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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#521

Post by killerstorm »

bopbopbop7 wrote: post #312
killerstorm wrote: post #99

I hope that "our craft" which now produces, largely, vulnerable buggy bloatware actually dies. Perhaps people or machines will finally figure out how to make software which actually works without a need to weekly patching

Something tells me a non-deterministic code generator won't be the solution to this problem.

You're missing the point. Consider this:

Mathematicians use LLMs. Obviously, they don't trust LLM to do math. But LLM can help with formalizing a theorem, then finding a formal proof. It's usually a very tedious thing - but LLMs are _already_ quite good at that. In the end you get a proof which gets checked by normal proof-checking software (not LLM!), you can also inspect, break into parts, etc.

You really need to look into detail rather than dismiss wholesale ("It made a math error so it's bad at math" is wrong.)

Re: We mourn our craft

#522

Post by lovich »

puchatek wrote: post #390
kaffekaka wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is the issue. We truly have something incredible now. Something that could benefit all of humanity. Unfortunately it comes at $200/month from Sam Altman & co.

If that was the final price, no strings attached and perfect, reliable privacy then I might consider it. Maybe not for the current iteration but for what will be on offer in a year or two. But as it stands right now, the most useful LLMs are hosted by companies that are legally obligated to hand over your data if the US gov. had decided that it wants it. It's unacceptable.

That 200/month price isn’t sustainable either. Eventually they’re going to have to jack that up substantially.

Re: We mourn our craft

#523

Post by stoneforger »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #236
12_throw_away wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have formal languages for a reason Right? At least on HN, there's a critical mass of people loudly ignoring this these days, but no one has explained to me how replacing formal language with an english-language-specialized chatbot - or even multiple independent chatbots (aka "an agent") - is good tradeoff to make.

It's "good" from the standpoint of business achieving their objectives more quickly. That may not be what we think of as objectively good in some higher sense, but it's what matters most in terms of what actually happens in the world.

Should it be what matters most? Idiots leading idiots in a circle.

Re: We mourn our craft

#524

Post by fupaskys »

nradov wrote: post #420
HendrikHensen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for you. But there are already so, so many posts and threads celebrating all of this. Everyone is different. Some of us enjoy the activity of programming by hand. This thread is for those us, to mourn.

You're still allowed to program by hand. Even in assembly language if you like.

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Re: We mourn our craft

#525

Post by fupaskys »

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…

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Re: We mourn our craft

#526

Post by Nextgrid »

JeremyNT wrote: post #511
Nextgrid wrote: post #137

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper. If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations. The perks of a…

I see what these can do and I'm already thinking, why would I ever hire a junior developer? I can fire up opencode and tell it to work multiple issues at once myself. The bottleneck becomes how fast you can write the spec or figure out what the product should actually be, not how quickly you can implement it. So the future of our profession looks grim indeed. There will be far fewer of us employed. I also miss writin…

You hire the junior developer because you can get them to learn your codebase and business domain at a discount, and then reap their productivity as they turn senior. You don’t get that with an LLM since it only operates on whatever is in its context.

(If you prefer to hire seniors that’s fine too - my rates are triple that of a junior and you’re paying full price for the time it takes me learning your codebase, and from experience it takes me at least 3 months to reach full productivity.)

Re: We mourn our craft

#527

Post by stoneforger »

godelski wrote: post #429
crazygringo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for AI programming. But I've seen this conversation on HN already 100 times. The answer they always give is that compilers are deterministic and therefore trustworthy in ways that LLMs are not. I personally don't agree at all, in the sense I don't think that matters. I've run into compiler bugs, and more library bugs than I can count. The real world is just as messy as LLMs are, and you still need the same te…

> The answer they always give is that compilers are deterministic and therefore trustworthy in ways that LLMs are not. I don't see this as a frequent answer tbh, but I do frequently see claims that this is the critique. I wrote much more here[0] and honestly I'm on the side of Dijkstra, and it doesn't matter if the LLM is deterministic or probabilistic It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have happened…

Nah bro I'll just ask the LLM to do better next time /s

Re: We mourn our craft

#528

Post by stoneforger »

Ronsenshi wrote: post #323
haolez wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just answered exactly that. I think that AI agents code better than humans and are the future. But the parent argument is pretty bad, in my opinion.

Depends on who these humans you're comparing AI code to. I've seen and reviewed enough AI code in the last few months to have formed a solid impression that it's "ok" at best and relies heavily on who guides it - how well spec defined, what kind of rules are set, coding styles, architecture patterns.

The prompt user is basically selecting patterns from latent space. So you kind of need to know what you're looking for. When you don't know what you're looking for that's when the fun begins, but that's a problem for the next quarter.

Re: We mourn our craft

#529

Post by crawshaw »

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.

You in SF? My schedule is a bit busy since we launched but I could find an hour in the city.

Re: We mourn our craft

#530

Post by stoneforger »

bopbopbop7 wrote: post #346
GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #207

One other helpful frame: I consider LLMs simply to be very flexible high-level 'language' Compilers. We've moved up the Abstraction Chain ever since we invented FORTRAN and COBOL (and LISP) instead of using assembly language. We're 'simply' moving up the abstraction hierarchy again. Good!

A non-deterministic, slow, pay to use, compiler for a language that is not precise enough for software. What an amazing abstraction!

You are just salty and old. If you're young and hip you don't need to know what you're doing just do the thing.
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