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Learning to code is still worthwhile

stevekrouse.com

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Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#321

Post by theshrike79 »

zingar wrote: post #214
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked at a company with thousands of microservices, I feel like most of it is just a bunch of boilerplate riddled with tons of ridiculous business logic, security and otherwise bugs. It seems like people were historically more concerned about Java inheritance and spreading everything around different files and directory hierarchies, while ignoring common sense business requirements completely. With each servi…

The 1500 line react component that my unsupervised agentic coding side project produced says that it can get worse than we have now.

24000 line central function in a mobile game that did 6 figure revenue monthly.

Made by an actual human, before OpenAI was a household name.

I'm 99% sure any SOTA LLM could've refactored that in a day to something actually manageable. It could've done it on a weekend.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#322

Post by theshrike79 »

customguy wrote: post #232
taybin wrote: post #120

> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music I think this is overstating it and makes me wonder how familiar the author is with literature and music. Most programming is closer to plumbing. We come in, gripe about the guy who did the prior job, and solve a puzzle with some unique constraints. The reason LLMs are good at coding is because with coding we want boring, banal code.

Most programming is throwaway garbage, and if plumbing was treated remotely like that we'd be in deep shit, literally. I never had plumbers come in and complain about the previous guy. They either changed something, or fixed something I caused. And whatever they did, it worked for years and decades, perfectly, even when I didn't treat it as well as I should have. And to make things boring and banal is still an "art",…

> I never had plumbers come in and complain about the previous guy.

True, it's the electricians who do this =)

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#323

Post by theshrike79 »

palmotea wrote: post #179
irjustin wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now, I can imagine a not too distant future where this is largely untrue. LLMs are an abstraction just like machine code -> assembly -> C/JVM -> some lang -> LLMs? At some point you stopped needing to understand the layer down because the layer you were on became so good. Yes there are always corner cases, but for the vast majority of developers/engineers out there, staying at your layer was enough to make a care…

> LLMs are an abstraction just like machine code -> assembly -> C/JVM -> some lang -> LLMs? People keep trying to make that analogy, but it doesn't really work because LLMs aren't deterministic like compilers and assemblers.

If the result looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck every time, isn't it deterministic enough?

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#324

Post by layman51 »

NuclearPM wrote: post #275
layman51 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have actually thought something similar but more in terms of divination. There’s some people who might compare LLMs to something like Tarot or automatic writing (think Ouija) because there’s a sense of randomness with LLMs too. Both LLMs and divination methods also have the danger that someone could kind of drive themselves into madness with it. I don’t know too much about what how or why people can drive themselve…

The obvious difference is LLMs are real and divination is bullshit.

Well LLMs also spout a lot of bullshit sometimes. I had a conversation with one just recently where it couldn’t do arithmetic too well with a challenge involving coins of a foreign currency. I think maybe it got tripped up because the convo got a bit too long or maybe it didn’t like that I was using the dollar sign.

You can also make LLMs agree with your own biases for some reason. For example, the people who use them to plan shady stuff.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#325

Post by taybin »

altmanaltman wrote: post #310
taybin wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think plumbing does require a bunch of creativity. Trying to add some fixture to an old house with out of spec walls and prior creative solutions can be a real challenge. And you can really appreciate the people who come up with an elegant solution that isn't "tear it out and redo it from scratch". I'd like to read that blog post.

Yeah that also makes sense. I guess a better comment would have been to highlight the art/work aspects of any process. Like yeah, most jobs (even those that include creativite processes) will just become boring because jobs are standardized usually where you're going from point a to point b doing the same thing again and again. But that doesn't mean there is no art/creativity to the process itself but rather we restr…

That’s an interesting point about the tension between standardization and creativity. I’m going to think about that for a bit.
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