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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#351

Post by sublinear »

sarchertech wrote: post #268
sublinear wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this opinion a lot before, but in my experience there's a lot more dysfunction behind the scenes when stuff like that happens. It's the same in other industries too. Someone designs and implements something properly and then it gets into the hands of product people who want to rip half of it out. The business then wants some much cheaper contractors to quickly make those changes without the original engine…

I’m not going to disagree with you there. A bad engineering culture is usually ultimately caused by other factors. Many times that is just hiring bad engineers though. Such that even if business got out of the way, the engineers still wouldn’t make a quality product.

I half agree, but the engineering culture tends to follow from the business culture being presented.

You can't trust any new hires if you have middle managers with no technical experience who only care about business concerns, execs who only care about money, and all your good devs have left the company because they are not allowed to change anything.

The blame game is a massive red flag for everyone actually worth a damn to leave. Complacency, intolerance of disagreement, hyperpragmatism and obsessive focus on measurable productivity, etc. all kill a business by a million papercuts. A business needs room to breathe and the time and desire to think in order to thrive.

If you want new engineers who do good work you have to recognize that existing problems have become intertwined with the way the business currently works. They cannot fix what they cannot discuss. They cannot create when their hands are forced to repeat the motions of the ones they're replacing. All the while, someone rotten in the middle is definitely benefitting from throwing people under the bus and picking up a paycheck.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#352

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

toraway wrote: post #111
HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your AI can rewrite it to your own standards for free. You can tell your AI to read their code, and create a new requirements document for a clean-room implementation. Then you have your AI implement using your own requirements document.

That doesn't sound like it would help while reviewing a PR full of verbose slop in your day job.

I feel like this could be improved by limiting the scope of the task given to GenAI, and also by giving it clear instructions on programming style, and tips to optimize the diff, for the PR reviewer.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#353

Post by cableshaft »

koenschipper wrote: post #342
cableshaft wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed has a lot to do with it, yeah. A.I. is now often doing in 5-10 minutes what would take me hours on my own for any given task (well based on the last couple of weeks at least, I wasn't doing much agent based A.I. coding before that). I was pretty much having a real-time conversation with my superiors, showing them updates just a couple of minutes after they suggested them, for a feature the other day, getting fe…

Yes, absolutely agree. I have that feeling too that we have to keep up that pace. But it is not realistic that everything can happen at that same speed. How do you deal with that feeling?

I don't really know, the client I've been working at for the past 4.5 years has only given me access to agent based A.I. two weeks ago, so this is all pretty new to me (it's a large corporation and they didn't allow it until very recently).

I experimented with it a bit a couple weeks before that on my own personal projects as well, but I don't feel that same push when I'm doing my own projects, obviously (well, if I do, it's because I choose to).

Re: Grief and the AI split

#354

Post by [deleted] »

oytis wrote: post #349
marssaxman wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have machines lift weights for us all the time. Claude is a forklift for the mind, perhaps?

That has become pretty controversial recently, but I think the difference is that in software development, building knowledge is the work. You write software and simultaneously build expertise in your team regarding what the software does that allows you to maintain it and move forward.

[deleted]

Re: Grief and the AI split

#355

Post by pseudalopex »

camgunz wrote: post #297
simonw wrote: post #2

This sounds right to me: > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. Helps explain why some people are d…

I think SWEs are genuinely pretty shocked and awed that codegen models can code at all, let alone code well. My guess is a lot of the agita around this is that people thought "I can code therefore I'm smart/special/etc." and then a machine comes by that can do pretty equivalent work and they're entirely unmoored. I sympathize with that, and I don't mean to dismiss it, but that's not what I feel. I really dislike this…

> My guess is a lot of the agita around this is that people thought "I can code therefore I'm smart/special/etc." and then a machine comes by that can do pretty equivalent work and they're entirely unmoored.

It was hard to believe the same person wrote the thoughtful rest of the comment and this insulting assumption.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#356

Post by sublinear »

saulapremium wrote: post #181
sublinear wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The divide was never invisible and there has always been at least three camps . The "make-it-go" people couldn't make anything go back then either. They build ridiculous unmaintainable code with or without AI. Since they are cowboys that don't know what they're doing, they play the blame game and kiss a ton of ass. The "craft-lovers" got in the way just as much with their endless yak shaving. They now embrace AI beca…

Let me guess: you happen to be one of these lone pragmatists in the sea of incompetent ass-kissers and yak-shavers who use AI for writing code?

I'm saying the majority of devs are neither ass-kissers nor yak-shavers.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#357

Post by msteffen »

wiml wrote: post #114

I think the article misunderstands completely. "Craft" coders are chasing results too — we're just chasing results that last and that can be built upon. I've been in this game for a while, and a major goal of every single good programmer I've known has been to make themselves obsolete. Yes, I enjoyed meticulous hand crafted assembly, counting cycles and packing bits, but nobody had to talk me into using compilers. Ye…

Yeah, I like this framing a lot. There comes a point, after working on a system for a while, when there are no details: every aspect of how the system works is understood to be in some way significant. If one of those details is changed, you understand what the implications of that change will be for the rest of the system, its users, etc. I worry that in a post-AI software world, that’ll never happen. The system will be so full of code you’ve barely looked at, understanding it all will be hopeless. If a change is proving impossible to make without introducing bugs, it will be more sensible to AI-build a new system than understand the problem.

I sometimes wonder if modularity will become even more important (as it has in physical construction, e.g. with the move from artisanal, temperamental plaster to cheap, efficient drywall), so that systems that AI is not able to reliably modify can easily be replaced.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#358

Post by suzzer99 »

cableshaft wrote: post #208
suzzer99 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoying something and getting satisfaction out of it are two different things. I don't enjoy the act of coding. But I enjoy the feeling when I figure something out. I also think that having to solve novel puzzles as part of my job helps preserve my brain plasticity as I age. I'm not sure I'll get either of those from claude.

> I also think that having to solve novel puzzles as part of my job helps preserve my brain plasticity as I age. Yeah, this is a concern. I remember when I took a break from coding to work as a video game producer for a couple of years and I felt like my ability to code was atrophying and that drove me nuts. Now I'm not so sure. There's just so much dumb garbage that's accumulated around coding nowadays, especially w…

My mom used to play Sudoku as part of her recommended therapy to stave off cognitive decline. Now she just plays solitaire on the iPad for hours on end, which I know isn't burning any new neural pathways.

I'm afraid my inherent laziness will lead to something like that if I don't have to do it for my job.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#359

Post by robocat »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #343
marssaxman wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have machines lift weights for us all the time. Claude is a forklift for the mind, perhaps?

Using forklifts has made us overall less healthy and less physically fit than moving things by hand Will LLMs, "the forklifts of the mind" make us less mentally fit? Seems like a pretty likely outcome to me

Strawman. Forklifts usually do work we physically can't do (or sometimes could do if ignoring personnel risks and costs).

Re: Grief and the AI split

#360

Post by hinkley »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #188
wiml wrote: post #114

I think the article misunderstands completely. "Craft" coders are chasing results too — we're just chasing results that last and that can be built upon. I've been in this game for a while, and a major goal of every single good programmer I've known has been to make themselves obsolete. Yes, I enjoyed meticulous hand crafted assembly, counting cycles and packing bits, but nobody had to talk me into using compilers. Ye…

> It's not about intelligence or whatever, it's a mindset or perspective thing. I agree with everything except this last sentence. What you wrote looks highly intelligent and I would suspect a lot of people in the second camp are not up to par with this.

Wise+intelligent people realize that intellectualizing every fucking thing in their life is a trap, and that they should rely more on other things. Not the least of which is buy-in, which is often not about rationality either.

It might take intelligence to notice the problem, but we all know people who haven’t and some who might never. My previous job has the oldest I’ve ever met and I wanted to strangle him at least once a week. I haven’t added anyone to my Do Not Hire list in over a decade. Except him. He made himself indispensable at every opportunity and had some of the most convoluted code (and vocabulary) I’ve encountered in a long time. I spent way too much time extracting his claws from code I’d written that he made an absolute hash of.

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