51–60 of 102 posts
what you do when things get easier is... go try something more difficult
If before it was hard to build one software thing
And now it's easy but building 10 software things is hard (or some other kind of new software thing)
Then you build the 10 or new hard software thing
Satisfaction restored?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software has, with precious few exceptions, almost always been held together with duct tape and a prayer.
The issue is not duct tape, the issue is having someone you can rely on to know what to tape.
> Turning this essay into a song in the style of 2000's Hip Hop? It used to be hard Have you listened to the song he links? It's very convincing. If you were just casually listening to it in the grocery store, you wouldn't notice it was made by AI.
What type of applications are y'all seeing from LLMs? Anecdotally the only thing that has changed for me is the ability to output more code. That's not software. My coworker is a 10x vibe-coder and his flagship application is held together with brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests. This is not software. This is just held together with…
Software has, with precious few exceptions, almost always been held together with duct tape and a prayer.
If you're not finding it hard to write software any more, write more ambitious software . I'm taking on massively more ambitious projects than I was just a year ago, and it's taking every inch of my skill and experience to do that. Building software feels harder now, and I'm really enjoying it.
This is the right take. I wouldn't dare to write a TypeScript compiler a year ago but now I'm trying it and I have to say this has taught me so much about compilers, Rust and performance overall that wouldn't be possible before. It's a lot of fun to embrace the new technology and do bigger things. Doing this sort of project is giving me a glimpse of what it is going to be like managing software projects. As software…
What type of applications are y'all seeing from LLMs? Anecdotally the only thing that has changed for me is the ability to output more code. That's not software. My coworker is a 10x vibe-coder and his flagship application is held together with brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests. This is not software. This is just held together with…
These used to be hard things that the author listed, and a potential next evolution from 1 minute of abstract thinking on my own:
1. "Building a financial model to compare recent S-1 filings?" - Build a bigger model to do a larger and hopefully more accurate/conclusive model.
2. "Photoshopping recent presidents onto Mount Rushmore?" - Make a physical model of recent presidents on mt Rushmore.
3. "Turning this essay into a song in the style of 2000's Hip Hop?" - Make a song that people actually give a shit about.
Like cmon folks, none of these seemingly hard things were actually all that useful for humanity, but rather just a task that was put in front of us because of the environment we were/are in.
Pre and post ai-boom; most software I interact with is dog shit. Not much has changed there other than speed.
This is simplistic. The hard part of writing professional software has never been the code. All the remaining problems still exists and I dare to say they were made worse.
I think emotions are an underrated aspect to the "AI changes how we work" thing. Everyone I know extensively uses AI in most parts of their work. Basically everyone has multiplied their output by a lot. But I don't know many people who say they enjoy their work more because of AI. I definitely resonate with the pain of watching something that required so many little bits of knowledge you earned over years melt into p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think writing code was ever hard. It’s basically the same level of difficulty as learning to write sheet music, a foreign language, or mathematical formula. Same with basic computer concepts. The hardest part is the formal logic, recursive reasoning, and how to abstract. It’s a thinking mode that some find difficult to adopt. As for domain knowledge, I don’t think that has ever been difficult to obtain. Just…
Interesting - I’ve been thinking that when people say “writing code” they mean figuring out abstractions, logic, reasoning. Without that, what’s left? The syntax? Realizing we might not all have the same thing in mind when someone says “writing code was never hard/easy” is making a lot of other comments I’ve read here make more sense!
Abstractions, logic, and reasoning is not helped by AI tools. Yes they can give you a ready-made solution, but you’ll need to exercise judgement to see if it really fits the problem. And doing the latter can be as hard as just doing it yourself.