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The Emacsification of Software

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#31

Post by munk-a »

SoftTalker wrote: post #7

"Personal Software" i.e. programs that one writes for oneself, was the original vision of home computing back in the 1960s. The PC wasn't really anticipated, but the thought was that everyone would have a computer terminal at home, and write programs to do whatever was needed. It was imagined that programming would become easy enough that anyone could learn to do it. We're not there yet but with LLMs we're getting cl…

LLMs are great for problem exploration. Especially with the decline of Google I think we're at a point where it's less difficult to get an LLM to spit out something that'll accomplish a task sorta compared to actually finding that on the internet. But if the task is going to be repeated or modified then I think LLMs are at a permanent disadvantage to prebuilt software. Even if that prebuilt software is just someone else running an LLM and then passing the output through acceptance testing most people just don't want the headache of debugging weird edge cases and the novelty of "I'm a developer too!" wears off pretty quickly.

I'm excited that the weird grey-zone of excel sheets with business critical logic is likely going to disappear as LLMs slowly make the logic driving those too complex to be comprehended and managed and those get foisted off onto actual engineering resources. It'll be painful but probably for the best... but for actual tools people need to use day-to-day I think the assurance that the tool will work has a lot more value than the AI hype has comprehended.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#32

Post by [deleted] »

shaokind wrote: post #6

I've absolutely engaged in making personal software [0] thanks to the age of LLMs. But to be honest, my time using Emacs didn't teach me to "build personal software". My Emacs set up was extremely brittle, and it was a nightmare when I tried to use it across Windows & macOS. My university project was written using an unholy combination of org-mode & some workflow to create a beautiful LaTeX file, and I couldn't tell…

[deleted]

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#35

Post by edbaskerville »

SoftTalker wrote: post #7

"Personal Software" i.e. programs that one writes for oneself, was the original vision of home computing back in the 1960s. The PC wasn't really anticipated, but the thought was that everyone would have a computer terminal at home, and write programs to do whatever was needed. It was imagined that programming would become easy enough that anyone could learn to do it. We're not there yet but with LLMs we're getting cl…

The road not (yet?) taken is the full flowering of the HyperCards, the Visual Basics, the Macromind Directors and Flashes...

That is, the idea that a non-expert might create interesting software in an authoring environment with good, well-thought-out building blocks and easy-to-grasp metaphors, shorn of layers of accidental or over-engineered complexity.

In this vision software still requires careful logical thinking, but it makes it much less cumbersome to translate that thinking into running code, with no tooling and build system nightmares.

Instead, we've invented such powerful models that they can regurgitate and recombine complex incantations on our behalf. The complexity is still there, though, and it's still inscrutable to non-experts.

But maybe they can help us eliminate some of it?

I think that path is still possible, and it may even nicely complement the LLM world, where LLMs help generate software that individual humans can still easily comprehend and manually modify.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#37

Post by il-b »

j2kun wrote: post #9

> You want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do. > monospaced and thus fatiguing to read. Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who read code (and code comments) all day care that strongly about this. Plaintext is king

The dislike of code per se is what drives these people to use agents in the first place.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#38

Post by TFNA »

munk-a wrote: post #31
SoftTalker wrote: post #7

"Personal Software" i.e. programs that one writes for oneself, was the original vision of home computing back in the 1960s. The PC wasn't really anticipated, but the thought was that everyone would have a computer terminal at home, and write programs to do whatever was needed. It was imagined that programming would become easy enough that anyone could learn to do it. We're not there yet but with LLMs we're getting cl…

LLMs are great for problem exploration. Especially with the decline of Google I think we're at a point where it's less difficult to get an LLM to spit out something that'll accomplish a task sorta compared to actually finding that on the internet. But if the task is going to be repeated or modified then I think LLMs are at a permanent disadvantage to prebuilt software. Even if that prebuilt software is just someone e…

> Especially with the decline of Google

Oddly enough, Google’s LLM is the only one that has been answering my questions well on a research project these last weeks. I’m getting information from scanned text files that exist on the internet but were never adequately OCRed by other LLM companies (i.e. both OCRed at all, and moreover OCRed as the specific language in question that picks up all the diacritics). Google search results may be disappointing and polluted for years, but the company is still offering a useful product in another tab of its interface.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#39

Post by ctrl4 »

tptacek wrote: post #29
tuo-lei wrote: post #27

i've made maybe 20 personal LLM tools this year. 3 survived past the first week. not because the rest weren't useful, just wasn't willing to debug them when something broke.

What were the three?

Not OP: - One shotted script that I schedule through cron that sends me a message when a new one piece manga chapter releases. - Also a simple script that moves my cursor one pixel every 30 seconds. Cannot disclose why I need this.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#40

Post by ErroneousBosh »

SoftTalker wrote: post #7

"Personal Software" i.e. programs that one writes for oneself, was the original vision of home computing back in the 1960s. The PC wasn't really anticipated, but the thought was that everyone would have a computer terminal at home, and write programs to do whatever was needed. It was imagined that programming would become easy enough that anyone could learn to do it. We're not there yet but with LLMs we're getting cl…

> It was imagined that programming would become easy enough that anyone could learn to do it.

Arguably LLMs take us further away from that than we've ever been. All they do is automate copying and pasting in shit from StackOverflow.

We were closer to everyone being able to learn how to program computers in the mid-80s when everyone had one and they started up with a BASIC prompt.

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