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Fuck it, make it anyway

joelotter.com

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Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#401

Post by groundzeros2015 »

djha-skin wrote: post #384
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that it falls apart after the first 1000 or so lines.

I used to think this but then improved and found that it was a matter of tooling. Using beads[1] and getting the AI to write its own tickets and wiki articles using GitHub's wiki feature on repos, it can keep track of long horizon projects pretty easily. Then you curate some of the tickets or read through them and have them update the beads or adjust them as they work them. When they want to retain some important pie…

I’m not into the personal wiki thing, let alone an AI wiki. This feels like productivity porn.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#402

Post by perching_aix »

user43928 wrote: post #142
lelanthran wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter when you post it; some kid with a $200 claude sub (or cheaper) is going to clone it for far cheaper than you, and sell it for far cheaper than you. There's no friction to what you produced, so why do you think that you won't have 100s of clones, all cheaper? We're now in a market for lemons as far as software goes.

I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction. If I told you the exact market and use case, I'd still have a decent head start, but indeed, someone without a job could invest more time than I do. People in a cheaper location can work for far cheaper than I can afford to. With head start I don't meant that the idea is so novel that I need to keep it a secret. However, I believe that if there is an…

That's the thing. The moment you publish, the design you spent 100s of hours on also becomes public, at which point it becomes entirely replicable with little to no recourse. Hence the theme of this entire thread: a devaluement spiral.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#403

Post by groundzeros2015 »

someguynamedq wrote: post #396
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that it falls apart after the first 1000 or so lines.

Then you're really really bad at using it. At the very least it is functional with minimal effort on codebases with 10s of thounsand

Or what happens is that after 1000 lines there are hundreds of decisions it would have to consider to do anything and it doesn’t do that and instead finds the smallest path to insert its latest request.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#404

Post by cmiles74 »

Towaway69 wrote: post #324
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now the AI companies are selling their product at a loss to try to get us hooked. I think it's fair to describe the current situation as "unreasonably cheap", though free is a bit of a stretch.

It will be interesting to see what happens when human developers become cheaper than token maxxing AIs. Interesting because by then codebases might have become so complex that these can no longer be modified, maintained nor understood by humans, so replacing AI with HI (human intelligence) will simply no longer possible. That then represents a certain vendor lock-in or Mafia stand off: either keeping paying or have a…

Will the LLM tools be able to maintain this pile of code either? In my experience there seems to be some complexity maximum to a project that, once reached, the LLM tooling doesn't seem able to manage it either.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#405

Post by GeneralMayhem »

59percentmore wrote: post #376
GeneralMayhem wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that there are finite hours in the day. I enjoy the process and craft very much, but I also enjoy making high tech salaries. Up until a year or so ago, those weren't contradictory, because the craft paid well. Now, continuing to be employed in an AI-dominated industry means that I can no longer practice my craft at work most days. So now I need to find the motivation to do it in my spare time - and this while…

Welcome to the world everyone else has to muddle through. The solution has long been, and remains, "Organize and demand enough money to live on from ~20 hours of employed labor a week, spend the rest of the time as you'd like."

Sure, I acknowledge that it was incredibly rare and lucky for "the thing I enjoy doing" and "the thing that pays" to have been the same for so long. That doesn't mean it's not painful for that to change out from under me - especially when I can't quite convince myself that the new way of doing things is actually better by any metric.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#406

Post by chorizo »

MachineMan wrote: post #10

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longe…

Honestly, enjoying the craft hasn’t resulted in a career related to it. My real job and chores take up most of my capacity, leaving little to enjoy the craft. But now with AI, I can play with crafting as if it was a video game. The end results, which nowhere near is satisfying, is better than nothing. Coding with AI feels gamified and simulated, but still somehow creates useful outcomes.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#407

Post by zer00eyz »

59percentmore wrote: post #328
zer00eyz wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. 30 years in tech, programing and I have the complete opposite take. My lawyer and writer friends asking me about containers and cron jobs is fascinating. These people are fulfilling the old promises of VB script, AppleScript, IFTT and all the…

It's interesting to hear that lawyers are coming to you with those questions, because my read was that there was almost universal contempt for AI within law (save for the few "dumb" enough to use it and get caught).

The language of the law attempts to be consistent, legal English isnt entirely the same as ours, it remains somewhat inured to modernization. It is, if nothing a domain specific way of writing. (There is a great bit by Lenny Bruce on this very topic)

If a basic filing with some citations is needed, letting one AI generate it, and then another validate it (to catch soft ball hallucinations) leaves it to be read and reviewed.

Lawyers, good ones, are by trade, critical readers and reviewers of documents. The contempt exists for those who fail to do this part of the job. Letting AI write your submission without reviewing it, validating it, is telling.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#408

Post by swat535 »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #354
pastel8739 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value. This is sort of meaningless; the purpose of _every_ job is to produce value. The reason I chose to be a software engineer is because I enjoy solving the kinds of problems that it involved, not because it would allow me to deliver value to companies. Changing what a programmer does is _changing the job_, an…

If I could get paid a Bay Area software engineering salary to clean the bathroom instead, I think I would actually prefer to clean the bathroom. Software engineering requires me to actually use a large part of my mind. Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, would leave my mind largely free to think whatever I feel like. The physical movement is probably better for the body, too.

Very off topic but I think you would highly enjoy watching the movie "Perfect Days (2023)" directed by Wim Wenders.

It had a profound effect on me in introspecting my long software career.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#409

Post by someguynamedq »

dofm wrote: post #200
CuriouslyC wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're projecting, and there are plenty of people in crafts who are using AI output as an input to their own works who are having a blast. AI images make amazing collages/photobash inputs, and AI music is useful to sample or use as inspiration for parts you're stuck on. These people just keep quiet about their use because of the witch hunts being persecuted by people who are afraid of change. AI use in creative field…

> You're projecting, No, I'm actually not. I'm an active creative portrait photographer and I take part in photographic communities with people much, much better than me, I am surrounded by dozens of gigging and working musicians, songwriters and composers in my friend group (and play a couple of instruments myself); I know painters and illustrators of great ability (though I am not that kind of artist). I listen to…

You're creating illusory boundaries to protect your ego. AI is not a supernatural category. It's just another thing. It can serve as inspiration the way anything else can.

You are not the arbiter of value in art, as much as you try to claim authority. You're just rationalizing your arbitrary beliefs.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#410

Post by wiz21c »

pastel8739 wrote: post #257
imdsm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. The feeling I get is that…

> The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value. This is sort of meaningless; the purpose of _every_ job is to produce value. The reason I chose to be a software engineer is because I enjoy solving the kinds of problems that it involved, not because it would allow me to deliver value to companies. Changing what a programmer does is _changing the job_, an…

I approach the thing differntly. My goal is not to add value (value means money and I don't care). I'm in for "creativity" though. I like to create programs. I'm not particularily fond of programming though. So what I have always done is to work on never-done-before stuff. Oh, I don't mean rocket science nor anything spectacular, but I like to be where defining the problem or understanding the problem is as much or more important as the skill needed to solve it.

For example, I'm working on an emulator in a field where emulators do exist since long. So I set myself to improve these emulators by emulating tricky corner cases. These corner cases do not exist in AI's memory because nobody has ever coded them. So although I use quite a lot of AI to investigate the corner cases, the actual problem solving is entirely mine. So I stay happy :-)

In my daytime job, a big part of what I do already exists in some form or another (fluid dynamics). But my job is more of understanding what I do so that I can convince someone else that my programs are robust and reliable. So again, I'm programming a lot with AI, but the important stuff, it's my skill to understand it, not AI.

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