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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#861

Post by account42 »

ahepp wrote: post #331
paulhebert wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s that simple. A couple of examples: Food: A lot of the processed foods that are easily available make us unhealthy and sick. Even vegetables are less nutritious than they were 50 years ago. Mass agriculture also has many environmental externalities. Consumer goods: It has become difficult to find things like reliable appliances. I bought a chest freezer. It broke after a year. The repairman said it…

It's true, they don't "make 'em like they used to". They make them in new, more efficient ways which have contributed to improving global trends in metrics such as literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, extreme poverty, and food supply. If you are arguing that standard of living today is lower than in the past, I think that is a very steep uphill battle to argue If your worries are about ecology and sustainabili…

> If you are arguing that standard of living today is lower than in the past, I think that is a very steep uphill battle to argue

We'd first have to agree on a definition for "standard of living". There are certainly many (important to me) aspects in which we have regressed and being able to buy cheap tech crap does not make up for it.

Re: We mourn our craft

#862

Post by spicyusername » 

    We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.”
I definitely feel this some days. It used to be that I would nitpick code to death to get it just so, proud of the artistic decisions I made. Not only was it functional, but it was beautiful, crisp, elegant, clever.

Just the right abstractions. Complicated problems reduced to perfectly legible structures, easy to read for newcomers, easy to extend when new problems arise.

Extracting that from an LLM just doesn't produce the same feeling, even when it produces the same results. And they don't reliably produce the same results yet even, just poor imitations, however functional.

On the other hand, when they work, I am empowered to produce code I would have never thought of. I'm empowered to bounce an idea off an oracle that knows all the answers, and can tailor its responses to my exact use case. I'm coming around to finding the joy in that. I have to.

Re: We mourn our craft

#863

Post by klaussilveira »

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…

Glad to hear I'm not the only one that thinks about retirement and having fun writing "my own" everything, just for the sake of it. From the compiler all the way to the UI library.

Re: We mourn our craft

#864

Post by wtetzner »

sneak wrote: post #810
wtetzner wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how people complain about macros as an abstraction mechanism, but replacing them with an LLM is fine.

Macros are referenced, like a function call. LLM output sort of “vendors in” smart macros (for lack of a better description) by saving the actual output of the LLM. In that sense, they serve different purposes.

Yes, LLMs are more like offline code generators that can't be reliably re-run. So the very first step of producing the code is "easy", but after that you have lost that ease, and have to read and maintain the larger generated output.

Re: We mourn our craft

#865

Post by [deleted] »

ryan_n wrote: post #854
wasmainiac wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name of the game for me is building “sh#t that works well” and I like it, and that means constant learning no doubt. I’ve done crazy sh!t like implementing Webservers with bash, accessed accessed by tunneling over uart, to configure laser driven HUD on a pair of glasses. All this was new to me but I did it and it works well within the constraints we were given. Now AI is making us more efficient (with questionabl…

Yea most people earn far less than that in the US too, that’s just hacker news being out of touch

[deleted]

Re: We mourn our craft

#866

Post by CaptainZapp »

Nextgrid wrote: post #298
AstroBen wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars being poured into the smartest minds in the world to push this thing forward I'm not so confident that it'll only be code monkeys for too long

Until they can magically increase context length to such a size that can conveniently fit the whole codebase, we're safe. It seems like the billions so far mostly go to talk of LLMs replacing every office worker, rather than any action to that effect. LLMs still have major (and dangerous) limitations that make this unlikely.

AI can’t do your job

But an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can’t do your job.

Cory Doctorow

Re: We mourn our craft

#867

Post by elzbardico »

spicyusername wrote: post #862

We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.” I definitely feel this some days. It used to be that I would nitpick code to death to get it just so, proud of the artistic decisions I made. Not only was it functional, but it was beautiful, crisp, elegant, cl…

I still nitpick it to death. If anything, I have more opportunities to nitpick code. LLM code is usually filthy: terrible abstractions, no care for complexity, cohesion, and coupling metrics.

Debugging with LLMs is also a mixed experience; they can identify plenty of hypotheses very well, thanks to millions of dollars spent in RL, but they lack a more profound understanding of causal chains. They will try to change more than one thing at a time, even when doing so will completely invalidate the experiment; they will get into bizarre loops and weird tangents. They can help a lot, but if you want to have good results, it is way better if you strongly take control of the steering wheel.

LLMs are basically the average developer, although with way more breadth. But still not much depth.

Re: We mourn our craft

#868

Post by elzbardico »

tangotaylor wrote: post #625

I feel like most of the anxiety around LLMs is because (in the USA at least) our social safety net sucks. I'd probably have way more fun debating LLMs if it wasn't tied to my ability to pay rent, have healthcare, or feel like a valued person contributing something to society. If we had universal healthcare and a federal job guarantee it would probably calm things down.

Don't let the hysteria and the astro-turfing get to you. Things are not nearly as close to what a bunch of hyper-excited project managers, average developers and labs propagandists like to say.

The more you use code agents, the clearer its limitations will appear to you.

Everyone selling them as some silver bullet is either trying to astroturf it, to ride the wave as a newly minted "expert/early adopter" or have no fucking clue about what they are talking.

Re: We mourn our craft

#869

Post by cindyllm »

elzbardico wrote: post #867
spicyusername wrote: post #862

We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.” I definitely feel this some days. It used to be that I would nitpick code to death to get it just so, proud of the artistic decisions I made. Not only was it functional, but it was beautiful, crisp, elegant, cl…

I still nitpick it to death. If anything, I have more opportunities to nitpick code. LLM code is usually filthy: terrible abstractions, no care for complexity, cohesion, and coupling metrics. Debugging with LLMs is also a mixed experience; they can identify plenty of hypotheses very well, thanks to millions of dollars spent in RL, but they lack a more profound understanding of causal chains. They will try to change m…

[dead]

Re: We mourn our craft

#870

Post by kakaghrjfk »

peheje wrote: post #267

I get the grief about AI, but I don't share it. After ten years of professional coding, LLMs have made my work more fun. Not easier in the sense of being less demanding, but more engaging. I am involved in more decisions, deeper reviews, broader systems, and tighter feedback loops than before. The cognitive load did not disappear. It shifted. My habits have changed. I stopped grinding algorithm puzzles because they s…

> I stopped grinding algorithm puzzles because they started to feel like practicing celestial navigation in the age of GPS. It is a beautiful skill, but the world has moved on.

I don't understand this comment. Is this your personal experience in the industry? The only reason 99.99% of people needed to do this was for technical interviews. The world hasn't moved on until technical interviews have moved on, and they haven't.

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