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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#261

Post by dale_glass »

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…

> The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful.

As an old school Perl coder, not true. Lots of people had a taste for Perl. TIMTOWTDI was sold as an actual advantage.

Perl caters to things almost nobody else does, like the way you have a negative "if" in "unless" and placing conditions after the code. So you can do things like:

    frobnicate() unless ($skip_frobnicating);
Which is sure, identical function-wise to:

     if (!$skip_frobnicating) frobnicate();
But is arguably a bit nicer to read. The first way you're laying out the normal flow of the program first of all, and then tacking on a "we can skip this if we're in a rare special mode" afterwards. Used judiciously I do think there's a certain something in it.

The bigger problem with Perl IMO is that it started as a great idea and didn't evolve far enough -- a bunch of things had to be tacked on, and everyone tacked on them slightly differently for no real benefit, resulting in codebases that can be terribly fragile for no good reason and no benefit.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#262

Post by edgyquant »

khafra wrote: post #241
Gud wrote: post #226

Earlier 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…

The people without capital will just form their own economies and continue to exist, likely they will kill the capital owners as well if it really came to that.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#263

Post by sarchertech »

kypro wrote: post #126
sarchertech wrote: post #69

I’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…

> Coding is not the bottleneck to produce a qualify product. I've been saying this too. The 10x engineer stuff simply cannot make sense unless previously you were spending 90%+ of your day just writing coding and now that's dropped to single digits because AI can generate it. If you spent 20-30% of your day coding before and the rest thinking about the problem, thinking about good UX, etc, then AI coding assistances…

I know someone who has a friend that works at Anthropic. He says that it’s essentially 2 companies. 1 that vibe codes everything and merges without understanding, and one that spends all their time putting out the fires created by the first company.

I think we’re destined to be #2 for a while. If it gets too bad, my plan is to move into a part of the industry where quality and reliability are non-negotiable. Or start my own company and compete against established players for the smaller customer base that’s willing to pay for quality.

I go out of my way to pay for quality projects even if (and often because) they have fewer features. I think there are probably enough of us to support a lifestyle business in many niches.

I also suspect as vibe coding introduces more bugs (we’ve certainly seen this at my current company) the people willing to pay for alternatives will grow.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#264

Post by khafra »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #247
khafra wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all." That's been tried several times now and has a tendency to end very badly for capital. You'd think folks with even a grade school level of historical literacy would know better than to stick a fork in that outlet.

It's never been tried before. Capital always required human labor, to be productive. Capital has never closed in on the ability to operate, maintain, defend, and expand itself without human assistance, as it is closing in on that ability now.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#265

Post by edgyquant »

FuckButtons wrote: post #230
simianwords wrote: post #223

Earlier 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.

I have many times and if you spend too long over architecting a prototype you start to get annoyed looks and tons of questions from PMs who just want something that looks right today (we can fix it/optimize it later)

Re: Grief and the AI split

#266

Post by khafra »

edgyquant wrote: post #262
khafra wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The people without capital will just form their own economies and continue to exist, likely they will kill the capital owners as well if it really came to that.

What's your plan for beating the autonomous drone swarms without capital?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#267

Post by woodenbrain »

This resonates with me. I got into development exactly because I wanted to make things useful to me, with limited background in programming, over 20 years ago. Tech eventually got in the way. I was so bored with sandboxes, entitlements, signing apps, etc. The joy was gone. Now I am developing a new app with AI help. I may not be using the tools optimally but I don't care, it's a process. And it's a lie that this is a fast process. I have been working on one app for months, and now I have a pretty solid new app to show for it. Looking for MacOS Apple Music users for beta testers, BTW. Please have a look. https://www.woodenbrain.com/grooves.html

Re: Grief and the AI split

#268

Post by sarchertech »

sublinear wrote: post #146
sarchertech wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term code quality is overloaded and not really worth discussing without defining exactly what we mean. But yes many of those problems were caused by business decisions. But engineers are perfectly cable of creating those problems on their own. If an engineer doesn’t realize that the function they called buffers messages in memory because someone made a wrapper function around sendAsync() and called it send(), tha…

I've heard this opinion a lot before, but in my experience there's a lot more dysfunction behind the scenes when stuff like that happens. It's the same in other industries too. Someone designs and implements something properly and then it gets into the hands of product people who want to rip half of it out. The business then wants some much cheaper contractors to quickly make those changes without the original engine…

I’m not going to disagree with you there. A bad engineering culture is usually ultimately caused by other factors. Many times that is just hiring bad engineers though. Such that even if business got out of the way, the engineers still wouldn’t make a quality product.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#269

Post by ontouchstart »

The consumer/producer dichotomy misses another aspect of coding, with or without AI.

About a decade ago, STEM education was trendy and everyone was getting Lego, Raspberry Pi etc to build robots and writing Python in the name of STEM. You can ask LLM what STEM standards for.

The Maker movement is not about consuming or producing for consumption. Some people might get incentive to be influencers and profit off it. But the majority of the kids who went through this process become adults and moved on to be producer/consumer and playing with AI now. I believe their curiosity and creativity.

Don’t worry, life will find its way.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#270

Post by grafmax »

khafra wrote: post #241
Gud wrote: post #226

Earlier 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…

Capital is a commodity, just like a business' product. It does not produce value. Labor does. This is a central point of LTV!

We witnessed the same thing with looms and other automation in the Industrial Revolution. Capital that helps you produce more. But owners faced with increased competition under commoditized production see their profit margins fall. Thus they will turn to squeezing workers - the source of value - for profit in the newly commoditized landscape - exactly what happened during the Industrial Revolution. It was only when workers got their act together and organized that this decline was stopped and reversed.

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