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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#711

Post by joe_mamba »

adamredwoods wrote: post #708
richard_todd wrote: post #704

The craft is still there just like painting is still an alternative to a photograph. It's just not going to be valued by society anymore, and far fewer will learn how to do it. Natural language is the new programming language. For now, understanding the craft is still an edge in making better prompts, but already I can see that telling Antigravity "now look for ways to make this more efficient" works almost as well a…

Natural language is not a programming language. Programming is precision. Natural language is fuzzy. >> spend my retirement having fun in it. People who have reaped the rewards of their careers tend not to be the ones concerned about their futures. Apathy.

>People who have reaped the rewards of their careers tend not to be the ones concerned about their futures. Apathy.

Not everyone has to become a programmer, people at the start of their careers can chooses paths other than programming if they're afraid of the (lack of) future prospects from AI. Where did people work before the ZIRP boom? Those industries are still around. Plenty of STEM related jobs besides programing.

Re: We mourn our craft

#712

Post by docmars »

Dang right we do.

And the problem isn't even the Junior Zoomer devs running circles around seniors. It's the CTO or Engineering VP himself disappearing for a few months and single-handedly consolidating a handful of products into a full rewrite for the company, excluding most of their engineering team from the process, and then laying them off after.

The problem is the CEO pretending to be an engineer and thinking they know better because they can write English prompts and spit out a hideous prototype.

The problem is Product Owners using LLMs to "write code" while their engineering team does zero human review before merging it, because their AI tooling was made solely responsible for code quality. If something's broken, just prompt a sloppy fix full of hidden performance and security bugs that the automated code review step missed.

If you think this is hyperbole, I was recently laid off from a company that did exactly the above.

Then in 2027, it will be product owners replacing the entire engineering team, including the CTO, because they made their system too reliable to justify their employment, while the "thinkers" get to build the product, engineers be damned.

People with real skills they acquired over a lifetime are no longer shaping business. Reckless efficiency towards being average will rule the day.

Re: We mourn our craft

#713

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

adamredwoods wrote: post #709

I agree with the nolanlawson's sentiment. What's interesting is many of the opposing statements here seem to be less interested in the actual code, and more interested in the final state. Both are valid, but one is going away due to technological advancements. That is the mourning. There are some of us who enjoyed the code as a thing to explore. Others here don't seem to like that as much.

I've never bought into it because like 80% of the work the world does is CRUD-level stuff which should be boring and simple so it can be readable and maintainable.

The craftspeople doing the other 20% of the code are at the top end of the skill spectrum, but AI is starting from the bottom and working its way up. They should be the least worried about AI taking over their output.

This is like throwing together dozens of stick frame homes that look alike vs. building custom log, brick, or stone houses. No one is going to be tearing down my drywall and marveling at how well the studs are spaced.

Re: We mourn our craft

#714

Post by AndrewKemendo »

abustamam wrote: post #696
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not Nobody has built a human so we don’t know how they work We know exactly how LLM technology works

We know _how_ it works but even Anthropic routinely does research on its own models and gets surprised > We were often surprised by what we saw in the model https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

Which is…true of all technologies since forever

Re: We mourn our craft

#716

Post by hgs3 »

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 on the precipice of something incredible.

Only if our socioeconomic model changes.

Re: We mourn our craft

#717

Post by godelski »

wtetzner wrote: post #622
godelski wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it needs to be "build the right things right", vs "build things right and then discover if they are the right things" I still think this is a bad comparison and I hoped my prior comment would handle this. Frankly, you're always going to end up in the second situation[0] simply because of 2 hard truths. 1) you're not omniscient and 2) even if you were, the environment isn't static. > But considering that AI will mor…

> The reason I'm not in favor of natural language programming has nothing to do with its probabilistic nature and everything to do with its lack of precision Yeah, even if they're made to be 100% deterministic, you've now got a programming language whose rules are deterministic, but hard to understand. You've effectively pinned the meaning of the natural language in some way, but not a way that anyone can effectively…

And it's weird that this even needs to be argued given that our long explanations are needed to even convey fairly simple concepts. Not to mention that it still relies upon correct interpretation.

The result of natural language programming is either an extremely limited programming language or an extremely verbose one (again, look at law). Presumably it'll result in both.

It's a nice idea but ignores the reason we invented symbolic languages in the first place. They were invented after natural language. It's not like code is some vestigial language raiment. We're trying to replace it because it's hard and annoying. But I'm certain that's mainly due to the level of abstraction we're trying to work with more than due to the language we're using

Re: We mourn our craft

#718

Post by rdiddly »

cess11 wrote: post #605
massysett wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I have a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions, so did Noah Webster when he compiled a dictionary. So did Carl Linnaeus when he classified species. So did the Human Genome Project. I have a pocket calculator, yet I know how to do long division. I use LLMs to learn and to enhance my work. A dictionary is a shortcut to learning what a word means without consulting an entire written corpu…

You're avoiding my question. Since you're comparing yourself to Noah Webster, do you have some examples of your achievements?

You're confused, and as evidence I cite your feigned interest in that guy's achievements, which are irrelevant. You want to argue on the internet.

Re: We mourn our craft

#719

Post by 9rx »

vaylian wrote: post #690
9rx wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. There was another way: Make one up. That is what the people you read from/talked to did before relaying it to you.

If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use. Otherwise the word will not hold its own meaning. For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary.

> If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use.

That depends on your goals. If you are writing in your private journal, or a comment on HN, it doesn't matter one bit.

If you want to find commonality with other people it is significantly more efficient, but still not required. It is not like one is born understanding words. They are not passed down from the heavens. They are an invention. When I say 'sloopydoopidydoo' you might not know what I intend by it right away, but the path to figuring it out is a solved problem. Even young children can handle it.

> For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary.

Let's put it to the test: I added enums to the programming language I am working on. Tell me, with your dictionary in hand, what do I mean by that?

Here's the thing: According to the dictionary, an enum is something like Go's iota or C's enum. But many people will tell you that Go doesn't have enums — that an enum is what others might recognize as a tagged union. That kind of language evolution happens all the time. So, what do I mean? Am I using the dictionary definition, or the community definition that is quickly gaining favour and will no doubt be added to the dictionary as soon as someone has a chance to update it? Both uses have been widely established in my opinion. In fact, the Swift programming language's documentation even acknowledges both uses and then goes on to explain what it means by "enum" to remove any confusion.

I look forward to seeing if you captured my intent.

Re: We mourn our craft

#720

Post by joe_mamba »

kristofferR wrote: post #695
layer8 wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is about what software developers like. It’s common knowledge that many programmers like working with computers because that’s different in specific ways from working with people. So saying that LLMs are just like people doesn’t help here.

Yeah, and you are sugarcoating it - the stereotype is that some programmers actively dislike socializing is a stereotype for a reason.

Working with people != socializing, those are two very different things.

You can be professional and collaborate productively at work with people who you don't like at a personal level and have no intention to socialize with. The Mythbusters were the best example for this.

I get along great with all colleagues but I stopped joining them for coffee and watercooler smalltalk since we don't vibe and have nothing in common, so not only is it a waste of my time, it's also an energy drain for me to focus and fake interest in forced social interactions. But that doesn't mean we can't be productive together at technical stuff. I do think my PoV resonates with most people.

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