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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

901–910 of 918 posts

Re: We mourn our craft

#901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that your base assumption that whoever you meet should succumb to your worldview is what is flawed here.

Have you considered that we exist in a post truth era? Data doesn't matter any more. It probably never did. It's all feelings and vibes. After all, conservatives haven't been able to demonstrate their success with the economy literally ever. Every single Democratic administration since Eisenhower has improved the economy by most used metrics (GDP, Unemployment, Deficit Reduction, etc. While Republican administrations…

So that's a no and you think there should be no diversity of thought. Have fund living in a bubble while the rest of the world returns does the same with your opinions as you do with theirs.

Re: We mourn our craft

#902
Most everything I've done professionally in my whole life has been about figuring out how to build something that doesn't yet exist. Usually this means a process of trial and error where I first try to build the full problem domain in my head and then proceed to think about what really needs to be done, given whatever the setting I'm in. For this, no farm of agents that can give me an answer because they don't know anymore than I do without going through the process of picturing it all out, and to be able to carry out this duty of the code dictator you have to have comprehension about the high-level stuff beyond the mechanical parts. You need a human objective, and you need to come up with one in order to implement it or ask AI to implement it.

What this means is that there's always going to be a bleeding edge, a wave of the known unknown, where someone has to sit down and think before anything can happen. Once that is done then AI can work out part of or the rest of the implementation.

The problem is that I genuinely like programming myself.

I like the process of thinking in terms of drafting code, seeing how it works, and discovering new insights I get while doing the Nth rewrite. I don't mind AI writing smart boilerplate code for me to get things going but I have very little of that in the first place. However, I like the interactive process of designing by programming and I don't get at all the same excitement from interacting with an AI and letting an agent do all the "hard" work of prototyping the code.

It's likely that my job will be more about the latter than the former, and I'm not thrilled about that. I know I can still find work doing the thinking what needs to be done part but the reason my work has been so enjoyable is how I've navigated through the whole high-level process by doing it in programming.

If I were a bricklayer I'd enjoy building arches, tiny details, stairs, cupolas, and whatnot that ultimately, tie together on a higher level and produce a vast building (a cathedral!) that somehow carries its own weight. I wouldn't mind an AI assistant laying a tediously long brick wall for me, but part of how I figure out how everything will play together is in me building the distinct features one by one, and brick by brick. If my job would be changing into pre-drawing all these features and sections on paper and then handing it out to a horde of assistants to do the actual laying of bricks I'd be equally miserable.

I know someone like me would still have to do the design part for each building but without also doing the bricklaying it's like imagining having sex with your wife. You like to imagine, too, but only because you know it's all backed up by sufficiently hands-down reality.

Luckily, programming being what it is, I can program on my spare time just the way I like. All I need is a laptop. I don't have to give up what I like. And I already don't finish much anything I do on my own, I don't need to productise what I work on, I just enjoy working on it. So there's no reason for me to let AI "help" in being more productive at home.

However, all through my working life I've had the utmost luxury of doing what I love for work and money. This might shift and change in the coming years in this world where productivity and shipping mean everything.

My work won't go away but it will change onto a plane where the creativity and discovery needed for the design process get uncoupled from the raw, physical work of programming. I'd be asking AI to accomplish what I want enough many times that it starts to hit close enough, instead of writing iterations of prototypes myself. Or I'll instruct an AI to drive the process of running more AI in order to build and implement the end product. That's no doubt much less fun and nothing I signed up for, really.

Re: We mourn our craft

#903
post #645

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

> I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. Maybe they made us feel magic, but actual magic is the opposite of what I want computers to be. The “magic” for me was that computers were completely scrutable and reason-able, and that you could leverage your reasoning abilities to create interesting things with them, because they were (a…

> The “magic” for me was that computers were completely scrutable and > reason-able

Yes, and computers were something that gave you powerful freedom. You could make a computer do anything it was physically able to as long as your mind could follow up. Computers followed logic, they didn't have opinions, they gave you full control of themselves and you would have unlimited control.

Re: We mourn our craft

#904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't really understand. It's a bit difficult to take "wait x months" at face value because I've been hearing it for so long. Wait x months for what? Why hasn't it happened yet? Things seem to be getting better from December 2022 (chatgpt launch), sure, but is there a ceiling we don't see?

"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.

Kind of funny that some of those wait-6-month people are basically the same ones behind "no human driven cars being sold after 2025" and "computer vision is all you need"

Re: We mourn our craft

#905
post #883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You left out the key line “and you don’t believe me, wait six months”. These models are getting better all the time. The term “vibe coding” was only coined a year ago, around the same time as the release of Claude Code. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think it’s good yet, because it’s brand new tech and it keeps improving.

We've been "waiting six months" for over three years now. Still waiting for the quality to improve.

If you don’t think the quality has improved then you haven’t actually been trying it. Any programmer who knows what they’re doing can immediately tell models like Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 are much better than models from a year ago. All the objective metrics (benchmarks etc) agree as well.

Re: We mourn our craft

#906

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself. If you find the agentic workflow to be more fun, more power to you. I for one think writing code is the rewarding part. You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.

I don't understand this perspective. I've never learned so much so fast as I have in the last few months. LLMs automate all the boring rote stuff, freeing up my time to focus exclusively on the high-level problem-solving. I'm enjoying my work more than ever. To be fair, I might have felt some grief initially for my old ways of working. It was definitely a weird shift and it took me a while to adjust. But I've been al…

I went back to typing myself after a short time, even for the stuff I do rely on LLMs on. I noticed that crucial steps of thinking happen as I type out the code. Letting an agent code, or copying from a chat, versus typing it off manually makes a huge qualitative difference for me. Typing manually is an extreme time saver because of all the issue it lets me catch early on.

At least for me and a lot of others, the mental process is very different between the two. I guess there's a similar dynamic with, e.g., writing a letter to someone vs. dictating it. You prepare differently, think differently. A different text comes out.

Like the author (I forgot which one) who said they once copied an entire classic novel with their typewriter, in order to "see what it feels like to write a great novel." When I first heard it, I thought it was meant as a joke, but there's a lot more truth and sense in that than it might sound like at first.

Re: We mourn our craft

#907

lmao nope burn in hell old programming. What is emerging is a thousand times better than that dumpster fire

Who cares if the resulting software is also a thousand times worse and a thousand times more insecure?

Re: We mourn our craft

#908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it's technically always a choice, but because society exists, some options are dramatically more plausible than others. For example, say phones become more and more locked down and invasive. Technically you can choose not to have a phone, but how are you meant to function in today's society without a phone? Basically everything of importance assumes you have a phone. Technically you could make your own phone, I…

"Basically everything of importance assumes you have a phone" -- this is far from the truth in my world. It seems that how one uses a modern smartphone shapes one's world view of what's valued and what's possible.

When I visit my parents, I often fly to the major airport a hundred miles or so from them and take a bus from the airport to their town. There used to be a desk in the bus station attached to the airport where you could buy tickets, ask the clerk when the next bus to your destination was, etc. A few years ago they got rid of the desk and have a sign with a QR code to download an app that gives schedules and let's you buy tickets. There is no other way to ride the buses now. This is just one example of how there's an assumption of "everyone has a smart phone" these days.

Re: We mourn our craft

#909
post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Models you can run on your own (expensive) computer are just a year behind the SOTA. Linux exists. Why are you so pessimistic?

Typical HN comment. They’re so in the weeds of edge case 1% concerns they can’t see the golden age around them. Most people living through golden ages might not know it. Many workers in Industrial Revolution saw a decline in relative wages. Many in the Roman Empire were enslaved or impoverished. That doesn’t mean history doesn’t see these as golden ages, where golden age is defined loosely as a broad period of enhanc…

So what your saying is lots of people being unemployed and dying from lack of resources is merely a "downside" and we should all just support your mediocre idea of what a "golden age" is?

Re: We mourn our craft

#910
post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Models you can run on your own (expensive) computer are just a year behind the SOTA. Linux exists. Why are you so pessimistic?

Typical HN comment. They’re so in the weeds of edge case 1% concerns they can’t see the golden age around them. Most people living through golden ages might not know it. Many workers in Industrial Revolution saw a decline in relative wages. Many in the Roman Empire were enslaved or impoverished. That doesn’t mean history doesn’t see these as golden ages, where golden age is defined loosely as a broad period of enhanc…

"the golden age of computing started 100 years ago"

Only 14% of Americans described themselves as "very happy" in recent studies, a sharp decline from 31% in 2018.

woohoo we did it, our neighbors are being sent to prison camps who work with the "golden age" bringers. Go team. Nice "golden age" you got there, peasant.

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