91–100 of 157 posts
Especially with my rules:
- Prefer simple, boring solution
- Before adding complexity to work around a constraint, ask if the constraint needs to exist.
- Remember: The best code is often the code you don't write.
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I mean yes, i am speaking for myself. I am drowning in mountains of LLM slop patches lol. I WISH people were using LLMs as "just another tool to generate code, akin to a vim vs emacs discussion."
LLMs are an amplifier. The great get greater, and the lazier get lazier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you still use your car if you ended up in the wrong destination half the time?
Yes, because I can drive to the other end of the state in an afternoon. Then if I get lost, I can just course correct.
As for lies and bad code, it didn't appear with AI. Humans lied and produced bad code before AI.
How does the author empirically know AI does not understand? And if it does not understand right now, is a machine fundamentally unable to understand? Is understanding an exclusive human ability? Is it because machines lack a soul? It sounds quite dualistic (Descartes'view that mind and body and fundamentally different).
Don't get me know, I think right now, AI is less a good at understanding humans than other humans (or even dogs) in many contexts because it has no access to non verbal signals. But in the context of building software, it is good enough and I don't see why a machine should not be able to understand humans.
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Sure and lots of times I can walk places. That doesn't mean bikes, cars, trains and planes aren't incredibly useful. They let me achieve things I can't in other ways for example transporting cargo without a team of people to help me. Just like AI coding.
Would you still use your car if you ended up in the wrong destination half the time?
Or do you suppose this is the best AI will ever get?
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You give examples where crafts based on pre-industrial technology still exist. You're right, but you're proving the GP's point. 200 years ago, being a blacksmith was a viable career path. Now it's not. The use of hand tools, hand knitting, and hand forging is limited to niche, exotic, or hobbyist areas. The same could be said of making clothes by hand or developing film photographs. Coding will be relegated to the sa…
> Effectively all software will be made by AI. Students will not study coding, the knowledge of our generation will be lost. Given the echo chamber of HN when it comes to AI that certainly seems inevitable. The question is - who would work on novel things or further AI model improvements if it so happens that knowledge of writing software by hand disappears?
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New technology does not eliminate old technology or craftsmanship. It just shifts who uses it and what for. - Power tools didn't annihilate the craftsmanship of hand-tool woodworking. Fine woodworkers are still around and making money using hand tools, as well as hobbyists. But contractors universally switched to power tools because they help them make more money with less labor/cost/time. - A friend of mine still kn…
The examples given are using tools to do well-defined, repeatable processes. So far, despite many attempts by upper management to make software the same way, it hasn't happened, and AI doesn't appear to be any different. I don't see a huge difference between people writing in a high-level language and people writing complex prompts.
AI agents isn't coding in Common Lisp home made macro DSL, is me doing in one hour doing something that could have taken a couple of days, even if I have to fix some slop along the way.
Thus I can already see the trend that started with MACH architecture and SaaS products, to go even further decreasing the team sizes required for project delivery.
Projects I used to be part of a 10 people team, are started to be sized into 5 or less.
I feel like one of the things that's not said enough, and which I think is conflating the effectiveness of AI in the eyes of actual software engineers, is that, for the most part, most code produced IS lousy. The craft of programming has been watered down so much in favor of results, and so much code is disposable or write-and-use once, that quality just became less relevant. I remember when I first started out progr…
Business doesn't care about the craft, they care that the use case is solved, even if the code is crap under the hood.
This argument is basically just the 1800s Luddite vs Industrialist argument recast for a new age. Group A thinks quality is about human agency, and that machines are being used to bypass the apprenticeship system and produce inferior goods. Group B thinks efficiency is the highest priority, and craft is just vanity. Of course as we know we went a third way, and human roles just shifted. I think one promising shift di…
Enterprise software tends to particularly bad because it's being sold to managers who won't use it themselves. Consumer software tends to be more user-friendly (or it won't sell), but popular software isn't always what you want. When writing software for yourself, there is a bias towards implementing just the features you want and never mind the rest. Sometimes the result can be pretty sloppy, but it works. However,…
Don’t forget that managers have different goals than file and rank employees.
For SaaS I work for we get requirements like required fields for a process that manager needs to have correct data and for insights into business process.
After we deliver software we get support tickets from employees that are using system nagging that “it takes too much time to fill in all this data” and that we should “fix our shitty system”.
They don’t care and they don’t have full knowledge why stuff is required - which is fault of managers that are not training their people and explaining “why”.
Oh and of course they have to copy paste shit over and over because their company won’t have budget for us integrating with their CRM and we won’t invest in something that benefits only single customer who might not renew the license next year - but also they don’t want to make a commitment like 5 years contract where we could do some investment. Of course there are some that invest in connecting the CRM but it mostly is an exception rather than the rule.