Really the distinction is between those that can see the bigger picture, and those that only see what is in front of them. Of course the immediate gratification of LLMs appeal to the latter, whereas the former is all too aware of the systemic downside of such automated content generation.
Grief and the AI split
251–260 of 404 posts
Re: Grief and the AI split
#252This 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…
"The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable."
Definitely not. Based on my observations from a career as an open source and agency developer it was obvious at a glance which of these camps any given developer lived in by their code quality. With few exceptions make-it-go types tended to produce brittle, hacky, short-sighted work that had a tendency to produce as many or more problems than it solved, and on more than one occasion I've seen developers of this stripe lose commit access to FOSS projects as a result of the low quality of their contributions.
"nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful."
Compared to trying to get stuff accomplished in C Perl was an absolute dream to work with and many devs I knew gravitated to web development specifically for their love of the added flexibility and expressiveness that Perl gave them compared to other commonly used languages at the time. Fortunately for us all language design and tooling progressed.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#253Before AI, as a head of product (who has always written code), I did this thing where when I was thinking through an idea or a product direction, I built the solution three or four times before I found the shape and direction that I liked. And once I liked it, I put it on a roadmap for one or more of my teams to execute on.
Candidly saying before AI is a little disingenuous, because since AI has gotten better in the last year at coding, my workflow has gone back to exactly what it was when I had a 40-person team reporting to me.
I still go through three, four iterations before a final direction is picked. It still takes me two, three weeks to think through an idea. Three things have changed.
1. When I think of a possible direction, a new version gets spun up within minutes to a couple of hours, usually in a single shot. 2. I can work through more big ideas which require some amount of coding-based ideation than I could previously. 3. And when a direction is decided on, the idea comes in to deliver the outcomes at a much quicker pace. Previously, it could have been 1 month of ideation + 2-8 sprints, now it's 2-4 weeks of ideation and 1-2 days to final delivery.
All in all, while I can see where the author is coming from, the grief has been different for me.
I've had a lot of good developers, product managers, product owners, and designers that have had the privilege of helping develop their skills in the past. That was the necessity of ensuring that we were developing talent who would then go on to produce good work on our teams.
And I'm at a stage now where a three-person team that I have can produce more than the 40 could, and I am likely never going to need to develop the skills the way I used to. The loss is not from coding, I thoroughly enjoy how that's evolved. The loss is from the white space around it.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#254The optimal amount of generative AI in the world is zero. There are three possible scenarios, all of them bad:
1. Weaker than expected AI.
Great Depression 2.0. Widespread poverty and suffering as the enormous investments already made fail to pay off.
2. AI works as expected.
Dystopia. A few trillionaires gain absolute control of the entire world, and everyone else is enslaved or killed.
3. Stronger than excepted AI.
Hard take-off singularity scenario. Extinction of all biological life.
It's probably hopeless to resist at this point, but we should at least try.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is a category error that i specifically called out in my comment.
Where? > 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. Here? Most of those that I’ve listed IS boring enterprise code. Unless we’re taking medical/military grade.
fair, you have presented specific niche where the ~quality~ correctness is important in enterprise - not just libraries.
but most people aren't writing code in those places. its usually CRUD, advertisement, startups, ecommerce.
also there are two things going on here:
- quality of code
- correctness of code
in serious reusable libraries and opensource tools, quality of code matters. the interfaces, redundancy etc.
but that's not exactly equal to correctness. one can prioritise correctness without dogmatism in craft like clean code etc.
in most of these commercial contexts like ecommerce, ads - you don't need the dogmatism that the craft camp brings. that's the category error.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#256Earlier 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? 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
For me specifically it means two products, one that is something I have been working on for a long time, well before the Claude Code era, and another that is more of a passion project in the music space. Both have been vastly accelerated by these tools. The reason I say “racing” is because I suspect there are competitors in both spaces who are also making great progress because of these tools, so I feel this intense pressure to get to launch day, especially for the first project.
And yes it is very frenetic, and it’s certainly taking a toll on me. I’m self-employed, with a family to support, and I’m deeply worried about where this is all going, which is also fuelling this intense drive.
A few years ago I felt secure in my expertise and confident of my economic future. Not any more. In all honesty, I would happily trade the fear and excitement I feel now for the confidence and contentment I felt then. I certainly slept better. But that’s not the world we live in. I don’t know if my attempts to create a more secure future will work, but at least I will be able to say I tried as hard as I was able.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
you can always change it later. this is exactly the dogmatism i'm speaking about - you need to prioritise pushing things. the clean up can come later.
ironically it is your camp that advices to not use microservices but start with monolith. that's what i'm suggesting here.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all. Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep hu…
I, for one, am looking forward to me and a band of my closest friends and family raiding heavily fortified data centers guarded by Boston Dynamics robot dogs to steal clean drinking water for our underground village. We might even hit a caravan of autonomous trucks carrying cricket protein powder in the same night.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#259The 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.
Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News
Perhaps one of the secondary effects of AI replacing developers will be mobilising a group of smart, motivated people to the left
(It's always interesting to think of the secondary effects which kick in past a certain point of growth. High-multiple stock valuations often fail to take these into account. For the East India Company, for example — your company can keep growing until it's the size of a country. But suddenly other countries treat you as a foreign power rather than a pet.)
Re: Grief and the AI split
#260I’ve heard this thesis a lot, but it’s almost always from the result chasers. It doesn’t resonate with me because I am a result chaser. I like woodworking because I like building something that never existed before. I don’t mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me out. I don’t care about the process, I care about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the result. I don’t care about the beauty of…
> I like woodworking because I like building something that never existed before. I don’t mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me out. I don’t care about the process, I care about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the result. Why not outsource it to someone else? That way you do none of the work.
Because delegating doesn’t give me the level of control I want, the kind of people with the quality standards and capabilities I have are extremely expensive, and I like creating things.
If I had access to a factory of apprentices that I had total control of, I probably would outsource more of it. So on the surface it seems like I’d love AI, but these particular apprentices aren’t up to my standards, there are severe limitations on how much I can train them, and I get no joy from teaching them.