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Leave Me Behind

androidessence.com

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Re: Leave Me Behind

#291

Post by josephg »

sillyfluke wrote: post #188
josephg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now. For example, I want to make: - A mini OS on top of SeL4 - A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust. - My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends - A local…

I support this take especially since you added the "I don't care if nobody else uses what I make", but you should at least acknowledge what you're talking about is pretty unrelated to the article, as the author's entire context seems to be making something for other people to use and building it together with other people. Since you said you want to make those things that you list, I assume none of these things have…

> I would encourage you to consider how excited you will be to constantly maintain those things you build.

Why should I consider that?

Its funny how the default with programming is that the piece of software exists forever. I've been learning to play the piano lately. The default with piano is that every piece is ephemeral. If I don't go out of my way to record something I play, after the notes have run out, the piece is gone forever. The same is true of cooking - except you can't record a meal at all. Once you eat it, its gone. Lots of art forms are like this - theatre. Dance. The circus. They're no less beautiful for being ephemeral.

Why do we assume software has to be maintained indefinitely? Why even think about that right now? Maybe I'll work on these projects for awhile, maintain them as long as I want, and then in a few years someone will make something way better and I'll use that instead? Would that make the effort I put in pointless? I don't think so. I think it would make programming more like playing the piano. How lovely.

> I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow.

Yes, I've burned through enough claude tokens now that I find myself agreeing with you. I wouldn't use an LLM to make and maintain google chrome. But I wasn't planning on doing that anyway. There are also a lot more options than (1) write everything yourself and (2) vibe code the whole thing.

LLMs are good at small-to-medium scope tasks right now. Fine. I'll use them - or not use them - with their limitations in mind.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#292

Post by mylifeandtimes »

baddash wrote: post #72
illithid0 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a position right now where I'm trying to decide if staying in my own field of information security is worth it to me. I have an entire project plan built out for using local models to do some crazy augmentation of my own skill set, e.g. malware development pipelines and vulnerability research. My biggest problem as an independent contractor is marketing and notoriety. Security has been a race to the bottom for…

This psychosis you keep referring to will only end up punishing the ones who subscribe to it wouldn't it? Since it's out of touch with reality. If that's indeed the case, then it sounds like an opportunity to get ahead of them since you know they will trip and fall at some point. That's what I make of what you're describing, while sleep deprived and having given it some light thought LOL. So take that with a lot of s…

> This psychosis you keep referring to will only end up punishing the ones who subscribe to it wouldn't it? Since it's out of touch with reality.

It might if the subscribers realize/admit that things are failing because they were wrong from the beginning. But that doesn't seem to be how things work.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#293

Post by josephg »

slopinthebag wrote: post #248
josephg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now. For example, I want to make: - A mini OS on top of SeL4 - A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust. - My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends - A local…

The issue is maintenance. If you want to use these projects for important things, you need to maintain them. If you don't want to maintain them, I can't see myself using them for anything important. I actually want less software for myself. Less things to maintain. I've become a "digital minimalist" in that I use very few software, only ones maintained by others who can afford and are willing to keep them working.

Some people find freedom in building their own house. Some people find freedom in living in a serviced apartment.

Some people find joy in home cooked meals. To others, wealth is never needing to cook again.

To each their own.

As for maintenance, I think LLMs are actually very well suited for small maintenance tasks. The expensive part of programming is loading and unloading context into my head. "Oh dear, what is all this code doing? Oh no, coffeescript? And some ancient version of express JS? How does any of this work?". LLMs can bomb in, fix a compilation error and bomb out. "This program isn't compiling any more on macos X.Y.Z. Read the patch notes. Figure out why and fix the problem." Perfect.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#294

Post by unknownfuture »

blks wrote: post #289
unknownfuture wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. I genuinely don't know if that's true and I doubt you do, either. It's all feels right now. What I do know is I run a couple of personal projects and I can say they are of objectively higher quality now that I'm using AI to build out proper CI pipelines, expand test coverage, prod…

People now just tell on themselves when they say that their projects’ quality is significantly better now with LLMs

What, that my personal project quality was low?

Yes! It absolutely was (and in many cases still is)! Both projects I've originated and projects I've inherited. I'm not ashamed to admit that. I build in my spare time to create things people (in particular myself) want to use, not to construct ivory towers of architectural purity.

Hell, I inherited maintainership of one gem that barely had a functioning test suite at all and is now at north of 85% coverage and is something I can now change with far greater confidence, and I recently forked a repo to work on another project that was a damned disaster that I massively refactored to make it clean and maintainable.

The world is absolutely full of janky side projects. Is that surprising to you? They're side projects, ffs, not five-nines planetary scale platforms.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#295

Post by witx »

I'm on the same boat I'd rather be left behind than play this stupid game.

It's specially hurtful to see open source developers and projects using and supporting the tools of companies which blatantly stole their work - and now profit from it - and that are actively against the open source ideals (Anthropic when trying to close github repos with their code)

I've stopped all my monetary support for open source projects, and moved all my code to a self hosted instance.

I'm not against AI tools I see where they can be useful, I'm just morally opposed to and disgusted of the ways these companies work.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#296

Post by josephg »

castedo wrote: post #232
20k wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And for some use cases, some crappy software is better than no software The best use case i've seen for AI is people generating random one shot projects for themselves, which is honestly so cool. You can make some basic app that does something very specific, that would have taken objectively a lot longer to make by hand. This is when 'crappy' software is more than good enough for a specific problem

Similar use cases of useful AI one-shot projects are: demos, proof-of-concept, prototype, exploratory tests, etc... I've AI-generated an HTML/javascript craplet to test how browser security would behave for certain JavaScript API calls. I just wanted to confirm how browser security would behave before I started to spend time hand-coding the non-AI quality software that I wanted to release. And I say this as somebody…

I was listening to a podcast talking about this the other day. They encouraged non-programmers to use LLMs to make working demos of the features they wanted to have. A demo is a much more powerful communication tool than a written description. Speaking as an engineer, a working demo makes a way better spec to work off than 100 pages of words. Even if the code itself will be completely rewritten.

I think this is a wonderful use case for LLMs. Who knows if regular people will try it out. We've spent decades making people feel like software is some special techy thing that regular mortals should stay away from. LLMs make it easy for anyone to turn an idea into a prototype.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#297

Post by ori_b »

satvikpendem wrote: post #278
unknownfuture wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just gonna hop in and say: I get it. If I spend a weekend standing up a self-hosted media system or something, I doubt anyone would dispute that's a fun building exercise. If I do the same thing but use an LLM to build out instead, somehow it's not. Yeah it's not the same kind of building as what we might have done pre-LLM but it need not be any less satisfying or rewarding. The real disconnect seems to be the cl…

Like Lego, assembly can be fun too, and I don't have to manufacture the individual bricks from scratch just to enjoy assembling them together. But no one doesn't call that building something, similar to your experience.

And sometimes buying a statue can be fun, but nobody calls it building a statue.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#298

Post by ori_b »

unknownfuture wrote: post #270
ori_b wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that you think coding just typing. Code is just a language where the problem is specified in fine detail; the biggest value proposition of an LLM is being able to hand-wave and let some other tool take care of guessing at detail, where you can't be bothered to specify it in full. And, part of the process of specifying in full forces you to rethink design assumptions. Architecture certainly isn't building,…

No, coding is the act of reifying all the things that actually matter--the requirements, the visual design, the system design, etc--into a form that a computer can execute. The biggest value proposition of an LLM is being able to focus on the truly high-value activities while allowing the machine take care of much of that reification. That you think architecture or interior design isn't building tells you prefer to d…

If you give up on the details, you lose the ability to do a good job on the high level structure. The entire purpose of the high level structure is setting things up so that the details fit cleanly.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#299

Post by josephg »

nradov wrote: post #222
ary wrote: post #167

There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider. We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think t…

Nah, there's no evidence of reduced quality. If anything it's the reverse. I've seen AI code review tools be tremendously effective at catching defects which otherwise would have shipped.

I think it really depends how you use the tools.

Its easy to lean too hard into vibe coding. I've spent the last week unpicking a bunch of poor decisions claude made while coding something up. Its my mistake - I trusted it too much. It made a lot of sloppy, poorly thought through abstractions and then built a bunch of bad code on top of them. I should have been more careful reviewing its abstractions first.

But as others in this thread have said, LLMs are also great at doing all the tedious quality-improving tasks that I sometimes don't have time to do. You can prompt LLMs to write tests, to do fuzz testing and to set up CI pipelines. You can get them to formalise the constraints in the system (and then try to find violations of those constraints). I'm doing some work at the moment with Cocoa (apple's old UI library). I downloaded all the cocoa docs I could find. Then asked claude to read it all and review our code. It found lots of places where we're not using the API effectively. Fabulous.

LLMs are an accelerator. If you already know how to write performant, reliable software, LLMs can help you get there faster. But if you sit back and let the LLM guide itself, who knows where you'll end up. Probably nowhere good. Over the next few years we're going to see every possible use of LLMs. Probably more vibe coding disasters than anything else. But as a senior engineer, I think its way too reductive to write the tools off entirely. They're useful. But using them well? That's the trick.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#300

Post by blks »

aspenmartin wrote: post #186
ary wrote: post #167

There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider. We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think t…

> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. Well, first of all you and the author point to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" or the one I have heard a lot "next-token predictors", and the connotation I read from these being that this makes them inherently dumb or unint…

I can trust a human to understand what a buffer overflow is and to learn.
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