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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#361

Post by hinkley »

simianwords wrote: post #190
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…

You are repeating the same thing. You think having good maintainable good is important - more than the first camp. That does not mean you are correct. This mindset is useful only in serious reusable libraries and open source tools. Most enterprise code involves lots of exploring and fast iteration. Code quality doesn’t matter that much. No one else is going to see it. When the craft coders bring their ideology to thi…

> Most enterprise code involves lots of exploring and fast iteration.

And when the code base is 250,000 lines of garbage all the way down, this is impossible. The projects where I’ve had free rein to kill tech debt and SDLC footguns with impunity have all been the ones where velocity maintained or increased over time. All the rest have ground to a halt.

There’s value in customers believing you’ll get there soon and the code will actually work. They can be patient if you have an air of competence. But they will switch to some other clown car if it’s cheaper than your clown car.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#362

Post by eikenberry »

simianwords wrote: post #190
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…

You are repeating the same thing. You think having good maintainable good is important - more than the first camp. That does not mean you are correct. This mindset is useful only in serious reusable libraries and open source tools. Most enterprise code involves lots of exploring and fast iteration. Code quality doesn’t matter that much. No one else is going to see it. When the craft coders bring their ideology to thi…

> Code quality doesn’t matter that much. No one else is going to see it.

You seem to be claiming that enterprise shops never adopted code reviews. Interesting if true.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#363

Post by lmorchard »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #192
lmorchard wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I ran the post past an LLM for some ideas on clarity and tightening it up - but I wrote, edited, and published it myself.

If the core of the post is yours I think it is fine, but there are so many pieces which the LLM always uses in these things that they stand out more than emdashes. Some examples. > I've felt the grief too—but mine resolved differently than I expected, and I think that says something about what kind of developer I've been all along. > I kept having this nagging sense that we were mourning different things. > Here's wh…

I mean, the irony is that those sentences were in my original draft before running it past the LLM

Re: Grief and the AI split

#364

Post by lmorchard »

dang wrote: post #165
lmorchard wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I ran the post past an LLM for some ideas on clarity and tightening it up - but I wrote, edited, and published it myself.

It's increasingly clear that the LLMs leave more of a mark than authors realize when they run their writing through for a touching-up. This has been coming up a lot lately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346449 . That's why readers end up reacting to the LLM imprints rather than the content. I don't mean to be critical because it's a good article! But I bet if you shared the version before it was "tightened u…

As I'm asking folks what bits they think are LLM imprints, they keep showing me bits that I originally wrote. It's really weird.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#365

Post by lmorchard »

furyofantares wrote: post #145
lmorchard wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I have a grating LLM-voice, then, because I don't think it sounds particularly different than how I've written other posts.

I've read through your comments on HN and you really don't. Comments and a blog post are different things but the difference in voice is stark. In your comments it's clear someone writing it cares about things.

My comments are often more off-the-cuff than my blog posts—I spend more time editing the posts, usually

Re: Grief and the AI split

#366

Post by hinkley »

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.

Some of us hate this part. They don’t want to learn the domain to that degree. It’s not always the dumb ones either.

However there’s not a lot of overlap I’ve noticed between the craftsman crowd and that one.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#367

Post by simonw »

skydhash wrote: post #348
simonw wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That codebase existed for 20 years and had contributions from nearly 200 people. Sure, they could have come up with those optimizations without AI... but they didn't. What's your theory for why that is?

Maybe because it’s a non issue. I saw that those improvements are in the order of micro seconds, while the transfer time of a page is measure in 1/10 seconds or even several seconds. Even a game engine have something like 15 ms to have a frame ready (60hz).

Lots of small improvements add up - the total performance improvement is 53%. That's significant.

If you're the size of Shopify that represents a huge saving in server costs and improved customer-facing latency.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#368

Post by svilen_dobrev »

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…

i wonder, is the divide something like Pirsig's classical vs romantic ? First see mostly-functionality / facts, want to understand to the bones, latter see .. appearance / utility / feelings, want to just-get-on-with-it ?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#369

Post by jasonlotito »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #336
jasonlotito wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolutist extremes here is wild. Let's just push the pedal to the metal. The real split are between those that support science and technology, and those that hate science and technology and want to see more children die.

The same children that those pushing for "science and technology" were sending to work in mines during last spectacular technological developments that promised to reduce need for hard-breaking labor?

Supporting "kill the children" seems like such a bad take, but you do you.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#370

Post by pibaker »

lmorchard wrote: post #364
dang wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's increasingly clear that the LLMs leave more of a mark than authors realize when they run their writing through for a touching-up. This has been coming up a lot lately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346449 . That's why readers end up reacting to the LLM imprints rather than the content. I don't mean to be critical because it's a good article! But I bet if you shared the version before it was "tightened u…

As I'm asking folks what bits they think are LLM imprints, they keep showing me bits that I originally wrote. It's really weird.

Maybe the imprints aren't on your text, but on your soul, my dear friend :)
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