It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!).
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@plexus adding to this what about losing the craft? If you just review the produced code and never practice the craft anymore, you will lose it and then what?
There are tons of other things going on in my mind and at the top my 12 yrs old kiddo is getting hooked into programming without using LLMs. What should I say to him? Don't worry too much, do a shitty job you don't like because a bunch of VC sharks decided that's better to invest in machines than humans?@plexus and my last point is that "us, developers" are an anomaly in the job market, well paid workers with many benefits doing the job they love. An anomaly that VCs want to be fixed...
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- LLMs generate straw-fire software. It seems to burn at first, but it's not even hot enough to start a real fire.- This seems cheap in a very short-term view, and it might satisfy short-term “wants”, but it's not sustainable.
- We need to start fixing somewhere. Two holes in a bucket are not a dilemma, but two tasks.
@Ardubal @hanshuebner @plexus "Move fast and break things" has been one of the worst motivators of our time.
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@hanshuebner @plexus I don't know what your point is?
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It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.
How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.
But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.
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Holger, as far as I understand the capabilities of LLMs, they only really produce a passable result when given a blank slate and the task at hand is some variation of gluing some libraries and/or REST APIs together.
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@hanshuebner @plexus I don't know what your point is?
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@plexus In the end, software engineering is about creating solutions to problems other people have. The solutions are not a byproduct, but the primary purpose. To the majority of users, the inner workings and the creation process of software is opaque. The qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings.
This means that for most people in the software industry, adapting to the new tooling that makes the creation process more efficient is 1/
@hanshuebner @plexus Did you ever read the toot you replied to before arguing with standard AI propaganda points?
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@hanshuebner @plexus Did you ever read the toot you replied to before arguing with standard AI propaganda points?
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@hanshuebner Thanks but I guess I will see the effects of using LLMs over a longer period of time on a bigger codebase at work anyway. I'm actually more concerned about the effects on the developers, which brings us back to Arne's original toot.
@grishka @plexus -
Hans, thanks but I'm not looking to change my workflow at this time. I'm fully satisfied with it as is now.
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@hanshuebner @plexus yes and no. It‘s a sytem problem that needs a fix on a regulatory scale. But enough single devs opting out can also make a difference. Furthermore, regulation is done by politics, which in the end is the sum of the votes and voices of the people.
@can @hanshuebner @plexus
> on a regulatory scaleYou can't "regulate" anymore.
The one-hour income of the business to be regulated surpasses sum* of whole-live earnings of less than thousand politicians that might regulate.
*Sans the side channel paymnts from the unregulated.
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@hanshuebner Thanks but I guess I will see the effects of using LLMs over a longer period of time on a bigger codebase at work anyway. I'm actually more concerned about the effects on the developers, which brings us back to Arne's original toot.
@grishka @plexus@schaueho @grishka @plexus I believe it is mostly a learning challenge. It was always possible and common to write bad and good software, and with LLMs generating code, new ways will need to be developed to ensure quality. This is the systemic part.
The personal part is that for some developers, their development activity changes. Merely writing code will not be a very common job for humans. Focus will be more on architecture, feature definition, requirements engineering etc.
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Hans, thanks but I'm not looking to change my workflow at this time. I'm fully satisfied with it as is now.
@grishka OK, but then be aware that your opinions will just be based on propaganda. I'd rather know what I'm talking about.
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It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.
How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.
But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.
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@can @hanshuebner @plexus
> on a regulatory scaleYou can't "regulate" anymore.
The one-hour income of the business to be regulated surpasses sum* of whole-live earnings of less than thousand politicians that might regulate.
*Sans the side channel paymnts from the unregulated.
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@hanshuebner You are replying to Rich Felker, primary developer of the musl C library for Linux, a shining example of software at a low layer of the stack developed with meticulous attention to quality. True, quality that business people probably don't appreciate, but if software at all layers were developed with this attention to quality, I think users would feel the difference.
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@hanshuebner @can @plexus
> Is it worth fighting for a [just] world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFu0o8NB5Io -
It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.
How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.
But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.
@plexus i recently rewrote one of my old hobby projects in Python, and it was kind of miserable the whole time. I did not do it for "fun" or for the craft or whatever. But i wouldn't think of asking an LLM to do it (or any part of it) for me, and the reasons are both practical and ideological:
Ideologically, i am not interested in giving any money or other support to those companies in any way. But practically, i do not trust any of them to not fuck it up, and i know i would spend *at least* equally long reading through and understanding whatever they've written than i spent just writing it myself.
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It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.
How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.
But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.
@plexus Indeed, this summarises my own position very well. Definitely not a purist craftsperson perspective.
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@hanshuebner You are replying to Rich Felker, primary developer of the musl C library for Linux, a shining example of software at a low layer of the stack developed with meticulous attention to quality. True, quality that business people probably don't appreciate, but if software at all layers were developed with this attention to quality, I think users would feel the difference.
@matt @dalias @plexus Is the reality not that not all software is developed with meticulous attention to quality? In my experience, most software is primarily written with the intent to solve a problem. The engineering challenge is to make it maintainable as requirements evolve. Success is when the software fulfills its purpose.
I love writing beautiful code, but don't expect anyone to pay me for it - not only because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but also because users don't care.
