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I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#91

Post by paulddraper »

oytis wrote: post #39
ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend

Amen.

I've always said that by only writing ASM can you get any sense of accomplishment from authoring software.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#92

Post by hext »

skydhash wrote: post #84
hext wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the attitude frequently adopted by open source maintainers - comparing themselves to Spielberg - has been a major roadblock to anyone looking to contribute to open source projects for years.

Why are you looking to contribute to open source projects? If you have a fix or a new feature, you can share the diff in variety of ways. The maintainers are not obligated to review, discuss, and accept your changes.

I’m not entirely following you. I generally don’t contribute anymore, but in the past I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.

I certainly understand things are different nowadays, I’m talking pre-LLM proliferation.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#93

Post by skydhash »

jrm4 wrote: post #48
ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

I do a bit in my IT classes where I show a "spectrum" of computer activities, from "changing a screensaver" to "Assembly" and then challenge people to find the line where "using a computer" stops and "programming a computer" starts. It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.

As soon as you’re specifying instructions for the computer to do a task automatically, you’re programming it. It can be recording a macro, writing a script, describing it in something like Shortcuts,… The core thing is automation.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#94

Post by oytis »

ai_critic wrote: post #81
oytis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend

Do you think your CEO has no sense of accomplishment when your team ships a product feature?

Yeah, they created a team that accomplished something (or a team that created a team), so it's well-deserved.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#95

Post by dgellow »

dude250711 wrote: post #7
ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie.

I think a better analogy would be commissioning an artist to create a painting. Yes you provided instructions and decided which style you preferred, and maybe pointed some corrections you wanted. And you can be proud of owning that specific, unique painting. No you didn't create anything.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#96

Post by rpdillon »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #44
senordevnyc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we could, you know, let people feel proud of whatever they want?

Call me old fashioned but I take pride in things I work hard to achieve. I think it's embarrassing to be proud of AI output of any kind, be it software or art or writing.

But you're acting like everything that you use AI to build is easy to achieve, and that doesn't seem to be true.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#97

Post by nihakue »

ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ This has never been truer than right now. What we need isn't app store ecoystems but to eliminate the friction for distributing apps to your inner circle. We're entering the WhatsApp era of software, where everyone is going to be using a home cooked version of every piece of software that can conceivably exist on an island, and it's going to be a vibe coded mess, but it's going to be lovingly maintained by the people that use it every day. This is why I'm bullish on things like https://sprites.dev/ (not affiliated, just a customer). I have a little self replicating starter template that lets me quickly stand up new sprites with all my stuff logged in, ttyd + tmux so I can run claude code in the browser from my phone, and a caddy reverse proxy so I can also host a little starter app behind the fly io relay that sprites get out of the box so I don't have to do any extra work to have a publicly accessible https url I can send to people. Using this set up I've created dozens of little silly web applications for my family and friends, none of them were more complicated than little sketches but we've gotten some real pleasure out of them. There's still quite a bit of friction here though and I think if someone can really make this seamless for people they'll have something really special.

As an example, the android options for printing to my outdated brother printer were all terrible (ad supported nokoprint for example), so I used my template to create https://print.walden-gabrielw.workers.dev/ (This one a put a cloudflare worker in front of because it's just a static html+js page and I didn't want to pay for uncached traffic but the principal is basically the same). No one will likely ever use this but me and my wife, but the cost to keep it up is basically 0, the cost to build it was very reasonable, and if it ever breaks I'm fairly confident the latest LLM will be able to debug it without too much trouble.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#98

Post by ethagnawl »

> Back in pre-LLM days, receiving an unexpected pull request (PR) from a fellow coder was a source of excitement and pride.

As a maintainer of a few FLOSS projects, this tracks.

The Pavlovian PR notification response has gone from, "Oh! What do we have here?" to "Groan. Do we have _anything_ here?"

I won't get specific but I just had to remove a contributor from a project after multiple submissions of either cutesy, fluffy bullshit (add ASCI animations!) or "rewrite entire project in other language". Not only did the PRs result in wasted time and energy but they also resulted in conversations about how to deal with this sort of spam. (Probably good to get out of the way and set policy but still...) So, this person probably spent fifteen minutes prompting together these stupid PRs and multiple maintainers had to spend hours agonizing over what to do about them.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#99

Post by luma »

oytis wrote: post #39
ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend

What sense of pride an accomplishment do you get from using a library, or a high level language? You didn't write that code, you didn't hand translate into processor opcodes, etc. There are a million man hours of other people's work involved in making a simple python script run.

Given that any coding effort relies heavily on a much greater amount of work as a prior than the code you yourself are writing... Why do you feel accomplishment?

Making things is fun, using tools to make things can continue to be fun. I have fun woodworking with hand tools and I also enjoy using my CNC where the job permits. Both bring joy.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#100

Post by rpdillon »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #33
the_af wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get where you're coming from, but for completely non-technical people, it seems to me the more precise analogy is not "building" but "ordering online". Or hiring someone to do something for you. If you order a pizza from an app, and assume you can pick ingredients from a checklist, would you consider it "making" a pizza? Would people get the feeling of accomplishment?

That's a better analogy than my dumb drawing one. You can be happy you got your pizza and you can enjoy the taste but it is not an accomplishment to be proud of.

It's mostly that how much you decide to involve AI as a spectrum. To extend to the pizza analogy, I feel like you're telling me that because I used dough that I bought at the store, I shouldn't be proud of the pizza I made, even though I made the sauce and cut the pepperoni and the sausage and baked it myself on a peel covered with cornmeal. That's not the same as just ordering it on DoorDash.
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