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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#331

Post by ahepp »

paulhebert wrote: post #81
thor-rodrigues wrote: post #34

I absolutely disagree with this. All the things the author said will still exist and keep on existing. Nothing will prevent you from typing “JavaScript with your hands”, from “holding code in our hands and molding it like clay…”, and all the other metaphors. You can still do all of it. What certainly will change is the way professional code will be produced, and together with that, the avenue of having a very well-pa…

I don’t think it’s that simple. A couple of examples: Food: A lot of the processed foods that are easily available make us unhealthy and sick. Even vegetables are less nutritious than they were 50 years ago. Mass agriculture also has many environmental externalities. Consumer goods: It has become difficult to find things like reliable appliances. I bought a chest freezer. It broke after a year. The repairman said it…

It's true, they don't "make 'em like they used to". They make them in new, more efficient ways which have contributed to improving global trends in metrics such as literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, extreme poverty, and food supply.

If you are arguing that standard of living today is lower than in the past, I think that is a very steep uphill battle to argue

If your worries are about ecology and sustainability I agree that is a concern we need to address more effectively than we have in the past. Technology will almost certainly be part of that solution via things like fusion energy. Success is not assured and we cannot just sit back and say "we live in the best of all possible worlds with a glorious manifest destiny", but I don't think that the future is particularly bleak compared to the past

Re: We mourn our craft

#332

Post by bayarearefugee »

eranation wrote: post #143
iambateman wrote: post #9

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learn…

I like coding, I really do. But like you, I like building things more than I like the way I build them. I do not find myself miss writing code by hand as much. I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right". But I do worry. The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have…

> will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet)

Of course, and if LLMs keep improving at current rates it will happen much faster than people think.

Arguably you don't need junior software engineers anymore. When you also don't need senior software engineers anymore it isn't that much of a jump to not needing project managers, managers in general or even software companies at all anymore.

Most people, in order to protect their own ego, will assume *their* job is safe until the job one rung down from them disappears and then the justified worrying will begin.

People on the "right things to build" track love to point out how bad people are at describing requirements, so assume their job as a subject matter expert and/or customer-facing liaison will be safe, but does it matter how bad people are at describing requirements if iteration is lightning fast with the human element removed?

Yes, maybe someone who needs software and who isn't historically some sort of software designer is going to have to prompt the LLM 250 times to reach what they really want, but that'll eventually still be faster than involving any humans in a single meeting or phone call. And a lot of people just won't really need software as we currently think about it at all, they'll just be passing one-off tasks to the AI.

The real question is what happens when the labor market for non-physical work completely implodes as AI eats it all. Based on current trends I'm going to predict in terms of economics and politics we handle it as poorly as possible leading to violent revolution and possible societal collapse, but I'd love to be wrong.

Re: We mourn our craft

#333

Post by crazygringo »

tatjam wrote: post #249
crazygringo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the point is you're now doing the most creative and satisfying part. Not the drudgery. It's not that you've stopped doing anything at all, like the other commenter claimed in their personal chef analogy.

Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests? For me, the act of sitting down and writing the code is what actually leads to true understanding of the logic, in a similar way to how the only way to understand a mathematical proof is to go trough it. Sure,…

> Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests?

For 99% of the functions I've written in my life? Absolutely drudgery. They're barely algorithms. Just bog-standard data transformation. This is what I love having AI replace.

For the other 1% that actually requires original thought, truly clever optimization, and smart naming to make it literate? Yes, I'll still be doing that by hand, although I'll probably be getting the LLM to help scaffold all the unit tests and check for any subtle bugs or edge cases I may have missed.

The point is, LLMs let me spend more time at the higher level of abstraction that is more productive. It's not taking it away!

Re: We mourn our craft

#334

Post by charcircuit »

stack_framer wrote: post #227

> wait six months. I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!" I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wante…

>It's utility was never "six months away,"

6 months ago is when my coding became 100% done by AI. The utility already has been there for a while.

>I didn't have to be compelled to use it—I was eager to use it of my own volition as often as possible.

The difference is that you were a kid then with an open mind and now your world view has fixed into a certain way the world works and how things should be done.

Re: We mourn our craft

#335

Post by imiric »

querez wrote: post #112
jmclnx wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I retired a few years ago, so I have no idea what AI programming is. But I mourned when CRT came out, I had just started programming. But I quickly learned CRTs were far better, I mourned when we moved to GUIs, I never liked the move and still do not like dealing with GUIs, but I got used to it. Went through all kinds of programming methods, too many to remember, but those were easy to ignore and workaround. I view t…

I think you're underestimating what AI can do in the coding space. It is an extreme paradigm shift. It's not like "we wrote C, but now we switch to C++, so now we think in objects and templates". It's closer to the shift from assembly to a higher level language. Your goal is still the same. But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main…

> But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away.

It's remarkable that people who think like this don't have the foresight to see that this technology is not a higher level of abstraction, but a replacement of human intellect. You may be working with it today, but whatever you're doing will eventually be done better by the same technology. This is just a transition period.

Assuming, of course, that the people producing these tools can actually deliver what they're selling, which is very much uncertain. It doesn't change their end goal, however. Nor the fact that working with this new "abstraction" is the most mind numbing activity a person can do.

Re: We mourn our craft

#336

Post by XenophileJKO »

_zagj wrote: post #246
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully AI generated code has similar artifacts. You can spot them pretty easily after a bit. Of course it doesn't really matter for the business goals, as long as it works correctly. Just like 99% of people don't care if their clothing was machine made vs. handmade. It's going to be a tiny minority that care about handmade software.

> Fully AI generated code has similar artifacts. You can spot them pretty easily after a bit. For now. Though I suspect the commit history would probably still be pretty telling.

lol.. the AI actually writes detailed commit message. Unlike me... "Fixed issue with timeout"

Re: We mourn our craft

#337

Post by deredede »

nubg wrote: post #151

To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries? This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher. I'm 100% honestly looking forward to findin…

I know how to review code without looking at the corresponding assembly and have high confidence in the behavior of the final binary. I can't quite say the same for a prompt without looking at the generated code, even with temperature 0. The difference is explainability, not determinism.

Re: We mourn our craft

#338

Post by tines »

IhateAI wrote: post #278
sosomoxie wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually extremely good at programming. My point is I love computers and computing . You can use technology to achieve amazing things (even having fun). Now I can do much more of that than when I was limited to what I can personally code. In the end, it's what computers can do that's amazing, beautiful, terrifying... That thrill and to be on the bleeding edge is always what I was after.

[flagged]

Thank you. I don't understand how people don't see that this is the universe's most perfect gift to corporations, and what a disaster it is for labor. There won't be a middle class. Future generations will be intellectual invalids. Baffling to see people celebrating.

Re: We mourn our craft

#339

Post by notnullorvoid »

> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

You can use AI to write all your code, but if you want to be a programmer and can't see that the code is pretty mid then you should work on improving your own programming skills.

People have been saying the 6 month thing for years now, and while I do see it improving in breadth, quality/depth still appears to be plateauing.

It's okay if you don't want to be a programmer though, you can be a manager and let AI do an okay job at being your programmer. You better be driven to be a good at manager though. If you're not... then AI can do an okay job of replacing you there too.

Re: We mourn our craft

#340

Post by esafak »

stack_framer wrote: post #227

> wait six months. I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!" I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wante…

If you've only experienced MS Copilot I invite you to try the latest models through Codex (free deals ongoing), Claude Code, or Opencode. You may be surprised, for better or worse. What kind of software do you do?
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