341–350 of 475 posts
Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it. Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself. I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand g…
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I've always distilled this down to people who like the "craft" and those who like the "result". Of course, everything is on a scale so it's not either/or. But, like you, how I get there matters to me, not just the destination. Outside the context of music, a project could be super successful but if the journey was littered with unnecessary stress due to preventable reasons, it will still leave a bad taste in my mouth…
> I've always distilled this down to people who like the "craft" and those who like the "result". I find it very unlikely anyone who only likes the results will ever pick up the craft in the first place It takes a very specific sort of person to push through learning a craft they dislike (or don't care about) just because they want a result badly enough
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I always wonder what kind of projects are we talking about. I am currently writing a compiler and simulation engine for differential-algebraic equations. I tried few models, hoping they would help me, but they could not provide any help with small details nor with bigger building blocks. I guess if you code stuff that had been coded a lot in public repos, it is fine, otherwise AI does not help in any way. Actually, I…
That's been my experience. If it's been solved a million times, it's helpful. If you're out on the frontier where there's no public code, it's worse than useless. If you're somewhere in between (where I am now) it's situationally useful for small sub-components but you need to filter it heavily or you'll end up wasting a day or two going down a wrong rabbit-hole either because you don't know the domain well enough to…
Obviously LLMs in this situation will still be insanely helpful, but in the same way that Google searches or stack overflow is insanely helpful.
This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI. Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.
I love coding but I also love AI. I don't know if I'm a minority but I'd like to think there are a lot of folks like me out there. You can compare it to someone who is writing assembly code and now they've been introduced to C. They were happy writing assembly but now they're thrilled they can write things more quickly. Sure, AI could lead us to write buggier code. Sure, AI could make us dumber because we just have A…
No, there's plenty of top-class engineers who love coding with AI. e.g. Antirez.
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You don't. That's why you don't use an LLM most of the time. I was talking about cases where either the tasks were too boring or required an expertise that I didn't have at the time. Thought it was obvious.
> or required an expertise that I didn't have at the time How do you verify code that you don't have the expertise to write on your own?
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That comment makes me deeply suspicious about your debugging skills. And the formatting of your code.
I write code to solve problems for my own use or for my hobby electronics projects. Asking chatgpt to write a script is faster than reading the documentation of some python library. Just last week it wrote me a whole application and gui to open a webpage at a specific time. Yeah it breaks after the first trigger but it works for what I need.
There's a lot of literature about these concerns and a lot of methodologies to alleviate them. I (and others) are judging LLMs in light of those concerns. Mostly because speed was never an issue for us in prototypes and scripts (and it can be relaxing to learn about something while scripting it). The issue is always reliability (can it do what I want) and maintainability (can I change it later). Performance can also be a key issue.
Aside: I don't know the exact problem you were solving, but based on the description, that could have been done with systemd timers (macOS services are more of a pain to write). Yes, there's more to learn, but time triggering some command is a problem solved (and systemd has a lot more triggers).
This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI. Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.
I love coding but I also love AI. I don't know if I'm a minority but I'd like to think there are a lot of folks like me out there. You can compare it to someone who is writing assembly code and now they've been introduced to C. They were happy writing assembly but now they're thrilled they can write things more quickly. Sure, AI could lead us to write buggier code. Sure, AI could make us dumber because we just have A…
(The hype merchant, LinkedIn influencer, Twitter thread crowd are super noisy but tend to stick to their own echo chambers, it's rare to have them engage in a forum like Hacker News directly.)
AI had nothing to do with my own loss of engagement, though certainly it won't cure what ailed me. In fact, AI promises to do to all of software development what the mechanized data mining process did to my sense of creative self-expression. It will squeeze all the fun out of it, reducing the joy of coding (and its design) to plug-and-chug, rinse, repeat.
IMHO the threat of AI to computer programming is not the loss of jobs. It's the loss of personal passionate engagement in the craft.
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I'm a classic engineer, so lots of experience with systems and breaking down problems, but probably Having LLMs like 2.5 now are total game changers. I can basically flow chart a program and have Gemini manifest it. I can break up the program into modules and keep spinning up new instances when context gets too full. The program I am currently working on is up to ~5500 LOC, probably across 10ish 2.5 instances. It's b…
Only 150 hours of programming in 15 years? Are you in more of an Architect / Tech Lead role than an IC (individual contributor) role?
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So much this. The AI takes care of the tedious line by line what’s-the-name-of-that-stdlib-function parts (and most of the tedious test-writing parts) and lets me focus on the interesting bits like what it is I want to build and how the pieces should fit together. And debugging, which I find satisfying. Sadly, I find it sorely lacking at dealing with build systems and that particular type of boilerplate, mostly becau…
> The AI takes care of the tedious line by line what’s-the-name-of-that-stdlib-function parts (and most of the tedious test-writing parts) AI generated tests are a bad idea.
I've been writing Python for 20+ years and I still can't use unittest.mock without looking up the details every time. ChatGPT and Claude are great at that, which means I use it more often because I don't have to deal with the frustration of figuring it out.