391–400 of 764 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but bad ingredients do not make a yummy pudding. Or, it's like trying to make a MacBook Pro by buying electronics boards from AliExpress and wiring them together.
I'd rather have a laptop made from AliExpress components than only have a single artisanal hand-crafted resistor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but bad ingredients do not make a yummy pudding. Or, it's like trying to make a MacBook Pro by buying electronics boards from AliExpress and wiring them together.
I'd rather have a laptop made from AliExpress components than only have a single artisanal hand-crafted resistor.
For me it's always been the effort that's fun, and I increasingly miss that. Today it feels like I'm playing the same video game I used to enjoy with all the cheats on, or going back to an early level after maxing out my character. In some ways the game play is the same, same enemies, same map, etc, but the action itself misses the depth that comes from the effort of playing without cheats or with a weaker character and completing the stage.
What I miss personally is coming up with something in my head and having to build it with my own fingers with effort. There's something rewarding about that which you don't get from just typing "I want x".
I think this craving for effort is a very human thing to be honest... It's why we bake bread at home instead just buying it from a locally bakery that realistically will be twice as good. The enjoyment comes from the effort. I personally like building furniture and although my furniture sucks compared to what you might be able buy at store, it's so damn rewarding to spend days working on something then having a real physical thing that you can use that you build from hand.
I've never thought of myself as someone who likes the challenge of coding. I just like building things. And I think I like building things because building things is hard. Or at least it was.
You were walking to your destination which was three miles away You now have a bicycle which gets you there in a third of the time You need to find destinations that are 3x as far away than before
This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080 "Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about wha…
But you can move a layer up. Instead of pouring all of your efforts into making one single static object with no moving parts, you can simply specify the individual parts, have the machine make them for you, and pour your heart and soul into making a machine that is composed of thousands of parts, that you could never hope to make if you had to craft each one by hand from clay. We used to have a way to do this before…
As someone that started with Machine Code, I'm grateful for compiled -even interpreted- languages. I can’t imagine doing the kind of work that I do, nowadays, in Machine Code.
I’m finding it quite interesting, using LLM-assisted development. I still need to keep an eye on things (for example, the LLM tends to suggest crazy complex solutions, like writing an entire control from scratch, when a simple subclass, and five lines of code, will work much better), but it’s actually been a great boon.
I find that I learn a lot, using an LLM, and I love to learn.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OS and compilers have a deterministic public interface. They obey a specification developers know, so you they can be relied on to write correct software that depends on them even without knowing the internal behavior. Generative AI does not have those properties.
But the code you’re writing is guard railed by your oversight, the tests you decide on and the type checking. So whether you’re writing the spec code out by hand or ask an LLM to do it is besides the point if the code is considered a means to an end, which is what the post above yours was getting at.
Also the code is not a means to an end. It’s going to be run somewhere doing stuff someone wants to do reliably and precisely. The overall goal was ever to invest some programmer time and salary in order to free more time for others. Not for everyone to start babysitting stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an amazing quote - thank you. This is also my argument for why I can't use LLMs for writing (proofreading is OK) - what I write is not produced as a side-effect of thinking through a problem, writing is how I think through a problem.
Writing is how I think through a problem too, but that also applies to writing and communicating with an AI coding agent. I don't need to write the code per se to do the thinking.