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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#501

Post by Revanche1367 »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #371
terminalbraid wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The better analogy is you're now a shop manager or even just QA. You don't need to touch, look at, or think about the production process past asking for something and seeing if the final result fits the bill. You get something that looks like a cabinet because you asked for a cabinet. I don't consider that "woodworking craft", power tools or otherwise.

If it looks like a cabinet, works as a cabinet and doesn’t fall apart, by all intents and purposes it’s a cabinet. 99% of people out there won’t care if it was a “craftsman” or a robot built it. Just like most people buy furniture at Ikea.

The difference is that the person who was a woodworker is no longer needed. Why can’t the customer just walk up to a kiosk and ask the machine to start building? The machine or another one specialized for QA can then assess if it fits all the technical requirements which the customer doesn’t necessarily understand. This is what most people here are worried about, eventually the professional human being will no longer be needed by businesses which can produce everything with neither customer nor business owner being in need of specialized knowledge which they previously needed to acquire by hiring professionals.

Re: We mourn our craft

#502

Post by stoneforger »

icedchai wrote: post #477
tatjam wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree with this, and in fact I do often use LLMs for for these tasks! I guess my message is more intended towards vibe-only coders (and, I guess, the non-technical higher ups drooling at the idea of never having to hire another developer).

I see junior PM types glowing about being able to lead teams of agents, doing their bidding without putting up a fuss or argument. Short term, developers are in for a world of hurt. Long term, we're going to need a lot more to clean this crap up.

Noone will clean it up, it's a societal problem. The koolaid is produce more, like we need another app for X . We are celebrating owning nothing, as a liberating act. People hate mental load yes, this is the perfect drug. You don't need to think or challenge anything. If the model says it's okay, it's okay. Local models will never be able to democratise this. People will do as they are told, and another generation of consumers will follow. The matrix won't be a prison, it will be a prompt from birth to death. And y'all clapping cause you can have X number of agents running around burning tokens like kids looking at the fire cracker on their hand about to blow up, giggling. The world was always mad, and this is proof it will always be mad while people are still around.

Re: We mourn our craft

#503

Post by chkaloon »

socalgal2 wrote: post #489
crawshaw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to see this already expressed here because I wholly agree. Programming has not brought me this much joy in decades. What a wonderful time to be alive.

I wish I could have you sit by my side for a week or two and pair program what I'm working on because most for the time I'm not getting great results.

Depends on the project. For web based functionality it seems great, because of all the prior work that is out there. For more obscure things like Obsidian Note extentions or Home Assistant help it's more hit and miss

Re: We mourn our craft

#504

Post by oxag3n »

> wait six months

from other sources: 6-12 months, by end of 2025, ChatGPT 7.

It's a concern trolling and astroturfing at it best.

One camp of fellow coders who are saying how their productivity grew 100x but we are all doomed, another camp of AI enthusiasts who got ability to deliver products and truly believe in their newly acquired superiority.

It's all either true or false, but if in six months it becomes true, we'll know it, each one of us.

However, if it's all BS and in six months there will be Windows 95 written by LLM but real code still requires organic intelligence, there won't be any accountability, and that's sad.

Re: We mourn our craft

#505

Post by chasd00 »

_zagj wrote: post #238
sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We could easily approach a state of affairs where most of what you see online is AI and almost every "person" you interact with is fake. It's hard to see how someone who supposedly remembers computing in the 80s, when the power of USENET and BBSs to facilitate long-distance, or even international, communication and foster personal relationship…

even in the 90s there was the phrase "the Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the teen girls are FBI agents". It was always the case you never really knew who/what you were dealing with on the Internet.

Re: We mourn our craft

#506

Post by stoneforger »

icedchai wrote: post #455
gamblor956 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI can do the coding, those of us who aren't programmers don't need you anymore. We can just tell the AI what we want. Luckily for real programmers, AI's not actually very good at generating quality code. It generates the equivalent of Ali Baba code: it lasts for one week and then breaks. This is going to be the future of programming: low-paid AI clerks to generate the initial software, and then the highly paid pr…

Yes. The problem is there is a huge invisible gap between "looks like it works" and "actually works", and everything that entails, like security and scaling beyond a couple users. Non-programmers and inexperienced ones will have trouble with those gaps. Welcome to our slop filled future.

It's been here since it's inception. The more the market grew and the more computing became widespread, the greater the number of ravenous sociopaths with other people's money got involved. This is just another version of Rome burning. This is the terminal acceleration phase. The lunatics are running everything to the ground and the few sane people left are labeled the same way they always had been. The useful idiots are just thinking they're so much smarter. Noone asked if it is wise or not, they are thinking they can outrun the treadmill. Just add water and LLM, it's so much fun for the whole family.

Re: We mourn our craft

#507

Post by bigstrat2003 »

I've been hearing "the LLM can write better code than a human, and if you don't believe me, wait six months" for years now. Such predictions haven't been true before and I don't believe they are true now.

Re: We mourn our craft

#508

Post by stoneforger »

eslaught wrote: post #435
geetee wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that our identity is grounded in being competent, it's that we're tired of cleaning up messes left by people taking shortcuts.

It's that, but it's also that the incentives are misaligned. How many supposed "10x" coders actually produced unreadable code that no one else could maintain? But then the effort to produce that code is lauded while the nightmare maintenance of said code is somehow regarded as unimpressive, despite being massively more difficult? I worry that we're creating a world where it is becoming easy, even trivial, to be that…

It's a societal problem we are just seeing the effects in computing now. People have given up, everything is too much, the sociopaths won, they can do what they want with my body mind and soul. Give me convenience or give me death.

Re: We mourn our craft

#509

Post by ozozozd »

I can relate coz once upon a time I enjoyed reading poetic code - which I later found to be impossible to modify or extend.

> Eventually your boss will start asking why you’re getting paid twice your zoomer colleagues’ salary to produce a tenth of the code.

And then I couldn’t relate because no one ever paid me for lines of code. And the hardest programming I ever did was when it took me 2 days to write 2 lines of C code, which did solve a big problem.

I abhorred the LOC success metric because we had to clean up after those who dumped their code diarrhea to fool those who thought every line of code is added value. Not to mention valuing LOC strictly makes you a junior programmer.

E.g. you have to know more to do the following in 2 lines (yes, you can):

‘’’ t = a; a = b; b = a; ‘’’

According to LOC missionaries these 3 lines are more expensive to write and shows that you’re a better programmer than the XOR swap. But it’s actually more expensive to run it than the XOR swap, and it’s more expensive to hire the person who can write the XOR swap. (Not endorsing clever/cryptic code, just making a point about LOC)

So, if the LOC missionaries are out of a job because of LLMs, I will probably celebrate.

Re: We mourn our craft

#510

Post by naragon »

teeray wrote: post #317

> because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike Sure, maybe it takes me a little while to ride across town on my bike, but I can reliably get there and I understand every aspect of the road to my destination. The bazooka-powered jetpack might get me there in seconds, but it also might fly me across state lines, or to Antarctica, or the moon first, belching out clouds…

Like the cab drivers in London who have to know the city inside and out? https://wheelchairtravel.org/london-black-cab-driver-knowled...
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