Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Slopware

stopslopware.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 171 posts

Re: Stop Slopware

#81

Post by tikhonj »

noman-land wrote: post #19

As a practitioner I also inherently believe in well written software but as a lifelong learner, things change, and evolve. There is absolutely no reason why software today has to be written like software of yesterday. There is no need to be so prescriptive about how software is made. In the end the best will win on the merits. The bad software will die under its own weight with no think pieces necessary. On the other…

> In the end the best will win on the merits.

The last six decades of commercial programming don't exactly bear this out...

The real lesson is that writing software is such a useful, high-leverage activity that even absolutely awful software can be immensely valuable. But that doesn't tell us that better software is useless, it just tells us it is not absolutely necessary.

Re: Stop Slopware

#82

Post by pegasus »

jayd16 wrote: post #41
simonsarris wrote: post #13

> if you’re doing this for your own learning: you will learn better without AI. This is not the distinction I would want to tell newcomers. AI is extremely good for finding out what the most common practices are for all kinds of situations. That's a powerful learning tool. Besides, learning how to use a tool well (one that we can expect professionals to use) is part of learning. Now most common practices and best pra…

You can go to a restaurant to see new dishes (which isn't nothing) but it wont exactly teach you how to cook.

Unless you happen to meet the unendingly patient and helpful cook who is willing to explain the recipe in any depth one desires.

Re: Stop Slopware

#83

Post by sergiotapia »

If you are an experience software developer, AI lets you fly and build things much faster.

If you are a new software developer, I don't see how you grow to develop taste and experience when everything is a away.

I think we are the last generation of engineers who give a fuck tbh.

Re: Stop Slopware

#84

Post by xeromal »

MisterTea wrote: post #73
xeromal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one engineer in my life who cared about the craft of software development also refused to have a color profile pic and also did his zooms in black and white and thought Ruby was the only good programming language.

That's like one person with terrible taste.

My point lol.

I think most devs, especially ones that call it a "craft, take themselves too seriously. We're glorified construction workers that get paid a lot

Re: Stop Slopware

#85

Post by zkldi »

jayd16 wrote: post #41
simonsarris wrote: post #13

> if you’re doing this for your own learning: you will learn better without AI. This is not the distinction I would want to tell newcomers. AI is extremely good for finding out what the most common practices are for all kinds of situations. That's a powerful learning tool. Besides, learning how to use a tool well (one that we can expect professionals to use) is part of learning. Now most common practices and best pra…

You can go to a restaurant to see new dishes (which isn't nothing) but it wont exactly teach you how to cook.

[dead]

Re: Stop Slopware

#86

Post by tonymet »

tikhonj wrote: post #78
tonymet wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s room for both types of people in any trade. Some photographers obsess over the equipment, some only care about the photos. Carpenters with tools. Musicians with instruments & gear. Every craft has people who care about the how and those who focus on the product. I’ve always enjoyed the craft of software engineering, though even I admit the culture around it can be a bit overly contemplative . Nevertheless, th…

Caring about craft in programming is more like a photographer caring about light and composition and creativity and taste than a photographer caring about equipment.

In some ways yes. Many “engineers” obsess over “idioms” and other trends to the detriment of performance, correctness and usability. So this analogy is a bit too charitable.

Re: Stop Slopware

#87

Post by Jach »

charlesabarnes wrote: post #3

My reflex is to call the website useless because the problem isn't usually software produced by individuals. My problem is the buggy messes that trillion dollar corporations produce.

Indeed, Adobe continues shipping their slop and by all accounts of those who keep using it continue to make it worse, this was all in motion well before modern AI tools. If anything, I bet AI tools are more likely to make things better. I read an anti-AI opinion recently where they had a sense that a small open source project was using AI (and were right, it was easy to see by noticing Claude in the commit history) but what tipped their sense was there were too many "professionalisms" in the code base. Oh no, more code that has documentation and tests and benchmarks, the horror! I also just can't take these "it's stinking up the commons" posts all that seriously -- like where have you been the last couple decades? The baseline seems as likely to improve as to degrade more than it already has. Even the spam of useless pull requests isn't new, the peak of that was probably with peak MOOC popularity some years ago when classes would require submitting pull requests to some open source project as an assignment.

Re: Stop Slopware

#88

Post by tonymet »

braebo wrote: post #75
tonymet wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s room for both types of people in any trade. Some photographers obsess over the equipment, some only care about the photos. Carpenters with tools. Musicians with instruments & gear. Every craft has people who care about the how and those who focus on the product. I’ve always enjoyed the craft of software engineering, though even I admit the culture around it can be a bit overly contemplative . Nevertheless, th…

> Just hang out with likeminded people and ignore the rest. Or find ways to integrate with the rest, challenging one another to facilitate growth.

While I appreciate your optimism, the cost of conversion is 1000x the cost of reaching & identifying the right people.

Re: Stop Slopware

#89

Post by mccoyb »

smolder wrote: post #51
noman-land wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. I see no reason at all why that's true any more than the screwdriver freezing the state of home design in time.

LLMs aren't like a screwdriver at all, the analogy doesn't work. I think I was clear. LLMs aren't useful outside the domain of what they were trained on. They are copycats. To really innovate on software design means going outside what has been done before, which an LLM won't help you do.

No, you weren't clear, nor are you correct: you shared FUD about something it seems you have not tried, because testing your claims with a recent agentic system would dispel them.

I've had great success teaching Claude Code use DSLs I've created in my research. Trivially, it has never seen exactly these DSLs before -- yet it has correctly created complex programs using those DSLs, and indeed -- they work!

Have you had frontier agents work on programs in "esoteric" (unpopular) languages (pick: Zig, Haskell, Lisp, Elixir, etc)?

I don't see clarity, and I'm not sure if you've tried any of your claims for real.

Re: Stop Slopware

#90

Post by idiotsecant »

I suspect the effect of AI will be a sort of eternal September, but for software. It's a phase change in how a lot of software will be written and used. There are a lot of applications right now for software where crappy software that mostly gets the job done in a specific way is Good Enough. There's going to be a lot of software written by LLMs that maybe barely compiles and doesn't handle edge cases and has weird behavior but gets a small, specific job done. This is a good thing, since maybe the previous alternative was doing something manually, or not at all.

There will still be major, fundamental, foundational software work for serious engineers to do, but we have to admit that most software needed in the world is not that.

Post reply on HN