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/
@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.
…
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@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
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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/
Hans, except in the modern software industry, the problems that are being solved by software products are not those of the end users, but instead those of the company that makes it or its investors. You can't explain all the humiliatingly hostile UX decisions of the last decade of software otherwise. No user problems are being solved by onboardings that get in your damn way when you want to use the app for its one and only purpose in a hurry.
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Hans, except in the modern software industry, the problems that are being solved by software products are not those of the end users, but instead those of the company that makes it or its investors. You can't explain all the humiliatingly hostile UX decisions of the last decade of software otherwise. No user problems are being solved by onboardings that get in your damn way when you want to use the app for its one and only purpose in a hurry.
@grishka Right on, and then consider that with the traditional mode of writing software, the cost of creating something that is good is very high.
I'd argue that with faster (machine assisted) software creation, it is easier to meet the need of users because the cost of change is drastically reduced. I'm experiencing that with those system that I'm currently writing that way.
The whole argument that software written by humans is better does not bear any merit for me.
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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/
Yes, »worse is better« morphed from /description/ to /prescription/. (There is a nice talk by Romeu Moura about this fallacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92Pq4-e0QyI)
In short: people erroneously move from »it's like this« to »it should be like this« or »it's inevitable like this«, and then enshrine it as a given fact, assumption or axiom instead of asking what can be done about it.
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@grishka Right on, and then consider that with the traditional mode of writing software, the cost of creating something that is good is very high.
I'd argue that with faster (machine assisted) software creation, it is easier to meet the need of users because the cost of change is drastically reduced. I'm experiencing that with those system that I'm currently writing that way.
The whole argument that software written by humans is better does not bear any merit for me.
@grishka It is basically the same argument that old-school programmers make since decades when a new tool comes to the market.
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@grishka Right on, and then consider that with the traditional mode of writing software, the cost of creating something that is good is very high.
I'd argue that with faster (machine assisted) software creation, it is easier to meet the need of users because the cost of change is drastically reduced. I'm experiencing that with those system that I'm currently writing that way.
The whole argument that software written by humans is better does not bear any merit for me.
"the cost of change is drastically reduced"
Only because the true costs are either being externalised or hidden by vast amounts of circular investments.
When the bubble pops and the bill comes due, we'll see how much the costs were actually reduced.
Oh. No, we won't. Because the too-big-to-fail companies will get bailed out by the tax payers. Again.
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@grishka Right on, and then consider that with the traditional mode of writing software, the cost of creating something that is good is very high.
I'd argue that with faster (machine assisted) software creation, it is easier to meet the need of users because the cost of change is drastically reduced. I'm experiencing that with those system that I'm currently writing that way.
The whole argument that software written by humans is better does not bear any merit for me.
@hanshuebner What does "software is better" even mean in this context?
I wonder if this entire "LLM generated code is good enough and it's creation is much more efficient" argument will stand the test of time when a lot of code is generated on the same product / project by many people. We do not know the answer to this yet.
@grishka -
@hanshuebner What does "software is better" even mean in this context?
I wonder if this entire "LLM generated code is good enough and it's creation is much more efficient" argument will stand the test of time when a lot of code is generated on the same product / project by many people. We do not know the answer to this yet.
@grishkaHolger, 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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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 honestly hard to express how I see it. As someone that has always been interested in tech I'm honestly curious about anything new but at the same time I don't like all the hidden natural and human cost behind it. I also hate being forced to use it because "we need to be an AI first company" and what I see here is the same process again: we hook you up, we lock you in and then we enshittify everything.
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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 thanks for this framing, it is one that I can fully recognize myself in. I am uninterested in any so-called "AI"-assisted coding and I am not a very good coder, I came to coding via science, it is not a craft I have mastered or perfected in any way. but I do care about results making sense, code being maintanable, the socio-political economy of technology, labor, ecology, decolonial struggles and tending to my cognitive capacities...
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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 "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it...."
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@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.@moonshinebrigade @plexus I'm one oh that guys. At the beginning of the year, my manager told me "why didn't you use AI this month?".
I had to answer "dude, I was on vacation until yesterday"
