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Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

writings.hongminhee.org

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Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#81

Post by atmavatar »

chongli wrote: post #53
Insanity wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. There's definitely _some_ who will use these tools to build systems for themselves. But do you think the chef who's been pulling insane hours in the restaurant wants to come home and build his own software? Or the teacher who just had to deal with an annoying classroom all day? People want software that just works, they'll pay for it, they don't want to use their computers to build their own software. Tha…

We’re not there yet, but that chef or that teacher definitely would want an AI voice assistant as good as the computer in Star Trek. Maybe to achieve that, a language model builds software entirely autonomously and runs it to carry out the user’s command. Or maybe they want the computer to build them software that they can then use to do their own work more efficiently.

> We’re not there yet, but that chef or that teacher definitely would want an AI voice assistant as good as the computer in Star Trek.

Since you brought up Star Trek, a good analogue for AI would be the holodeck. Given the appropriate prompts, it produces amazing scenery and even immersive fantasy narratives.

But occasionally, it goes haywire, the safeties no longer work, and the characters from your fictional adventure try to kill you.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#82

Post by robocat »

burntoutgray wrote: post #22
pclowes wrote: post #13

I do hand tool woodworking as a hobby. Aside from rough dimensioning, all the final cuts, planing, mortising, carving, dove tails etc are done by hand. Sometimes using tools over 100yrs old, not out of some fetish for the past, they are just better and cheaper than hand tools today. It takes forever but I want to work the wood and develop actual skill. I don't want to just push wood through a series of saws, sanders,…

The way some people wield LLM, etc is like using a chainsaw to cut a dovetail because it is faster.

I figured there must be a mix of dovetails and chainsawing: beautiful:

https://dovetailcabintools.com/videos

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#83

Post by mlsu »

linguae wrote: post #65
tracerbulletx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine that doesn't change the fact for a lot of people they felt they had "if you love what you do you don't work a day in your life" and now they don't. They aren't wrong to feel a sense of deep loss.

I wholeheartedly agree. Computing professions such as software engineering used to feel like, "Wow, they're paying me to do this!" Yes, there was real work involved, but for many of us it never felt like drudgery, and we produced, shipped, and made our customers, managers, and other stakeholders happy. I remember a time (roughly 20 years ago) when zealous enthusiasts would proudly profess that they'd work for compani…

The money was what did it, not the AI. If we were all just tinkering with the AI all day long this stuff would still be fun.

Money sucking the joy out of things, a tale as old as time.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#84

Post by gexla »

shigawire wrote: post #45
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK… I don’t care. I think there is an unheard number of people that think vibe coding is fucking stupid and knows it doesn’t work. While also being really thankful for the small task automation that AI nails every single time. Why does it have to be a world changing life altering experience? Why can’t I just like have a really helpful rubber duck that will find all the missing references or clean up merge issues for…

> Why does it have to be a world changing life altering experience? Because the global economy has been wagered on this

Is that what they're wagering on though? Everytime I open X, it's all about the first to some hand-wavy definition of AGI is going to win everything, and it's the only thing that can get us through the painful transition period from massive job loss to abundance.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#85

Post by gexla »

burntoutgray wrote: post #24

To use an analogy, back in the days of film cameras and before 1 hour labs, the "craftsman" photographer would carefully frame the shot, carefully setting the exposure, aperture and focus. The most meticulous would take notes in a notebook. There were only 36 frames to a roll of film and all going well, the photographer had to wait a couple of days to get back the proof sheet. Those were the days when expert photogra…

And you could say similar for the transition between painting and photography.

ETA: It's interesting how the bottleneck may reveal the real skill in the thing. Architecting the code. Having a eye for interestingness in creating an image / painting of something, etc.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#86

Post by justonepost2 »

I guess I’m not the target audience but the flood of articles about craft or “deep blue” feel like a psyop.

When the middle class disappears and your comfortable salary is replaced by, at best, a $1000/mo UBI (that’s 12k per year by the way) most people won’t have time to think or care about this nonsense

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#88

Post by roncesvalles »

This is probably contrary to conventional wisdom (esp among the startup/VC crowd) but: there are very few scenarios where how quickly you build something matters more than the quality of what you build.

The AI coding era has brought about an unhealthy obsession with speed of software dev (where "speed" is often measured by fallacious metrics like LOC pushed per day, but that's tangential). And it's obvious why, this is the main commercial value proposition (if you can build 2x faster, you need 50% as many devs).

Except that the speed only comes "for free" until a certain point. Beyond that point, you're trading off quality for more speed, and this trade is almost never worth it. If it takes you 6 months to handcraft a high quality version of your product (with selective AI assistance only until the boundary where it's not eating quality), almost always this is a better approach than banging out some heavily vibe/agent-coded crap in 1 month.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#89

Post by tdeck »

maplethorpe wrote: post #80
pclowes wrote: post #13

I do hand tool woodworking as a hobby. Aside from rough dimensioning, all the final cuts, planing, mortising, carving, dove tails etc are done by hand. Sometimes using tools over 100yrs old, not out of some fetish for the past, they are just better and cheaper than hand tools today. It takes forever but I want to work the wood and develop actual skill. I don't want to just push wood through a series of saws, sanders,…

For me, woodworking has never been about the "craft". It's been about holding that finished product in my hand. That's why I gave up manual woodworking and shifted to ordering finished pieces from IKEA. The speed with which I can now receive furniture delivered to my door far outpaces anything I could have ever done myself. Some people say this isn't actually woodworking — that it's just ordering stuff online — but t…

[dead]

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#90

Post by tdeck »

flankstaek wrote: post #26

I think this article misses a potential connection in the capitalist critique of LLMs to correlate this to the equivalent "industrialization" of coding. When a craft becomes industrialized, as is talked about here, you see the divergence in hobbyists and mass production. I think because of the uniqueness or newness of the craft of programming - this shift hadn't actually occurred and you were seeing hobbyist programm…

Absolutely. These tools are being used to deprofessionalize our work. At some point, perhaps in our lifetime, most of us will no longer be able to bring anything to the table that commands either job security or a good wage. This is the dream of most of the employing class. There will be a glut of laid off software engineers all jockeying for positions babysitting a dozen LLM agents at a time, agents that work constantly and never run out of questions and review requests to ping us with. Perhaps we'll be measured on our response time to agent inquiries. Just like all the cottage weavers who ended up stuck in a thunderously loud power loom weaving shed for 14 hours a day, we are going to discover what a big loss in status and security feels like.

Any special knowledge, taste, or communication skills we think we are bringing to the table will be siphoned into LLMs and used to train them. The way we boss the LLM around to make it produce better work will be incorporated into the next model version, rendering our contributions less and less valuable. Companies will make deals with LLM providers to suck all their internal customer interactions and team chats into the LLM so they can tune it to replicate those interactions. Perhaps it will go off the rails now and then, but think of the savings.

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