It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!).
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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.
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@grishka OK, but then be aware that your opinions will just be based on propaganda. I'd rather know what I'm talking about.
Hans, I understand the working principles of LLMs. I don't need to have used one for writing code (I did poke at ChatGPT and DeepSeek a bit out of curiosity) to know that I don't need it. I don't have the problems that they claim to solve. My bottleneck isn't typing the code into the editor, it's the very kind of abstract thinking that LLMs are incapable of by virtue of what they are. I ask a lot of questions, both to myself and to other people, before I write a single line of code.
Besides, I prefer my tools to be 100% deterministic, predictable, and knowable. LLMs are anything but. They are designed to give varied statistically likely output, there's a step at the end that deliberately applies a bit of randomness when picking which of the most likely next tokens is used for output.
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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 You don't have to use big tech to have a coding assistant. Run it locally. Been using #OpenCode over the last few days.
https://opencode.ai/ -
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 Every time I try it. except with the simplest of coding, it gets it wrong. You tell it it's wrong, it fixes that but changes the rest of the code is subtle ways so you have to recheck the whole damn thing. Net result - no time saved.
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Hans, I understand the working principles of LLMs. I don't need to have used one for writing code (I did poke at ChatGPT and DeepSeek a bit out of curiosity) to know that I don't need it. I don't have the problems that they claim to solve. My bottleneck isn't typing the code into the editor, it's the very kind of abstract thinking that LLMs are incapable of by virtue of what they are. I ask a lot of questions, both to myself and to other people, before I write a single line of code.
Besides, I prefer my tools to be 100% deterministic, predictable, and knowable. LLMs are anything but. They are designed to give varied statistically likely output, there's a step at the end that deliberately applies a bit of randomness when picking which of the most likely next tokens is used for output.
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Hans, of course I will. There will be industrial amounts of gloat coming from me when the AI bubble pops.
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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 Bullshit. Your entire argument rests on the false assumption that it works well enough.
It does not, and the failures it inherently introduces are dangerously opaque in ways that humans' mistakes are not.
Whether you realize it or not, you are shilling for con artists.
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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 Yeah well, we also mourn the loss of our craft on top of that :).
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@hanshuebner @plexus Bullshit. Your entire argument rests on the false assumption that it works well enough.
It does not, and the failures it inherently introduces are dangerously opaque in ways that humans' mistakes are not.
Whether you realize it or not, you are shilling for con artists.
@jmax I'm glad that smart people like you exist on the internet to explain things. Thank you!
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@jmax I'm glad that smart people like you exist on the internet to explain things. Thank you!
@hanshuebner Props for well executed sarcasm, our other differences acknowledged.
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@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.
@hanshuebner @matt @plexus Software written without any concern that it's doing the wrong thing does not "solve any problem" except "how to line venture capitalists' pockets".
Unless it's just being written for fun and not actual deployment to real-world applications, software is responsible for people's safety.
It controls deadly machines like cars and airplanes.It's used to design buildings and bridges. It guards people's communications against abusive partners, stalkers, governments. It controls people's money. It controls who gets need-based benefits. It decides whether people will be wrongly accused of embezzlement and driven to suicide.
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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 It’s not about ‘loving the craft vs making it work’ it’s about control, quality, and who really benefits from this shift
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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 @hanshuebner @plexus This. The fact that so many people believe otherwise doesn't make it true, and we will suffer the consequences of that stupid ideology.
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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 no..
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@hanshuebner @matt @plexus Software written without any concern that it's doing the wrong thing does not "solve any problem" except "how to line venture capitalists' pockets".
Unless it's just being written for fun and not actual deployment to real-world applications, software is responsible for people's safety.
It controls deadly machines like cars and airplanes.It's used to design buildings and bridges. It guards people's communications against abusive partners, stalkers, governments. It controls people's money. It controls who gets need-based benefits. It decides whether people will be wrongly accused of embezzlement and driven to suicide.
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@flooper @hanshuebner @plexus This. The fact that so many people believe otherwise doesn't make it true, and we will suffer the consequences of that stupid ideology.
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@hanshuebner @dalias (Dropping the original author as they already warned you that they're in no mood for your arguments.)
IMO, code is not something to be cranked out en masse. Every detail matters; as such, we should write every line deliberately, with care, as the clearest, most direct expression of our understanding of how to solve the problem, certainly clearer and more precise than a natural-language prompt.
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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.
I love to listen to virgins talk about sex.
It's very fun.
