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The Programmer Identity Crisis

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Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#281

Post by toprerules »

greymalik wrote: post #27

> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding. To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself. > careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.

> Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.

For the early MIT hackers, and for many of us still today, it absolutely is.

It's also not about the input mechanisms, which have changed over the years. Solving problems, turning complexity into simplicity, cool hacks, that's what the hacker ethos is about. It's not about driving "value".

I suppose you also feel that there's no value in learning a musical instrument either.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#282

Post by toprerules »

bdangubic wrote: post #152
isaacremuant wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so funny to me. Hand-coding is no longer "the future"? Did an AI write your post or did you "hand write it"? Code needs to be simple and maintainable and do what it needs to do. Auto complete wasn't a huge time saver because writing code wasn't the bottleneck then and it definitely is not the bottleneck now. How much you rely on an LLM won't necessarily change the quality or speed of what you produce. Special…

> Code needs to be simple and maintainable and do what it needs to do. And yet after 3 decades in the industry I can tell you this fantasy exists only on snarky HN comments. > Hand-coding is no longer "the future"? hand-coding is 100% not the future, there are teams already that absolutely do not hand-code anything anymore (I help with one of them that used to have 19 "hand-coders" :) ). The typing for sure will get…

> there are teams already that absolutely do not hand-code anything anymore

The only instances I've seen so far are from developers who are really, really bad at coding, but, under the false delusion of the Dunning-Kruger effect, believe they're generating reams of "high quality" code.

Unfortunately this isn't like isn't a rare occurrence at all.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#283

Post by toprerules »

rafaelero wrote: post #181

It's honestly not that deep. If AI increases productivity, we should accept it. If it doesn't, then the hype will eventually fade out. In any case, having attachment to the craft is a bit cringe. Technological progress trumps any emotional attachment.

I sincerely wonder how some people go around having 0 emotional attachment to any of their hobbies or passions - or maybe you're just extremely unfortunate and live your life completely focused on producing output for someone else.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#284

Post by klardotsh »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #253
deltaburnt wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you effectively saying that no one will understand the code they're actually deploying? That's always true to an extent, but at least today you mostly understand the code in your sub area. If we're saying the future is AI + careful review, how am I going to have enough context to even do that review?

I expect that in most cases you'll review "hot spots" that AI itself identifies while trusting AI review for the majority of code. When you need to go deeper, I expect you'll have to essentially learn the code to fix it, in roughly the same way people will occasionally need to look at the compiler output to hunt down bugs.

Human trust has to be earned, why should AI trust be any different? If I’m supposed to yolo-approve any random code a machine spits out, it had better prove to me it’s nearly flawless, otherwise I’m applying the same review regiment I apply to any other code. To do otherwise is to shame the word “engineering” and the field thereof.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#285

Post by [deleted] »

happytoexplain wrote: post #8
psunavy03 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That says more about your lack of writing skills and understanding of grammar than AI.

That's simply not true, and pointlessly derogatory. This article does not appear to be AI-written, but use of the emdash is undeniably correlated with AI writing. Your reasoning would only make sense if the emdash existed on keyboards. It's reasonable for even good writers to not know how or not care to do the extra keystrokes to type an emdash when they're just writing a blog post - that doesn't mean they have bad w…

[deleted]

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#286

Post by pfannkuchen »

jjav wrote: post #220
pfannkuchen wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it doesn’t really seem different from people copy/pasting from stack overflow without reading through it. This isn’t really a new thing, though I guess nobody was really acting like SO was the second coming so it’s probably happening more now.

> Yeah it doesn’t really seem different from people copy/pasting from stack overflow without reading through it. It is vastly different because there are no (as far as I've ever seen) multi-thousand line blocks of code to cut & paste as-is from stack overflow. If you're pasting a couple dozen lines of code from a third party without understanding it, that's bad, but not unbearable to discover in a code review. But if…

What I mean is that, at least where I’ve worked, copy/pasting from SO without checking it and taking responsibility for it was already not acceptable. Making a machine generate it instead of a human is… still not acceptable.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#287

Post by Izkata »

johnisgood wrote: post #12
happytoexplain wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply not true, and pointlessly derogatory. This article does not appear to be AI-written, but use of the emdash is undeniably correlated with AI writing. Your reasoning would only make sense if the emdash existed on keyboards. It's reasonable for even good writers to not know how or not care to do the extra keystrokes to type an emdash when they're just writing a blog post - that doesn't mean they have bad w…

Pressing "-" and a space gets replaced by an emdash to me in LibreOffice. No extra keystrokes required.

That's an en dash, not an em dash. An em dash is longer and as far as I know Libreoffice doesn't have a built-in way to make one (though you may have added it to the autocorrect settings yourself).

en dash: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2013

em dash: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2014

Edit: Ah, Libreoffice does have a built-in autocorrect for em dash, but you have to type this:

  :---:

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#288

Post by CuriouslyC »

klardotsh wrote: post #284
CuriouslyC wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect that in most cases you'll review "hot spots" that AI itself identifies while trusting AI review for the majority of code. When you need to go deeper, I expect you'll have to essentially learn the code to fix it, in roughly the same way people will occasionally need to look at the compiler output to hunt down bugs.

Human trust has to be earned, why should AI trust be any different? If I’m supposed to yolo-approve any random code a machine spits out, it had better prove to me it’s nearly flawless, otherwise I’m applying the same review regiment I apply to any other code. To do otherwise is to shame the word “engineering” and the field thereof.

Engineering is a game of tradeoffs. Time is one of the things you have to trade off, given your strong opinions I expect this is something you've been in the industry long enough to understand intuitively.

Regarding proof, if you have contracts for your software write them up. Gherkin specs, api contracts, unit tests, etc. If you care about performance, add stress tests with SLOs. If you care about code organization create custom lint rules. There are so many ways to take yourself out of the loop rigorously so you can spend your time more efficiently.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#289

Post by Quis_sum »

strix_varius wrote: post #57

To me, the most salient point was this: > Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who cl…

I am probably too old school: Unless properly documented (the "whats" and especially the "whys") and provided with a test harness (plus the test cases, including all fringe cases btw.) just reject it straight away. And in the case it is provided and you have a hard time understanding it, reject it as well with the comment that, the "demi-god" (author) should provide documentation which mere mortals can follow.

That principle can be applied to both LLM slop and handcrafted rubbish. Eventually most people will get it.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#290

Post by csomar »

spicymaki wrote: post #242

I feel that for long time people coming into the industry did not really care about code as a craft, but more of code as easy money. This was first salient to me when I saw posts about opensource developers who make critical infrastructure living hand to mouth. Then the day in the life of a software engineer working in a coffee shop. Then the bootcamps or just learn to code movement. Then the leetcode grinders. Then…

Professions that have "associations" are limited by physical geography. The "association" is a political power play although I concede that it offers certain guarantees about the people working in the profession.

Programming can't be constrained in that fashion. Having a "Software Developer" association will 1. not solve the problem; and maybe make it worse and 2. move all of the industry outside of the US.

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