It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!).
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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/
@plexus not a matter of choice, or resent. The market for "human crafted" software will be small, much smaller than the market for software that is cheap and does what users "want".
It is clear that the hidden costs of LLM generated software are huge, but these costs are not going to be realised at the point of creation.
This mechanism is the same for many aspects of capitalism. Opting out of one thing won't fix the system, but is a gesture. Just. 2/2
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@plexus not a matter of choice, or resent. The market for "human crafted" software will be small, much smaller than the market for software that is cheap and does what users "want".
It is clear that the hidden costs of LLM generated software are huge, but these costs are not going to be realised at the point of creation.
This mechanism is the same for many aspects of capitalism. Opting out of one thing won't fix the system, but is a gesture. Just. 2/2
@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.
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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 @plexus It is a personal choice to frame it that way, if you can afford it. For the majority of developers, it is a question of adapting or dropping out of the industry.
Humanity went through this process a couple of times now, and every industrial cycle left those who were made redundant by new technologies with the same choice.
Social change is possible, but our class - workers of the software industry - is not going to spark the next revolution, I fear.
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@plexus not a matter of choice, or resent. The market for "human crafted" software will be small, much smaller than the market for software that is cheap and does what users "want".
It is clear that the hidden costs of LLM generated software are huge, but these costs are not going to be realised at the point of creation.
This mechanism is the same for many aspects of capitalism. Opting out of one thing won't fix the system, but is a gesture. Just. 2/2
@hanshuebner I didn't say anything about fixing the system, I only talked about the resentment, which is real.
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@can @plexus It is a personal choice to frame it that way, if you can afford it. For the majority of developers, it is a question of adapting or dropping out of the industry.
Humanity went through this process a couple of times now, and every industrial cycle left those who were made redundant by new technologies with the same choice.
Social change is possible, but our class - workers of the software industry - is not going to spark the next revolution, I fear.
@hanshuebner @plexus if you are against how big tech is pushing LLMs, but you can’t do any chages because you will lose your job and don’t have any alternative, you can keep using it at your job but e.g. pressure your elected officials to improve regulation of big tech with regard to LLMs.
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@can @plexus It is a personal choice to frame it that way, if you can afford it. For the majority of developers, it is a question of adapting or dropping out of the industry.
Humanity went through this process a couple of times now, and every industrial cycle left those who were made redundant by new technologies with the same choice.
Social change is possible, but our class - workers of the software industry - is not going to spark the next revolution, I fear.
@hanshuebner @can seriously Hans, I am in no mood for this. Yes, the force of capital is overwhelming, and there's little that a bubble of old timers on the fediverse is going to do about it. We're all going to have to reckon with that and figure out what choices we have left. That's life under capitalism. The least we can do is speak our truth, and call things out for what they really are. At least we won't feel like we're the only ones who think this shit sucks, or who see it for what it really is. There's a reason I talk about hegemony. The defeatism only hastens the process.
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@hanshuebner @can seriously Hans, I am in no mood for this. Yes, the force of capital is overwhelming, and there's little that a bubble of old timers on the fediverse is going to do about it. We're all going to have to reckon with that and figure out what choices we have left. That's life under capitalism. The least we can do is speak our truth, and call things out for what they really are. At least we won't feel like we're the only ones who think this shit sucks, or who see it for what it really is. There's a reason I talk about hegemony. The defeatism only hastens the process.
@plexus @can I don't actually think this shit sucks. Things are not that easy. Mind you, computers are a product of the military industrial complex in itself, and we were just lucky to be far away from WWII and the Manhattan Project that we could ignore and forget how all this stuff came to fruition in the first place.
There is no alternative to taking the world as it is when working on social change, though. It does not seem like a successful strategy to opt out of the technology everyone 1/
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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 Very good writing here. Thank you.
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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 Thank you for expressing this out loud, Arne!
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@plexus @can I don't actually think this shit sucks. Things are not that easy. Mind you, computers are a product of the military industrial complex in itself, and we were just lucky to be far away from WWII and the Manhattan Project that we could ignore and forget how all this stuff came to fruition in the first place.
There is no alternative to taking the world as it is when working on social change, though. It does not seem like a successful strategy to opt out of the technology everyone 1/
-
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 our hobby has always known culture wars
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/1682-coldfusion-vs-xyz-it-finally-got-physical.htmI think alot of colleagues don't have the luxury to choose, but have an employer that orders them to use AI.
When the draft of our strategy document was submitted i responded with some caution not to double down on the hype. I am fortunate that i can have a voice in this matter at my job. -
R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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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
"The qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings." Sorry, but this can't be further away form truth. Our 70+ years pile of empirical evidence says otherwise. The whole history of software engineering is about how to manage and improve internal quality in order to result in good external quality. -
@plexus not a matter of choice, or resent. The market for "human crafted" software will be small, much smaller than the market for software that is cheap and does what users "want".
It is clear that the hidden costs of LLM generated software are huge, but these costs are not going to be realised at the point of creation.
This mechanism is the same for many aspects of capitalism. Opting out of one thing won't fix the system, but is a gesture. Just. 2/2
You are stating a lot of assumptions:
- That the qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings.
- That LLMs make the creation process more efficient.
- That LLM-generated software is cheap and does what users “want.”
- That fixing one thing is not worthwhile while other things are not fixed.
But:
- Inner quality does matter a lot. E. g. JIRA receives a lot of complaints because it is not well designed internally.
…
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You are stating a lot of assumptions:
- That the qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings.
- That LLMs make the creation process more efficient.
- That LLM-generated software is cheap and does what users “want.”
- That fixing one thing is not worthwhile while other things are not fixed.
But:
- Inner quality does matter a lot. E. g. JIRA receives a lot of complaints because it is not well designed internally.
…
…
- 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.
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@hanshuebner @plexus
"The qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings." Sorry, but this can't be further away form truth. Our 70+ years pile of empirical evidence says otherwise. The whole history of software engineering is about how to manage and improve internal quality in order to result in good external quality.@flooper @plexus You can certainly define "quality" so that what you wrote is true. I know of enough "successful" software that was "successful" without having "good quality" on the inside. "Success" is something that many people would associate with "quality", so there you have the definition that I was talking about.
I believe that disussions around quality that don't consider users is worthless. The connection between external and internal quality less tight than some make it appear.
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You are stating a lot of assumptions:
- That the qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings.
- That LLMs make the creation process more efficient.
- That LLM-generated software is cheap and does what users “want.”
- That fixing one thing is not worthwhile while other things are not fixed.
But:
- Inner quality does matter a lot. E. g. JIRA receives a lot of complaints because it is not well designed internally.
…
-
@hanshuebner I didn't say anything about fixing the system, I only talked about the resentment, which is real.
@plexus I can relate to that.
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@flooper @plexus You can certainly define "quality" so that what you wrote is true. I know of enough "successful" software that was "successful" without having "good quality" on the inside. "Success" is something that many people would associate with "quality", so there you have the definition that I was talking about.
I believe that disussions around quality that don't consider users is worthless. The connection between external and internal quality less tight than some make it appear.
@hanshuebner @flooper I explicitly called out Worse is Better, which is exactly what you are talking about. The original formulation was that Unix "won" because it was "worse", it was simpler, easier to port, etc. That whole dogma has morphed over time. During the SaaS boom worse-is-better meant ship MVPs to capture market and lock in users. Now that we're in the enshittify stage it means "drop quality and raise prices as much as the user will bear before churning", enabled by platform lock in. So yes, for some capitalist notion this is winning, it's certainly extracting value. It's a notion I wholeheartedly reject.
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@hanshuebner @flooper I explicitly called out Worse is Better, which is exactly what you are talking about. The original formulation was that Unix "won" because it was "worse", it was simpler, easier to port, etc. That whole dogma has morphed over time. During the SaaS boom worse-is-better meant ship MVPs to capture market and lock in users. Now that we're in the enshittify stage it means "drop quality and raise prices as much as the user will bear before churning", enabled by platform lock in. So yes, for some capitalist notion this is winning, it's certainly extracting value. It's a notion I wholeheartedly reject.
@plexus @flooper "Worse is better" is not a dogma, it is a thesis and an interpretation of history, which can be read in different ways. It was originally frame in the context of Unix and how it was worse than other systems. These other systems were, e.g. Multics, VAX/VMS, VM/370 or Genera, and much of the resent of the applauding audience came from habit, arrogance and hubris.
In that context, it can also be argued that Unix was better than these other systems, strictly because of its 1/
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@plexus @flooper "Worse is better" is not a dogma, it is a thesis and an interpretation of history, which can be read in different ways. It was originally frame in the context of Unix and how it was worse than other systems. These other systems were, e.g. Multics, VAX/VMS, VM/370 or Genera, and much of the resent of the applauding audience came from habit, arrogance and hubris.
In that context, it can also be argued that Unix was better than these other systems, strictly because of its 1/
@plexus @flooper simplicity. And simplicity has become a primary quality in the recent years, as you know.
This teaches us that resentment to technology within the technology field is very much bound to the time period in which it occurs, and to common habits.
It is tempting to interleave social and technological critique, but I'd argue that it is often not leading to a very focused conversation. 2/2
