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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

maggieappleton.com

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Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#91

Post by deafpolygon »

9dev wrote: post #24

If I have learnt one thing working in software engineering, specifically on AI-enabled products empowering junior engineers, and using Copilot professionally, it’s that you need even more experience to detect the subtleties in the lack of the models understanding of your domain, your specific intent. If you don’t know exactly what you’re after, and use the LLM as a sparring partner to bounce your ideas off, you’re in…

> ChatGPT will gleefully suggest you a wrong approach, just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No when it would be appropriate

Therein lies the mistake. Too many people assume ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) are capable of reasoning. It's not. It is simply just giving you what is likely the 'correct' answer based on some sort of pattern.

It doesn't know what's wrong, so it's not aware it's giving you an inappropriate answer.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#92

Post by liampulles »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #66
liampulles wrote: post #31

Unpopular opinion inbound: what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FUN. By extendable, I mean doing things like generating and sending emails, and using plugins to integrate with external services. By fun, I mean non-enterprisey, something that one would WANT to engage in as a hobby and that a total novice can pick up and gradu…

I largely agree with you. Spreadsheets are arguably the most successful no-code/low-code tool out there in that they've enabled millions of people to automate some task or complex process and effectively become programmers, despite the fact that I personally find an empty spreadsheet to be kind of intimidating to look at. I think the only point of disagreement we might have is that I don't necessarily think that the…

"I don't necessarily think that the speadsheet, even an improved one, is the best graphical model/structure for articulating complex processes, but it seems to be the best we've discovered thus far."

I actually do agree with you on that, as you say its just the best we've discovered so far. But if there is a better model which is as versatile and easy to use, I'm totally open to it.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#93

Post by [deleted] »

analog31 wrote: post #83
mangamadaiyan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tangential nitpick: Scientists, Engineers who are not of the Software persuasion, Accountants, and Lawyers, to name just a few, also make up people who work "outside the SWE field". Almost all of these people are interested in thinking; a few of them will probably not be, just as one finds a few people working in the SWE field being reluctant to think. There is a very good reason why people -- even technically mind…

I've noticed that even the SWE's are annoyed by the UI's of typical enterprise software and websites, and by gratuitous UI churn.

[deleted]

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#94

Post by ximm »

The author makes it sound like most software in the world is software that is made to scale. I strongly doubt that. I would say that at least ~50% of software is ad-hoc scripts or specialized tools for single organizations.

It is no wonder that the software that is used by a large number of people is talked about more than software that is only used by a handful. Home-Cooked Software already exists, it is just not as easy to see.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#95

Post by okwhateverdude »

analog31 wrote: post #83
mangamadaiyan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tangential nitpick: Scientists, Engineers who are not of the Software persuasion, Accountants, and Lawyers, to name just a few, also make up people who work "outside the SWE field". Almost all of these people are interested in thinking; a few of them will probably not be, just as one finds a few people working in the SWE field being reluctant to think. There is a very good reason why people -- even technically mind…

I've noticed that even the SWE's are annoyed by the UI's of typical enterprise software and websites, and by gratuitous UI churn.

Only because I, as a SWE, know how that sausage is made. Either it is some misguided desire to show a customer that you're working on the product ("See, we're still alive, please keep paying us money!"), some PM or UI designer stuffing their promo packet ("Look at how much increased engagement we have!" by making users now click twice as much), or to satisfy the whim of some c-level sponsor. Rarely is the UI actually improved or made more efficient or actual user research conducted. Prime example is the last Slack UI update from last year that introduced a ton of dead space and other annoyances. Like, the tool is for reading and writing text. I want to see the text. Why did you shrink the text area for that stupid dead space on the left? Guarantee they are measuring useless metrics like clicking on those stupid buttons on the left now and patting themselves on the back on how awesome and useful their change was.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#96

Post by fire_lake »

Analysis seems flawed to me.

They claim that large companies can never support the long tail since it’s too expensive to produce those features.

But they also claim that cost of software production is going to fall dramatically such that people can build their own apps for small user-bases.

I don’t mean to sound negative, since I love the picture painted by Local First, but I don’t think it will work out that way.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#97

Post by logicallee »

deafpolygon wrote: post #91
9dev wrote: post #24

If I have learnt one thing working in software engineering, specifically on AI-enabled products empowering junior engineers, and using Copilot professionally, it’s that you need even more experience to detect the subtleties in the lack of the models understanding of your domain, your specific intent. If you don’t know exactly what you’re after, and use the LLM as a sparring partner to bounce your ideas off, you’re in…

> ChatGPT will gleefully suggest you a wrong approach, just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No when it would be appropriate Therein lies the mistake. Too many people assume ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) are capable of reasoning. It's not. It is simply just giving you what is likely the 'correct' answer based on some sort of pattern. It doesn't know what's wrong, so it's not aware it's gi…

>Too many people assume ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) are capable of reasoning. It's not.

Sure it is, just like a child or someone not very good at reasoning. You can test ChatGPT yourself on some totally novel ad hoc reasoning task you invent for the task, with a single correct conclusion that takes reasoning to arrive at and it will probably get it if it's really easy, even if you take great pains to make it something totally new that you invented. Try it yourself (preferably with ChatGPT 4o) if you don't believe me. Please share your results.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#98

Post by llm_trw »

theamk wrote: post #73
llm_trw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not there to fix defect, they are there to detect them.

Sure, but it's LLM - so this would be mix of some of the real defects (but not all of them) and a totally fake defects which do not actually need fixing. This is not going to help junior developers figure out good from bad.

And by running multiple versions of the system in parallel you can have them vote on which is the most likely part of the code which is a bug and which isn't.

We've known how to make reliable components out of unreliable ones for a century now. LLMs aren't magic boxes which make all previous engineering obsolete.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#99

Post by lelanthran »

bawolff wrote: post #18

Personally i'd rather we bridge the gap between using excel and writing python with something that is between the two, rather than relying on LLMs. Call me a skeptic, but i remain very unconvinced that LLMs will be the enabling tool that lets non programmers program.

> Personally i'd rather we bridge the gap between using excel and writing python with something that is between the two, rather than relying on LLMs.

Maybe Lua[1] and Excel. Python's significant whitespace is unsuitable for doing the one-liners that spreadsheet experts do.

Writing code for the spreadsheet should not require putting that code in a separate file just so the significant whitespace can be maintained.

Whatever you write in a single cell should be the programming language. If you later want to move it to it's own file, module, package, CLI, etc, you should be able to.

[1] Visual Basic turned out to be very usable with spreadsheet experts.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#100

Post by alabhyajindal »

> They [barefoot developers] are the kinds of people who would be thrilled to have more agency and power over computers.

I don't think this is true. No-code software development solutions have existed for a while now and we have not seen a rapid increase in software being built.

Technical people who are non-programmers are not interested in having power over computers at all. They want to get their work done. And if doing this work requires too much work, they'll give up on the task than learn the thing.

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