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Believe the Checkbook

robertgreiner.com

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Re: Believe the Checkbook

#41

Post by fwip »

fwip wrote: post #26
zamadatix wrote: post #9

Something about the way the article sets up the conversation nags at me a bit - even though it concludes with statements and reasoning I generally agree quite well with. It sets out what it wants to argue clearly at the start: > Everyone’s heard the line: “AI will write all the code; engineering as you know it is finished... The Bun acquisition blows a hole in that story.” But what the article actually discusses and…

I mean, it smells an AI slop article, so it's hard to expect much coherence.

I guess y'all disagree?

> The Bun acquisition blows a hole in that story.

> That contradiction is not a PR mistake. It is a signal.

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment.

> They didn’t buy a pile of code. They bought a track record of correct calls in a complex, fast-moving domain.

> Leaders don’t express their true beliefs in blog posts or conference quotes. They express them in hiring plans, acquisition targets, and compensation bands.

Not to mention the gratuitous italics-within-bold usage.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#42

Post by maccard »

faxmeyourcode wrote: post #28

While I agree with the premise of the article, even if it was a bit shallow, this claim made at the beginning is also still true: > Everyone’s heard the line: “AI will write all the code; engineering as you know it is finished.” Software engineering pre-LLMs will never, ever come back. Lots of folks are not understanding that. What we're doing at the end of 2025 looks so much different than what we were doing at the…

Does it?

I use AI as a smart auto complete - I’ve tried multiple tools on multiple models and I still _regularlt_ have it dump absolute nonsense into my editor - in thr best case it’s gone on a tangent, but in the most common case it’s assumed something (often times directly contradicting what I’ve asked it to do), gone with it, and lost the plot along the way. Of course when I correct it it says “you’re right, X doesn’t exist so we need to do X”…

Has it made me faster? Yes. Had it changed engineering - not even close. There’s absolutely no world where I would trust what I’ve seen out of these tools to run in the real world even with supervision.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#43

Post by bibimsz »

RandallBrown wrote: post #7

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

I thought you were going to point how this phrase (and others) make it painfully obvious this article was written by AI.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#44

Post by fragmede »

RandallBrown wrote: post #18
gowld wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this thinking. How many hours per week did you spend coding on your most recent project? If you could do something else during that time, and the code still got written, what would you do? Or are you saying that you believe you can't get that code written without spending an equivalent amount of time describing your judgments?

In my experience (and especially at my current job) bottlenecks are more often organizational than technical. I spend a lot of time waiting for others to make decisions before I can actually proceed with any work. My judgement is built in to the time it takes me to code. I think I would be spending the same amount of time doing that while reviewing the AI code to make sure it isn't doing something silly (even if it d…

Does voice transcription count as AI? I'm an okay typer, but being able to talk to my computer, in English, is definitely part of the productivity speed up for me. Even though it struggles to do css because css is the devil, being able to yell at my computer and have it actually do things is cathartic in ways I never thought possible.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#45

Post by fragmede »

RunSet wrote: post #37
ryandrake wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual act of typing code into a text editor and building it could be the least interesting and least valuable part of software development. A developer who sees their job as "writing code" or a company leader who sees engineers' jobs as "writing code" is totally missing where the value is created. Yes, there is artistry, craftsmanship, and "beautiful code" which shouldn't be overlooked. But I believe that beauti…

Raising the question: Where is the beautiful machine-generated code?

Where's the beautiful human generated code? There's the IOCCC but that's the only code comleo that's a competition based on the code itself, and it's not even a beauty pageant. There's some demo scene stuff, which is more of a golf thing. There's random one-offs, like not-Carmack's inverse square, or Duff's device, but other than that, where're the good code beauty pageants?

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#46

Post by imron »

croes wrote: post #16
zamadatix wrote: post #9

Something about the way the article sets up the conversation nags at me a bit - even though it concludes with statements and reasoning I generally agree quite well with. It sets out what it wants to argue clearly at the start: > Everyone’s heard the line: “AI will write all the code; engineering as you know it is finished... The Bun acquisition blows a hole in that story.” But what the article actually discusses and…

But the engineers can do it because they have written lots of code before. Where will these engineers get their experience in the future. And what about vibe coding? The whole point and selling point of many AI companies is that you don’t need experience as a programmer. So they sell something that isn’t true, it’s not FSD for coding but driving assistance.

> Where will these engineers get their experience in the future

The house of the feeble minded: https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#47

Post by barfoure »

I disagree with this article and what it attempts to do: frame the acquisition using a conjecture. The only thing to “believe” are the authors reasons - which are flimsy, because they are the very thing we need to be critical of.

I don’t know why the acquisition happened, or what the plans are. But it did happen, and for this we don’t have to suspend disbelief. I don’t doubt Anthropic has plans that they would rather not divulge. This isn’t a big stretch of imagination, either.

We will see how things play out, but people are definitely being displaced by AI software doing work, and people are productive with them. I know I am. The user count of Claude Code, Gemini and ChatGPT don’t lie, so let’s not kid ourselves.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#48

Post by glitchc »

ryandrake wrote: post #25
kibwen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Writing code" is not the goal. The goal is to design a coherent logical system that achieves some goal. So the practice of programming is in thinking hard about what goal I want to achieve, then thinking about the sort of logical system that I could design that would allow me to verifiably achieve that goal, then actually banging out the code that implements the abstract logical system that I have in my head, then i…

The actual act of typing code into a text editor and building it could be the least interesting and least valuable part of software development. A developer who sees their job as "writing code" or a company leader who sees engineers' jobs as "writing code" is totally missing where the value is created. Yes, there is artistry, craftsmanship, and "beautiful code" which shouldn't be overlooked. But I believe that beauti…

Excellent point. Why are folks downvoting this?

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#49

Post by 0x3f »

SoftTalker wrote: post #24
0x3f wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This argument requires us to believe that AI will just asymptote and not get materially better. That's not what asymptote means. Presumably what you mean is the curve levelling off, which it already is.

This seems overly pedantic. The intended meaning is clear.

Hardly, asymptotic behavior can be anything, in fact that's the whole question: what happens to AI performance as we tend to infinity? Asymptoting to `y = x` is very different to levelling off.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#50

Post by ehutch79 »

fragmede wrote: post #44
RandallBrown wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience (and especially at my current job) bottlenecks are more often organizational than technical. I spend a lot of time waiting for others to make decisions before I can actually proceed with any work. My judgement is built in to the time it takes me to code. I think I would be spending the same amount of time doing that while reviewing the AI code to make sure it isn't doing something silly (even if it d…

Does voice transcription count as AI? I'm an okay typer, but being able to talk to my computer, in English, is definitely part of the productivity speed up for me. Even though it struggles to do css because css is the devil, being able to yell at my computer and have it actually do things is cathartic in ways I never thought possible.

No, not ai. Just an alternative input method.
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