Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

911–918 of 918 posts

Re: We mourn our craft

#911

Post by coolThingsFirst »

jryio wrote: post #216

These comments are comical. How hard is it to understand that human beings are experiential creatures. Our experiences matter, to survival, to culture, and identity. I mourn the horse masters and stable boys of a century past because of their craft. Years of intuition and experience. Why do you watch a chess master play, or a live concert, or any form of human creation? Should we automate parts of our profession? Yes…

This is so naive, you watch chess masters not because of the quality of the end result of the chess game but because it illustrates human ability, it's entertainment.

SWE the quality is measured in the end result, there's no beauty in handcrafted barely working code. So if machines come to the stage where they program better than 90% of human developers then yes the craft is done for. The profession is dead.

You can talk to LLM to give it specs for what you want built but that's basically a totally different profession that a high-schooler would do and salaries will soon follow suit.

Re: We mourn our craft

#912

Post by timbritt »

An architect knows the difference between this window and that, this door and another, a partition wall and a firewall, a tile roof and a metal one. The architect understands how to orient them and work the materials together.

But the architect does not have to make the windows, or the doors, or the walls…or the roof to create the house.

There are lots of things that autonomous agents are not so good at. Most of the things it took away from me are things that were holding me back in the first place.

Re: We mourn our craft

#913

Post by tracker1 »

autoexec wrote: post #723
sosomoxie wrote: post #10

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…

> we're definitely in a golden age of computing. Certainly not. Computers are still magic, but much of that magic is now controlled and being restricted by someone other than you. Today most people's only computer is a cell phone, which is heavily locked down and designed for media consumption and to collect and give away every scrap of their personal/private data. Most people's desktop computers aren't much better.…

Most people's only computer??? MOST people in the 80's had never, personally, touched a computer other than maybe an ATM machine. The fact that most people today don't care about a personal computing device in terms of what it does or how it does it isn't really a surprise.

Most people don't care how the toaster or microwave work, only that they do. Same for the show me movies boxes in the living rooms. And, really, most people shouldn't have to care.

This isn't to dismiss privacy concerns or even right to own/repair... let alone "free" internet. It's just that most people shouldn't have to care about most things.

Re: We mourn our craft

#914

Post by chipsrafferty »

archagon wrote: post #500
Nextgrid wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't be prompting AI for the fun stuff (unless laying out boring boilerplate is what you consider "fun"). You'll still be writing the fun part - but you will be able to prompt beforehand to get all the boilerplate in place.

If you’re writing that much boilerplate as part of your day to day work, I daresay you’re Doing Coding Wrong. (Virtue number one of programming: laziness. https://thethreevirtues.com ) Any drudgework you repeat two or three times should be encapsulated or scripted away, deterministically.

This is a nice fantasy. In practice, maintaining tools that help you scaffold common code patterns take more time to create and maintain than it does to copy, paste, and edit.

Turns out LLMs are REALLY good at "make me this thing that is 90% the same as another thing I've built / you've seen before, but with this 10% being different"

Also, by your own metrics, laziness is a virtue, and copying, pasting, and editing is much easier and lazier than maintaining boilerplate tools. So it's not even following your 3 commandments.

Re: We mourn our craft

#915

Post by chipsrafferty »

wtetzner wrote: post #606
joquarky wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as a senior engineer, most of the stuff you do shouldn’t be stuff that an LLM is good at to begin with Your use of the word "should" is pointing to some ideal that doesn't exist anymore. In current actual reality, you do whatever your employer gives you to do, regardless of your job title. If you have 40 years of broad development experience but your boss tells you to build more CRUD web apps or start looking for a…

I think the point is that if you're building yet-another-CRUD web app, why aren't you abstracting more of it away already? It's not like we don't have the facilities for this in programming languages already.

Not everything can be abstracted away, jesus

Re: We mourn our craft

#916

Post by chipsrafferty »

anon_hack33rr wrote: post #560
ozozozd wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day someone referred to Claude Code as “the most complex terminal app” they’ve seen. Meanwhile folks are rendering videos in the terminal.

And if you didn't know, Claude Code is actually based on React and they are struggling to keep it at 60 FPS, whatever that means in the context of a terminal app They are writing markup to render monospaced characters in a terminal lol

the smartest minds in the world

Re: We mourn our craft

#917

Post by chipsrafferty »

JeremyNT wrote: post #511
Nextgrid wrote: post #137

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper. If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations. The perks of a…

I see what these can do and I'm already thinking, why would I ever hire a junior developer? I can fire up opencode and tell it to work multiple issues at once myself. The bottleneck becomes how fast you can write the spec or figure out what the product should actually be, not how quickly you can implement it. So the future of our profession looks grim indeed. There will be far fewer of us employed. I also miss writin…

Because then you can save the time you have to spend working on it yourself.

Re: We mourn our craft

#918

Post by archagon »

chipsrafferty wrote: post #914
archagon wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re writing that much boilerplate as part of your day to day work, I daresay you’re Doing Coding Wrong. (Virtue number one of programming: laziness. https://thethreevirtues.com ) Any drudgework you repeat two or three times should be encapsulated or scripted away, deterministically.

This is a nice fantasy. In practice, maintaining tools that help you scaffold common code patterns take more time to create and maintain than it does to copy, paste, and edit. Turns out LLMs are REALLY good at "make me this thing that is 90% the same as another thing I've built / you've seen before, but with this 10% being different" Also, by your own metrics, laziness is a virtue, and copying, pasting, and editing i…

> Also, by your own metrics, laziness is a virtue, and copying, pasting, and editing is much easier and lazier than maintaining boilerplate tools. So it's not even following your 3 commandments.

I mean, so is paying someone to write the code for you, but you're not really an engineer at that point, are you?

Engineering involves using stable, deterministic abstractions and components and understanding the architecture and ramifications of your design on a deep level. Yes, you can outsource this work. But don't delude yourself into thinking that you're still in the same profession.

(Of course, maybe you always thought of yourself as an entrepreneur and only saw coding as a means to an end. I think a lot of people are coming to that conclusion.)

Post reply on HN