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AI code and software craft

alexwennerberg.com

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Re: AI code and software craft

#51

Post by hackyhacky »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #36
slotrans wrote: post #11

The AI code takeover will not free engineers up to do craftsmanship. It will annihilate the last vestiges of craftsmanship forever.

New technology does not eliminate old technology or craftsmanship. It just shifts who uses it and what for. - Power tools didn't annihilate the craftsmanship of hand-tool woodworking. Fine woodworkers are still around and making money using hand tools, as well as hobbyists. But contractors universally switched to power tools because they help them make more money with less labor/cost/time. - A friend of mine still kn…

You give examples where crafts based on pre-industrial technology still exist. You're right, but you're proving the GP's point.

200 years ago, being a blacksmith was a viable career path. Now it's not. The use of hand tools, hand knitting, and hand forging is limited to niche, exotic, or hobbyist areas. The same could be said of making clothes by hand or developing film photographs. Coding will be relegated to the same purgatory: not completely forgotten, but considered an obsolete eccentricity. Effectively all software will be made by AI. Students will not study coding, the knowledge of our generation will be lost.

Re: AI code and software craft

#52

Post by jlipps »

tikhonj wrote: post #50
jlipps wrote: post #45

I love the references to Jacques Ellul's ideas, which I think are interesting to reflect on in an AI age. It helps make clear that what is fundamentally at stake in much technological "progress" is an (often only tacitly acknowledged) sublimation of "efficiency" to the place of highest value. What's fascinating is that this value elevation seems to have gone largely unchallenged, despite being in essence an arbitrary…

Efficiency isn't even the best way to optimize for (expected) shareholder returns for an organization! Efficiency fundamentally trades-off against adaptability and resilience.

Yes, good point! Further underscoring the fetishistic nature of efficiency as highest value ;-)

Re: AI code and software craft

#53

Post by FarmerPotato »

+1 for the mention of Forth. I use it often. LLM answers are possible now, but they are like translated C. It’s very bad style.

The standard: Forth words should be a few lines of code with a straightforward stack effect. Top level of a program might be 5 words.

LLM will generate some subroutines and one big word of 20-50 lines of nested IF..THEN..ELSE and DO..WHILE just as if it writing C.

Re: AI code and software craft

#54

Post by hackyhacky »

Herring wrote: post #3

This argument is basically just the 1800s Luddite vs Industrialist argument recast for a new age. Group A thinks quality is about human agency, and that machines are being used to bypass the apprenticeship system and produce inferior goods. Group B thinks efficiency is the highest priority, and craft is just vanity. Of course as we know we went a third way, and human roles just shifted. I think one promising shift di…

The Luddites indeed lost their jobs to machines, but they could find other jobs, and their children adapted to the changed world.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, thinks that this disruption be different from that one. From his article The Adolescence of Technology, currently on HN's front page:

> AI will be capable of a very wide range of human cognitive abilities—perhaps all of them. This is very different from previous technologies like mechanized farming, transportation, or even computers. This will make it harder for people to switch easily from jobs that are displaced to similar jobs that they would be a good fit for. For example, the general intellectual abilities required for entry-level jobs in, say, finance, consulting, and law are fairly similar, even if the specific knowledge is quite different. A technology that disrupted only one of these three would allow employees to switch to the two other close substitutes (or for undergraduates to switch majors). But disrupting all three at once (along with many other similar jobs) may be harder for people to adapt to. Furthermore, it’s not just that most existing jobs will be disrupted. That part has happened before—recall that farming was a huge percentage of employment. But farmers could switch to the relatively similar work of operating factory machines, even though that work hadn’t been common before. By contrast, AI is increasingly matching the general cognitive profile of humans, which means it will also be good at the new jobs that would ordinarily be created in response to the old ones being automated. Another way to say it is that AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.

Re: AI code and software craft

#55

Post by adithyassekhar »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #43
adithyassekhar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think one promising shift direction is humans do NOT like to talk to bots, especially not for anything important. It's biological. Let me tell you why I like shopping from amazon instead of going to a super market... But also the older I get I keep wanting to visit the store in person. It's not to see the other human, I just want to hold the thing I want to buy and need it immediately instead of waiting. I feel l…

You talk to bots on Amazon? If say Hacker News was entirely just bots, why would you bother commenting, why would you bother reading the comments?

This is exactly why I come here. I just woke up and didn't feel like dealing with people today and made that comment. Now you got me thinking, I do like to be social. Just not the kind where the other person is actively trying to sell me something often by being dishonest.

I remember a sales person in a store actively trying to shame me for purchasing from a brand he didn't prefer. I gave him a lot of chances to get off of me, respectfully and firmly. Some really are like blood sucking leeches, they don't come off. He was probably paid to do that.

Re: AI code and software craft

#56

Post by mbesto »

will__ness wrote: post #17

> But there are serious limits. [Your coding agent] will lie to you, they don't really understand things, and they often generate bad code. I think that really high quality code can be created via coding agents. Not in one prompt, but instead an orchestration of planning, implementing, validating, and reviewing. Its still engineering work. The code still matters. Its just a different tool to write the code. I'd compa…

> high quality code

What does high quality code look like?

> The code still matters.

How so?

Re: AI code and software craft

#57

Post by pixl97 »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #40
skybrian wrote: post #2

Enterprise software tends to particularly bad because it's being sold to managers who won't use it themselves. Consumer software tends to be more user-friendly (or it won't sell), but popular software isn't always what you want. When writing software for yourself, there is a bias towards implementing just the features you want and never mind the rest. Sometimes the result can be pretty sloppy, but it works. However,…

Enterprise software is also particularly bad because many of the customers get to demand that things work the way they want. Leading to a million weird functions, toggles, configurability because some manager in charge of making a big purchase demanded that first it must do X, many of these features left with not even a single user after the original requester leaves. While consumer software the individual consumers…

>many of the customers get to demand that things work the way they want

This here so much. When some group paying you millions is saying they want a feature or they will look at competitors all kinds of crap ends up in the software.

Re: AI code and software craft

#58

Post by ekianjo »

Herring wrote: post #3

This argument is basically just the 1800s Luddite vs Industrialist argument recast for a new age. Group A thinks quality is about human agency, and that machines are being used to bypass the apprenticeship system and produce inferior goods. Group B thinks efficiency is the highest priority, and craft is just vanity. Of course as we know we went a third way, and human roles just shifted. I think one promising shift di…

> It's biological.

Nonsense. We never evolved to send text messages and yet here we are with social networks, chat systems and emails used everywhere for everything.

Re: AI code and software craft

#59

Post by simplify »

acedTrex wrote: post #26
nubg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself.

I mean yes, i am speaking for myself. I am drowning in mountains of LLM slop patches lol. I WISH people were using LLMs as "just another tool to generate code, akin to a vim vs emacs discussion."

LLMs are an amplifier. The great get greater, and the lazier get lazier.

Re: AI code and software craft

#60

Post by ekianjo »

fwip wrote: post #9
convolvatron wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think it's the same at all. when weaving was displaced, yes some people were pissed about losing their livelihood, but the quality of the cloth didn't diminish. when CNC came for machining, no one really bitched, because the computers were just removing the time consuming effort of moving screws by hand. when computers write code, or screenplays, the quality right now is objectively much worse. that might chan…

The available quality of cloth did, in fact, diminish.

Not really. Polymers in clothes are everywhere and they have very désirable properties compared to pure cotton. Untreated cotton had many problems.
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