61–70 of 234 posts
Plato, in the Phaedrus, 370BC: "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
Good job he wrote that down.
But sometimes the new tech is a hot x-ray foot measuring machine.
"Some people might not enjoy writing their own code. If that’s the case, as harsh as it may seem, I would say that they’re trying to work in a field that isn’t for them." I've tolerated writing my own code for decades. Sometimes I'm pleased with it. Mostly it's the abstraction standing between me and my idea. I like to build things, the faster the better. As I have the ideas, I like to see them implemented as efficie…
My general way of working now is, I'll write some of the code in the style I like. I won't trust an LLM to come up with the right design, so I still trust my knowledge and experience to come up with a design which is maintainable and scaleable. But I might just stub out the detail. I'm focusing mostly on the higher level stuff.
Once I've designed the software at a high level, I can point the LLM at this using specific files as context. Maybe some of them have the data structures describing the business logic and a few stubbed out implementations. Then Claude usually does an excellent job at just filling in the blanks.
I've still got to sanity check it. And I still find it doing things which looks like it came right from a junior developer. But I can suggest a better way and it usually gets it right the second or third time. I find it a really productive way of programming.
I don't want to be writing datalayer of my application. It's not fun for me. LLMs handle that for me and lets me focus on what makes my job interesting.
The other thing I've kinda accepted is to just use it or get left behind. You WILL get people who use this and become really productive. It's a tool which enables you to do more. So at some point you've got to suck it up. I just see it as a really impressive code generation tool. It won't replace me, but not using it might.
Plato, in the Phaedrus, 370BC: "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
I think this is a mistake. Building things and figuring out how stuff works is not related to pressing buttons on a keyboard to form blocks of code. Typing is just a side effect of the technology used. It's like saying that in order to be a mathematician, you have to enjoy writing equations on a whiteboard, or to be a doctor you must really love filling out EHR forms.
In engineering, coming up with a solution that fits the constraints and requirements is typically the end goal, and the best measure of skill I'm aware of. Certainly it's the one that really matters the most in practice. When it is valuable to type everything by hand, then a good engineer should type it by hand. On the other hand, if the best use of your time is to import a third-party library, do that. If the best solution is to create a code base so large no single human brain can understand it all, then you'd better do that. If the easiest path to the solution is to offload some of the coding to an LLM, that's what you should do.
"Some people might not enjoy writing their own code. If that’s the case, as harsh as it may seem, I would say that they’re trying to work in a field that isn’t for them." I've tolerated writing my own code for decades. Sometimes I'm pleased with it. Mostly it's the abstraction standing between me and my idea. I like to build things, the faster the better. As I have the ideas, I like to see them implemented as efficie…
But I’m not a software engineer first, I’m a builder first. For me, using these tools to build things is much better than not using them, and that’s enough.
It's almost always a leaky abstraction, because sometimes you do need to know how the lower layer really works.
Every time this happens, developers who have invested a lot of time and emotional energy in understanding the lower level claim that those who rely on the abstraction are dumber (less curious, less effective, and they write "worse code") than those who have mastered the lower level.
Wouldn't we all be smarter if we stopped relying on third-party libraries and wrote the code ourselves?
Wouldn't we all be smarter if we managed memory manually?
Wouldn't we all be smarter if we wrote all of our code in assembly, and stopped relying on compilers?
Wouldn't we all be smarter if we were wiring our own transistors?
It is educational to learn about lower layers. Often it's required to squeeze out optimal performance. But you don't have to understand lower layers to provide value to your customers, and developers who now find themselves overinvested in low-level knowledge don't want to believe that.
(My favorite use of coding LLMs is to ask them to help me understand code I don't yet understand. Even when it gets the answer wrong, it's often right enough to give me the hints I need to figure it out myself.)
> Some people might not enjoy writing their own code. If that’s the case, as harsh as it may seem, I would say that they’re trying to work in a field that isn’t for them Conversely: Some people want to insist that writing code 10x slower is the right way to do things, that horses were always better, more dependable than cares, and that nobody would want to step into one of those flying monstrosities. And they may als…
"Some people might not enjoy writing their own code. If that’s the case, as harsh as it may seem, I would say that they’re trying to work in a field that isn’t for them." I've tolerated writing my own code for decades. Sometimes I'm pleased with it. Mostly it's the abstraction standing between me and my idea. I like to build things, the faster the better. As I have the ideas, I like to see them implemented as efficie…
This is something that I struggle with for AI programming. I actually like writing the code myself. Like how someone might enjoy knitting or model building or painting or some other "tedious" activity. Using AI to generate my code just takes all the fun out of it for me.