMs at work. I'm expected to and paid to show up and do that, so I do it. But I refuse to leave understanding the codebase to machines. I did that the other day as an exception and fortunately my reviewer picked up on things which weren't exactly broken - just redundant and inelegant - e.g. two variables which easily could have been one, passed between several methods. We have an automatic reviewer as well and…

Same boat, same reasons.

Skills not exercised degrade as well, if you don't actually write code then your skill at reading and interpretting it degrades, you just become a "looks good" step.

In theory if disciplined enough you could resist that but our brains seem to take the lazy path whenever it is offered, thinking hard and focussing are a skill and one I don't feel is been exercised when using AI.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#226

Post by beej71 »

ricardobayes wrote: post #205
CuriouslyC wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CNC machine will beat a whittler every time. If a craft is only about technical execution, AI is going to own it. The crafts that are safe are the ones that elicit/depend upon a complex human response that's not easily predictable from its parts.

Looks like teaching is about to become the "it" profession and might become insanely competitive.

That's a definite maybe. You can bet there's a general movement afoot to replace teachers with AI because it's cheaper and always available, etc. Also, measuring the human advantage is difficult.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#227

Post by ryandrake »

01100011 wrote: post #161
timcobb wrote: post #91

My first thought after reading this was, good for this person to have only been broken, or nearly broken, I guess, by society finally now. I was broken long before AI. I learned that no one was interested in my doodads even before generative AI. People were interested in all this other stuff, like ROI, how much money things make, how practical something is, etc. "No one cares about the code" was beat into me 10-20 ye…

Hah, I think I agree with this, but from a cynical, dark perspective. I'm an old systems programmer (embedded, c/c++, linux, etc) with an EE background (but not one of them if you know what I mean. I enjoyed software and appreciate the art). But early on I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project. If you want that, great, go write code on your own time(as many of us do!). B…

> I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project.

The minute I also realized this, I moved out of software development into a different function. Pooping out lines of ugly code full of compromises was just not my thing. If I was still coding for work when AI came around, that would have definitely pushed me out of the career.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#228

Post by ofjcihen »

coldtea wrote: post #121
DidntUseIt wrote: post #92

Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a…

[flagged]

3 responses, all from green accounts basically hurling the same vitriol at you.

Has someone gone and made 3 accounts to make it seem like their take is more popular?

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#229

Post by bakugo »

9dev wrote: post #28
bob1029 wrote: post #7

> I’ve spent years learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that might have been a waste of time? Generative AI is really awful at building games that are fun to play. It is a masterclass at reproducing Minecraft clones and shiny HDRP demo scenes in one shot. But, unless you are a total novice at game dev, you should be able to see through these cheap tricks for what they are. 99% of the…

Are you saying Assassin's Creed 87 or Far Cry 32 aren't cheap clones of its own previous incarnations? The gaming industry is, to a huge extent, just an optimisation problem for MBAs running the major publishers. Most gamers don't really value creativity, but easy rewards and familiar tropes in eternal regurgitation. AI is going to be able to pump out a never-ending stream to satisfy that market rather sooner than la…

> Are you saying Assassin's Creed 87 or Far Cry 32 aren't cheap clones of its own previous incarnations?

If your goal was to prove that people don't care about how derivative games are, I think you picked some pretty bad examples, because Ubisoft is not in a good place right now. And I'd argue that the main reason behind it is precisely that lack of originality.

Hell, even the biggest titans of the "release the same game every year" part of the industry, such as Call of Duty, have been stumbling in recent years due to people inevitably getting bored of playing derivative slop made by people who don't understand what made the originals good, and can only mindlessly copy it over and over.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#230

Post by whstl »

DidntUseIt wrote: post #186
embedding-shape wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don…

Think we’re saying the same thing. I very actively work using LLMs (no “agentic” stuff) and agree with you - they are only really worth tasking out tedium to. But a lot of - say a DM feature - is tedium. Something simple like adding reactions, adding read receipts. It’s not hard at all. The LLM easily excels at the task and yet I didn’t have to do it. There are 1000s of those tasks. Handling file uploads, filling out…

> There are 1000s of those tasks.

Yep.

Plenty of products attacked this tedium from different angles, from Ruby and Rails to Supabase. And half of NPM. Heck, more than half.

LLMs are doing it a bit better, IMO. I don't have to rewrite the app in or install to take advantage of it.

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