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Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

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Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#521

Post by sodapopcan »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #515
sph wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the analogy is good, does it mean AI boosters hate programming, and feel like it's a chore and waste of time? Yet they keep calling themselves programmers. I dislike cooking; I don't call myself a chef, nor go on cooking forums saying they're all idiots for churning butter as a hobby, and telling them they are luddite dinosaurs just because I bought myself an Instant Pot.

I for one have spent my career calling myself not a programmer but others think I'm half decent enough

I'm not calling you bad programmer, but one always has to take into account that our industry has no accreditation.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#522

Post by somenameforme »

inigyou wrote: post #496
somenameforme wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not describing how but why . And at a fundamental level it's something that can't be overcome. If you can only have 10 of one thing, yet can have 5000 of another, and both have even remotely comparable levels of demand/necessity/etc, then the 10 is always going to end up much more valued. Even take some sort of idealized anarcho-communal society. Imagine two people have a dispute and threaten to leave over it. O…

A society with no garbage collected will fall apart much more quickly than one without healthcare.

I'd agree, but any other person can pick up the slack of being a garbage collector. Hence the notion of one having thousands of potential garbage collectors, while far fewer doctors.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#523

Post by vasco »

dgellow wrote: post #270
vasco wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is most people's jobs are like that. So it doesn't matter how interesting it was or that who did it before doesn't like it anymore because there's a queue of people lined up to do the brainless new version of the job.

It obviously does matter. The industry was built by people who care about the underlying details and want to engage with the hardware and software at a deep level. That has traditionally been the way people develop expertise - the exact thing you need to effectively use LLMs for anything else than boilerplate work. Ironically agentic stuff pull us away from from that

The point really went over your head. New people don't give a shit how it was done before. Do you care that your clothes aren't hand made?

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#524

Post by _luci_ »

jujube3 wrote: post #514
_luci_ wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you're right, it IS entirely fair to suddenly and quickly push the group that built your industry out of the industry. They should all just find new jobs, because that's very easy and simple. Thankfully we have bright minds like you to replace the talent lost, because with AI you can truly do anything your heart desires! Obvious sarcasm aside, these LLMs have been trained (without consent!) on our hard work, on…

Making your code open source was consenting to have people (and AIs) read it and learn from it. As an open source developer myself, I always understood that.

I consented to PEOPLE reading it. How could I have predicted that AI would take off so rapidly and get trained on my repos? How could I have predicted that AI would be trained on code without a license attached, or on code with strict licenses attached that do not allow for such use? A silly response if you ask me

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#525

Post by _luci_ »

ABoltzmannMush wrote: post #381
_luci_ wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would you want to filter these people out? surely those that consider programming more than just a "means to an end" are going to be much more valuable employees, consider they are much more likely to be skilled at their craft? im genuinely interested in why you'd want to filter these people out!

I want to find people who have already had all their passions and emotions stamped out by the endless grind already, so that they will tell an AI to do what I tell them for 996 without complaint. These people who "care" about things just get in the way and want time off and such.

That is genuinely gross, I'm assuming it's just ragebait or something haha who actually thinks like this!

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#526

Post by xakpc »

jatora wrote: post #350
xakpc wrote: post #212

The entire AI-pilled side-software development has a single goal: shipping as fast and as much as possible. The problem is that it’s not better code or a better product—it's just more I can understand why people who aren't interested in "shipping daily" and are more interested in figuring things out are kinda annoyed by all the LLM noise

Imagine, if you will, wanting a narrow application to assist you personally in some side hobby, that is data driven but would take weeks or months to set up. Now imagine it's done in hours (and not even purely focused hours) and does everything you need it to do in an instantly verifiable and rewarding way. Imagine doing this on the regular for all of your various use cases. And then imagine not trying to sell or mar…

I draw a clear line between using agentic tools at work (I basically put my team on Lode-coding) and just tinkering with things.

I do plenty of tinkering, and AI isn't really that great at it. When exploring something like Windows widgets (my latest hobby), AI helps, but official docs, sample repos, and debug-driven experimentation help way more.

After all the fun tinkering part, when I have working solution, I could build new widget in a second with AI if I ever need to produce them en masse

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#527

Post by captainbland »

hlynurd wrote: post #400
derektank wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would all die in a week if we went without water, yet water is cheaper per gallon than gasoline or printer ink or perfume. It’s a question of scarcity and supply curves. Water, even clean water, is not particularly scarce if you leverage industrial systems to purify it. Other products require much more complicated supply chains and are produced at a much smaller scale than water, which makes them more rarer and mo…

You're explaining how things are but the parent is indicating that's not how things should be.

I think making water expensive because of the fact that it's essential would be problematic at best

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#528

Post by thesz »

Bewelge wrote: post #425
Nextgrid wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about code quality (though indeed that could be a problem too), I'm talking about understanding the code - having written the code by hand means you don't need to rediscover it from scratch. (with human-written code I can reach out to the person who wrote it and let them deal with it, and they will have the understanding of said code, even if it is bad by quality measures. With LLMs there is nobody wh…

To be fair though: "That code is horrible! Who the hell wrote this?!" git blames sees their own name Isn't that an experience everybody makes? For me it was like a year into working professionally. And I feel it's part of being a professional to know that you're not going to remember it in the long term and therefore provide proper documentation of why you did what.

  git blames
  sees their own name

  Isn't that an experience everybody makes?
Our fearless leader once did clang-assisted formatting of all of our code. Wherever we look with git blame, we see his name. Of course, we change code, etc, but for some year and a half it was fun.

(to actually go to the specific commit that authored the code I skip two specific revisions, both are formatting changes)

So you seeing your name next to the code you do not like can be an indentation change due to adding condition or something like that.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#529

Post by thesz »

yunwal wrote: post #390
alkonaut wrote: post #224

Programming has five phases effectively: 1) You figure out what problem to solve. 2) You figure out HOW to solve the problem. 3) You actually implement the solution. 4) You see the solution work, for yourself. 5) You ship/deploy/publish the program. This means you see people be happy users and/or you get paid for it and so on. If you're an entrepreneur type, you probably enjoy the first and last steps most, and you s…

I enjoy the process of solving problems with LLMs. I understand it's chaotic (what many people call non-deterministic), and that doesn't appeal to some people, but solving problems with statistics is problem solving just the same. Just because medicines don't work with 100% reliability doesn't mean Jonas Salk didn't solve a problem. The same is true with LLM solutions that don't work 100% of the time. I think most pe…

  > The same is true with LLM solutions that don't work 100% of the time.
In my experience, about one of ten LLM suggestions during code review is important and valid. Nine of ten are either unimportant or not valid. Yet, I have to read them and rule them out.

Also in my experience, having my colleagues do root cause analysis (RCA) with LLM brings to me invalid RCAs which I have to rule out, instead of working on finding true RCA.

I saw part of documentary about Charlie Abrahams, son of Jim Abrahams. Charlie had epileptic seizures as a child, hundredths a day. In the documentary, Charlie's doctor said that no drug in his experience worked as fast as ketogenic diet (seizures stopped in three days) and as reliably as ketogenic diet (works on more than 80% of people). When he was asked why he did not applied ketogenic diet, he said there still were drug options to try.

"Medicines do not work 100% of time," my bald cranium.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#530

Post by r_lee »

kbelder wrote: post #454
r_lee wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can take already painted warhammer figurines, pose them, take a photo, prompt an AI to make that your first scene, and generate a hollywood level scene in about a minute or two. if that's so awesome then why isn't everybody doing it? I never dreamt about stuff like that, but are there actually people who are like "oh thank God I can finally make my AI movies with my figurines and other stuff I have laying aroun…

People are doing it, but not that much, because while it generates some pretty good five-second scenes, it fails terribly at generating any long-form video. And by long-form, I mean 'longer than 30 seconds'. I think what people want is to tell a story that's in their imagination, and no current AI is up to that task (at least in video format). Great for making an animated PNG for a meme, but not for adapting that fan…

> I think what people want is to tell a story that's in their imagination, and no current AI is up to that task

I just don't think this is the case? I could be wrong but I tend to hear this most from people who are obsessed with AI, as in trying to find use cases instead of people using AI to get that task done

so far I've seen it be used in place of stock photos or still image scenes, even those are obvious and are a turnoff for me

but this concept of having a story in your head and then just being so relieved that now you can finally prompt an AI to generate a short film or something from that...

it's just a gut feeling, but I don't think most people are looking for that. having a story and then just sending it off to be generated where it'll inevitably look unnatural and a bit off, I just don't see how anyone would be wishing for this

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