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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#341

Post by jimbokun »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #295
mikestorrent wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible…

The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes? When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely . But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediatel…

It’s a tool to replace human creation, not to enable human creation.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#342

Post by Forgeties79 »

jimbokun wrote: post #341
Forgeties79 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes? When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely . But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediatel…

It’s a tool to replace human creation, not to enable human creation.

I have found that LLM’s are fantastic for rewriting things in ways that get me to break through writer’s block. It’s great for just keeping me going when I can’t think of the next words, even if I just sit on it and come back later. In that way it helps me create. But this covers one major issue that affects my progress, it doesn’t like…do the job for me, if that makes sense. I throw out probably 80% of what the LLM spits out, but even just seeing what you don’t want can often help you decide what you do want.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#343

Post by jimbokun »

chickensong wrote: post #274
jimbokun wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and project…

> But it's largely done now Somehow I doubt that. The monkey is never satisfied.

If that were true there wouldn’t be so many layoffs in the industry.

Sure there is still some residual need for new software or modifying existing software. But it’s far less than it was say 30 years ago.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#344

Post by jimbokun »

paganel wrote: post #298
jimbokun wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and project…

> What value is left to provide for users? A spreadsheet editor with at most a couple of hundred MBs in size that can compete against Excel, for example. While also not eating from RAM resources. The same goes for a new browser and a new browser engine, it's time for Chrome to have a real competitor, it has become a mess. I can of other such examples, but these are the 2 biggest ones.

Ok it’s useful to have a few developers working with LLMs to make existing software more efficient, granted.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#345

Post by yunwal »

bluGill wrote: post #245
jr3592 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? I think the entire software industry has reached a saturation point. There's not really anything missing anymore. Existing tools do 99% of what we humans could need, so you're just getting recycled and regurgitated versions of existing tools... slap a different logo and a veneer on it, and its a product.

The tools are mostly there, but there is a lot of need. Quality can be much better. Quality is UI, reliability, security, and a bunch of other similar things I can't think of offhand.

Doesn’t really seem like that’s the way the market is heading though

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#346

Post by tau5210 »

youknownothing wrote: post #311

I understand your pain, we're just a peak hype, I think people will learn to backtrack and use the tool in a more sensible way. It always happens. I remember when MongoDB and other NoSql databases came out, people went as far as to say that "SQL is dead" and refuse to use a normal SQL database for anything. Not even for the most obvious relational application. People would store everything as key-value pairs with no…

Also reminded me of Kafka (Kafka as a database!) and microservices (monoliths are evil, microservices are the future). I'm sure we can dig up similar hypes on various scales throughout the history of this industry...

Perhaps so-called AI is slightly different from hypes like NoSql and microservices in that these reduced to usages that practically apply to only a fraction of the engineering population (albeit, it's still good for anyone to know about them even if we never use them), whereas AI will probably still affect us all even after the dust settles. Just in much less spectacular ways than is being trumpeted currently by some groups. Reminded me of No Silver Bullet: "There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity. "

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#347

Post by gurachek »

The compounding booboos bit is the key insight here. Humans are a bottleneck and that bottleneck is actually load-bearing. You feel the pain of bad decisions slowly enough to course correct.

I've been building the same AI product for months - a coaching loop that persists across sessions. Every few weeks someone ships a "competitor" in a weekend. Feature list looks similar. The difference is everything that breaks when a real user comes back for session 3 or 4. Context drifts, scores stop calibrating, plans don't adapt. None of that shows up in a demo. You only find it after sitting in the same codebase for weeks, running real sessions, getting confused by your own data. That's the friction the post is talking about and I don't think you can skip it.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#348

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

jimbokun wrote: post #340
HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program. The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible , and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software -…

Sure but maybe we’re all better off spending more time going for walks, learning to cook, playing sports , talking to friends and family, participating in spiritual communities, and making love (to other people !)

This line of reasoning applies to nearly any way to spend time - "why are you playing videogames? Learn X instead!" or "why are you bothering with X when Y exists?" or "what, you don't know how to make sourdough? Silly goose!"

At the end of the day, we all have only finite time on this earth, and how one chooses to spend the meager time between eat, sleep, and fend for self is up to them. If a person is content to play sports in their free time, more power to them. If they want to play videogames, and find satisfaction in that, great! Broadly, I like to create. Most of my creations are engineering-adjacent much more than they art. That's fine, and I'm happy. I do everything you named on that list in addition to building stuff.

While using AI, I have caused things to exist that I want much faster than I could have otherwise - I know how to program, but I'm not very fast and I have to have the docs open all the time because the things I want to do are so broad and varied that one week it's bash SLURM scripts and the next it's adding things to my k8s config and the one after that it's something in Python and I don't have enough brain cells to keep track of seven different languages well enough to not accidentally put semicolons at the end of my Python scripts or use the wrong syntax but boy at least I have a bunch of stuff that actually works in the time frame and attention span that I have left after the rest of my life for that day occurs. It's not like I wasn't programming before AI - I've been doing bash scripts and Arduino stuff since middle school - but I have a lot more to show for the little free time I have to work with in the last year or so.

And, for the people who don't really know how to code, the incredible power of their computers is now much closer to their fingertips and usable for more than Electron apps. Want to have a thing happen? Ask, Wait, Iterate. All for cheaper than fiverr, and you might learn a few things before you finish.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#349

Post by tau5210 »

andai wrote: post #182

It occurred to me on my walk today that a program is not the only output of programming. The other, arguably far more important output, is the programmer. The mental model that you, the programmer, build by writing the program. And -- here's the million dollar question -- can we get away with removing our hands from the equation? You may know that knowledge lives deeper than "thought-level" -- much of it lives in mus…

> The recent trend is to increase the output called programs, but decrease the output called programmers. That doesn't exactly bode well.

Perhaps on a related note, I've noticed that a lot of the positive talks about AI are about quantity. On the other hand, there is disproportionately very little deep discussion about quality. And I mean not just short term, local quality, but more long term and holistic quality (e.g. managing complexity under evolving requirements in a complex system with multiple connected parts) at real production scale, where there is much less tolerance for failure.

In all the places I've worked in throughout my career, I've felt that there have always been a tension between those who cared more about things like the mental model and holistic quality, and those who seemed to care less or were even oblivious about it. I think one contribution of the current AI hype is that it gave a more concrete shape to this split...

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#350

Post by esseph »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #336
esseph wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where are the vibe coded apps that are actually good? Where are the new, innovative creations built by “normal” people? Because by now you’d think we’d see them. They're busy using them. They're probably not GitHub users or HN readers. I've seen some really nice internal (business) apps made.

So we have to assume there’s good stuff being made by newbies that no one else is seeing? I didn’t have to take it on faith that people were actually making amazing things with digital cameras. I could look at them. I could reproduce it.

I mean, yeah. I've seen a network infrastructure monitoring system for an ISP, a router config generator tool, and a go-based BGP EVPN daemon in the past week. All are in production.
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