641–650 of 764 posts
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Couldn't agree more. AI as it's designed today is very heavy on the "f u; got mine" vibe.
Tech in general, I remember when I was younger thinking the tech world was so cool and different. I still love the work, but to say I’m disillusioned by the industry is an understatement.
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> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens. But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if Tarantino just typed “Write a gangster movie.” into a prompt field.
Pulp Fiction, like many Tarantino movies, also gets much of its effect from using existing songs rather than using an all new soundtrack
I'm wondering if everyone here saying they think harder with LLM agents have never reached "flow state" while programming. I just can't imagine using 100% of my mental focus state for hours with an agent. Sure, I think differently when my coding is primarily via agent, but I've never been totally enveloped by my thoughts while doing so. For those who have found a "flow state" with LLM agents, what's that like?
I've literally never found flow state with programming. Is it even possible when working as a full stack web dev? I am constantly context switching between backend/frontend, reading documentation, looking at/modifying data, refreshing & interacting with the browser, checking/double checking feature requirements, asking people about things.
With LLM Agents I can't seem to do it, as waiting for the agent to finish working just doesn't tickle my brain in the right way. I feel... distracted, I guess?
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Yep. Any statement in python or others can be mapped to something that the machine will do. And it will be the same thing every single time (concurrency and race issue aside). There’s no english sentence that can be as clear. We’ve created formal notation to shorten writing. And computation is formal notation that is actually useful. Why write pages of specs when I could write a few lines of code?
There's also creative space inside the formal notation. It's not just "these are the known abstractions, please lego them together", the formal syntax and notation is just one part of the whole. The syntax and notation define the forms of poetry (here's the meter, here's the rhyme scheme, here's how the whitespace works), but as software developers we're still filling in the words that fit that meter and rhyme scheme…
Software engineering is all about making sure the what actually solves the why, making the why visible enough in the what so that we can modify the latter if the former changes (it always does).
Current LLM are not about transforming a why into a what. It’s about transforming an underspecified what into some what that we hope fits the why. But as we all know from the 5 Why method, why’s are recursive structure, and most software engineer is about diving into the details of the why. The what are easy once that done because computers are simple mechanisms if you chose the correct level of abstraction for the project.
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I find it interesting, the comments on this post (not just this particular comment per se) and the sheer inability to relate or ATTEMPT to relate to another persons experience or feeling. The post itself articulated a viewpoint and experience, your having a different one does not negate the other. Nor does your perspective mean the other does not exist. I'm dumbfounded at many of the comments. Here are some clipped c…
When I read the article, I feel the same emotions that I feel if someone were to tell me "I keep trying to ride a bike but I keep falling off". My experience with LLMs is that the "lack of thinking" is mostly a quick trough you fall into before you come out the other side understanding how to deal with LLMs better. And yes, there's nothing wrong with relating to someone's experience, but mostly I just want to tell th…
> I keep trying to ride a bike but I keep falling off
I do not think this analogy is apt.
The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do.
The article is lamenting the disappearing of something meaningful for the OP. One can feel sad for this alone. It is not an equation to balance: X is gone but Y is now available. The lament stands alone. As the OP indicates with his 'pragmatism' we now collectively have little choice about the use of AI. The flood waters do not ask they take everyone in their path.
This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080 "Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about wha…
To me it's all abstraction. I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them but I'm happy to work on the new thing that uses what's already there. This is no different than many things. I could grow a tree and cut it into wood but I don't. I could buy wood and nails and brackets and make furniture but I don't. I instead just fill my ho…
One of the reasons Barry Lyndon is over 50 years old and still looks like no other movie today is because Kubrick tracked down a few lenses originally designed for NASA and had custom mounts built for them to use with cinema cameras.
https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa...
> Popular and highly acclaimed games not at crap because they didn't write their own physics engine (Zelda uses Havok)
Super Mario Bros is known for having a surprisingly subtle and complex physics system that enabled the game to feel both challenging and fair even for players very new to consoles. Celeste a newer game also famous for being very difficult yet not feeling punishing does something similar:
https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_towerfall_p...
> or their own game engine (Plenty of great games use Unreal or Unity)
And Minecraft doesn't, which is why few other games at the time of its release felt and played like it.
You're correct that no one builds everything from scratch all the time. However, if all you ever do is cobble a few pre-made things together, I think you'll discover that nothing you make is ever that interesting or enduring in value. Sure, it can be useful, and satisfying. But the kinds of things that really leave a mark on people, that affect them deeply, always have at least some aspect where the creator got obsessive and went off the deep end and did their own thing from scratch.
Further, you'll never learn what a transformative experience it can be to be that creator who gets obsessive about a thing. You'll miss out on discovering the weird parts of your own soul that are more fascinated by some corner of the universe than anyone else is.
I have a lot of regrets in my life, but I don't regret the various times I've decided I've deeply dug into some thing and doing it from scratch. Often, that has turned out later to be some of the most long-term useful things I've done even though it seemed like a selfish indulgence at the time.
Of course, it's your life. But consider that there may be a hidden cost to always skimming along across the tops of the stacks of things that already exist out there. There is growth in the depths.
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> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens. But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if Tarantino just typed “Write a gangster movie.” into a prompt field.
Pulp Fiction, like many Tarantino movies, also gets much of its effect from using existing songs rather than using an all new soundtrack
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> They obey a specification developers know Which spec? Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? You can’t even know that for sure if you roll your own code, with no 3rd party libraries. Bugs are by definition issues arise when developers expect they code to do one thing, but it does another thing, because of unforeseen combination of factors. Yet…
> Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? There can be. But you’d have to map the libraries to opcodes and then count the cycles. That’s what people do when they care about that particular optimization. They measure and make guaranties.
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This is really what it’s about. As someone that started with Machine Code, I'm grateful for compiled -even interpreted- languages. I can’t imagine doing the kind of work that I do, nowadays, in Machine Code. I’m finding it quite interesting, using LLM-assisted development. I still need to keep an eye on things (for example, the LLM tends to suggest crazy complex solutions, like writing an entire control from scratch,…
But we become watchers instead of makers. There is a difference between cooking and putting a ready meal into the microwave. Both satisfy your hunger but only one can give some kind of pride.
If you are a cook wanting to open a restaurant, you will be delegating, the same thing with AI. If you are fine only doing what your hands can possibly do in the time allotted, go ahead and cook in your kitchen.
But I need to make money to be able to trade for the food I eat.
I will never not be upset at my fellow engineers for selling out the ONE thing that made us valuable and respected in the marketplace and trying to destroy software engineering as a career because "Claude Code go brrrrrr" basically. It's like we had the means for production and more or less collectively decided "You know what? Actually, the bourgeoisie can have it, sure."
But I would sooner compare this engineer class to something of a small bourgeoisie swallowed by a yet larger one, especially in the United States.