CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@carlosefr No, I reject that premisse. If we actively contribute to the degradation and possibly destruction of our industry, we are not victims, we are collaborators.

@carlosefr I agree with all you said, but I think on top of the general dystopia there’s concrete things individual engineers and teams can and should say no to. Take Liquid Glass. Even if the design team crapped that out (assuming they weren't pressured to release it one year earlier to distract from Apple not being in the AI train), the engineering team should have said nope. Other examples are all the software that comes on hardware we recommend our parents not to install in any way.

@carlosefr Yes. Again, something I also keep saying: as someone coming from this country where the minimum wage is what it is, I laugh very loudly when people getting paid 6 digits, where the most significative one is often >1, argue they can’t afford to risk saying no to their management hierarchy. lol.

@fast_code_r_us @carlosefr This. Very good point. Because very often I see these things being evaluated by how fast code can be written. This is an old trend, not just LLM. I spend 0.5% of time, or less, actually doing the writing. So who cares.

This doesn’t exclude not writing boilerplate code should be a goal. But this is “not writing”. By using better frameworks and libraries that avoid such code. Not sweeping it under the LLM rug.

@carlosefr My thinking is there’s broadly two groups: the ones who just just care about the “what” and those who care about the “how”. First ones just want to ship something no matter what. Second ones care about quality and how the problem is solved. Naturally for the first ones who see software engineering as writing crap code that barely does what’s needed, that code being written by humans or machines doesn’t matter. That’s the majority of the industry, sadly.

@carlosefr I didn't reduce it nor equated it. Again, read my posts. And yes, code is a liability, the same way a bridge with people walking, driving or riding trains on it is a liability. So, build good bridges, and build good software. Which is NOT what LLMs do. It's the exact opposite. It's creating a much bigger liability and the “I don't even review code any more" crowd are dramatically increasing that liability, future cost, both direct (fixing it) and indirect (consequences of failure).

@carlosefr Comparing programming in software engineering to hammering is a very false equivalence. Read my posts on “there is no bridge”. Software is a spec and the code is that spec. If you don’t like doing that you don’t like writing software, because that is what software is. You may like (and be good at) product design and related things, but you don’t like engineering software.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@a2_4am/116072231370688110

“If you don't want to write software then don't.”

This. I remember so many people that took software engineering in the univ and kept saying out loud they didn’t like programming. I always thought “what the hell are you doing here then?”. I guess they’re managers now.