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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#611

Post by wtetzner »

iambateman wrote: post #9

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learn…

This is the best description of value from AI that I've seen so far. It allows people who don't like writing code to build things without doing so.

I don't think it's nearly as valuable to people who do enjoy writing code, because I don't think prompting an agent (at least in their current state) is actually more productive than just writing the code. So I don't see any reason to mourn on either side.

Re: We mourn our craft

#612

Post by falloutx »

Stop acting like software engineering is dead or something. Even if it its, we will still code by hand when we are poor later in this bubble. Only thing I would refuse is to pay any money to Anthropic & openAI. Literally would invest in Chinese labs at this point

Re: We mourn our craft

#613

Post by bonoboTP »

hnlmorg wrote: post #299
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…

The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems. Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did. And software that’s open and can be modified. Instead what we have is: - AI which are little black boxes and beyond our ability to fully reason. - perpetual subscription services for the same software we used to “own”.…

Local models exist and the knowledge required for training them is widely available in free classes and many open projects. Yes, the hardware is expensive, but that's just how it is if you want frontier capability. You also couldn't have a state of the art mainframe at home in that era. Nor do people expect to have industrial scale stuff at home in other engineering domains.

Re: We mourn our craft

#614

Post by _aavaa_ »

paganel wrote: post #609
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…

> We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality The difference is that the computer only talks back to you as code because you’re paying its owners, with you not being part of the owners. I find it really baffling that people put up with this. What will you do when Alphabet or Altman will demand 10 times the money out of you fir the privilege of their compu…

Use one of the open models that are also getting better and easier to run every year?

Re: We mourn our craft

#615

Post by falloutx »

IhateAI_2 wrote: post #404

If you must use these tools, when using one thay has the option, please press thumbs down when a response was good, and thumbs up when the response is bad. Dont train your replacements, better yet lets stop using them whenever we can.

Or dont pay them out of your own pocket. Use employer paid but dont let these shit companies in your personal space.

Re: We mourn our craft

#616

Post by _aavaa_ »

IhateAI_2 wrote: post #413
_aavaa_ wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of local models has increased significantly since this time last year. As have the options for running larger local models.

These takes are terrible. 1. It costs 100k in hardware to run Kimi 2.5 with a single session at decent tok p/s and its still not capable for anything serious. 2. I want whatever you're smoking if you think anyone is going to spend billions training models capable of outcompeting them are affordable to run and then open source them.

Quantize it and you can drop a zero from that price.

How much serious work can it do versus chatgpt3 (SOTA only a few years ago)?

Re: We mourn our craft

#617

Post by shimman »

hnlmorg wrote: post #487
apitman wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large percentage of the code I've written the last 10 years is Go. I think it does somewhat better than the others in some areas, such as relative simplicity and having a robust stdlib, but a lot of this is false security. The simplicity is surface level. The runtime and GC are very complex. And the stdlib being robust means that if you ever have to implement a compiler from scratch, you have to implement all of st…

I’ve got 8 year old Go code that still compiles fine on the latest Go compiler. Go has its warts but backwards compatibility isn’t one of them. The language is almost as durable as Perl.

8 years is not that long, if it can still compile in say 20 years then sure but 8 years in this industry isn't that long at all (unless you're into self flagellation by working on the web).

Re: We mourn our craft

#618

Post by falloutx »

throwaway0123_5 wrote: post #210
webdevver wrote: post #79

it definitely sucks to be honest, and theres a lot of cope out there. fact of the matter is, being able to churn out bash oneliners was objectively worth $100k/year, and now it just isnt anymore. knowing the C++ STL inside-out was also worth $200k/year, now it has very questionable utility. a lot of livelihoods are getting shaken up as programmers get retroactively turned into the equivalent of librarians, whose job…

Yeah, I notice a lot of the optimism is from people who have been in the field for decades. I'm newish to the field, half a decade out of undergrad. It definitely feels like almost all of what I learned has been (or will soon be) completely devalued. I'm sure this stuff feels a lot less threatening if you've had decades to earn a great salary and save a bunch of money. If money wasn't a concern I'd be thrilled about…

No, dont trust the supposed "staff engineer" types, Many had forgotten how to write code and now they can finally live the fantasy of being architects. So for them its like winning a jackpot. For people who could always write good code, the basics are still same, a good dev is still a good dev, and its even more important to be able to read & critique code.

Re: We mourn our craft

#619

Post by falloutx »

arrowsmith wrote: post #592
chetanahuja wrote: post #539

Oh good lord. Spare us the beatings of the chest and rending of the garments. "crafting code by hand" like some leftover hipsters from 2010s crafting their own fabric using a handloom. It's fucking code. Were there similar gnashing of the teeth and wails of despair when compilers were first introduced?

> Were there similar gnashing of the teeth and wails of despair when compilers were first introduced? Yes, at least according to ChatGPT: "Compilers didn’t arrive to universal applause; they arrived into a world where a chunk of programmers absolutely believed the machine could not be trusted to write “real” code—until the productivity wins (and eventually the performance) became undeniable." Damn that sounds familia…

compiler is deterministic, coding models are not. compilers have been unit tested and will generate same output for a given input. They are not the same things.

Re: We mourn our craft

#620

Post by pocksuppet »

orwin wrote: post #417
HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried using GenAI to write documentation? You can literally point it to a folder and say, analyze everything in this folder and write a document about it. And it will do it. It's more thorough than anything a human could do, especially in the time frame we're talking about. If GenAI could only write documentation it would still be a game changer.

But it write mostly useless documentation Which take time to read and decipher. And worse, if you are using it for public documentation, sometimes it hallucinate endpoints (i don't want to say too much here, but it happened recently to a quite used B2B SaaS).

It can generate useful documentation or useless documentation. It doesn't take very long to instruct the LLM to generate the documentation, and then check if it matches your understanding of the project later. Most real documentation is about as wrong as LLM-generated documentation anyway. Documenting code is a language-to-language translation task, that LLMs are designed for.
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