4 ms·

All the stuff in the first half sound great, but adding an llm dependency is a complete antithesis to local first and well crafted software. I don't really lik

All the stuff in the first half sound great, but adding an llm dependency is a complete antithesis to local first and well crafted software. I don't really like the term barefoot developers, but local craftsman should own and understand the tools they work with and the code they write. Their tools should be local first as well.

throwanem 2y ago
It's not conceived as an LLM dependency, but really more similar to the way I currently use LLMs as an engineer: as a consultant. I don't think current models are up to that task on their own, certainly not for someone without significant programming knowledge - but the sense I got, especially as the talk touched on still needing access to a skilled dev for a while at least, was that the author also understands this. Too, in sketching out so broad a vision as this, I wouldn't necessarily expect any author to treat what's possible today as a hard limit, any more than anyone else working in tech does or should. I also don't understand why you'd consider LLMs as a blocker to local-only. You can run a 7B model on a $600 refurbished M1 Mac mini today. It won't be the fastest or the cleverest, and you probably will need an hour or so from someone who knows how to set up Ollama and Open WebUI, but it is absolutely usable after that with no Internet connection at all - I have a Mac mini so configured on my desk right now, actually. Or for an order of magnitude more outlay, you can get a Studio capable of supporting multiple concurrent users with 70B models producing tokens faster than you can read them. Again, sure, it won't be GPT-4o, and it won't be up to the standard of the sorts of tools described in the talk - not this year, anyway. In 2026 or 2027, though? Again, this talk looks to a possible future, not just today. And with a setup based on open models running locally as I've described, there is the countervailing advantage that once you have it, you own it. As for the term 'barefoot developer' itself - it's a cavil, I grant, but I still want to quibble, because as a child in rural Mississippi with an Apple IIc and a couple of books, I was a barefoot developer, writing my own programs to solve my own problems, and often enough going to play in the woods by the road cut when I got stuck. (It helped! These days I'm more likely to chase wasps with a camera, but it still helps, when I can force the time. For what it's worth, though, I do wear shoes these days.) Now I'm what Amazon would call an L5, earning as highly as almost anyone in this generation of my family - and not for a lot of student debt, because I never went to college. Whatever I am as a professional, I am in large part because I've been discovering and developing my craft since my single-digit days - and was free to do so without my parents having to pay anyone a damned subscription, besides. True, the technology has grown far away from the kind of locally and individually empowering model this talk describes, and that I recall from my own childhood and early career days - that proto-SPA I mentioned nearby, for example, was hosted on a machine that everyone who ever worked on it could physically touch without leaving the office we all shared. And this in 2011! It really has not been that long a time since a model very much like what this talk describes was actually present in reality. I see no reason in principle why that can't be true again. Certainly I'm convinced that it should.
- skydhash 2y ago
  The thing is you can learn a lot with a bootable FreeBSD usb, an old PC and a copy of the "Absolute FreeBSD" or the equivalent for Linux. I strongly believe that anyone who is not willing to put in the time to learn those stuff won't be able to do anything custom with computers. Shortcut has been there for years now and most people haven't touch it. Many only learn a few actions that apps provide and are content. Their phone are mostly for the things they replace (flashlight, camera, landline, magazines, tv,..). Computing is not one of these. Even taking the time to properly learn Word and Excel is no longer a thing. Anything LLM can do locally, you can do it better with another, less demanding tool. And what they help with, it would be faster to just learn how to do it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwanem 2y ago
    Hence the time the talk spends dwelling on how this isn't an "everyone" thing any more than it's a "professional devs" thing. The point, or at least the point as I understood it, is to broaden the space for people who want to learn enough to support the things that matter to them, and no more. Again, there's nothing new in this; in fact it's much the way things were when 8-bit micros and BASIC were about as fancy as most ever saw, yet anyone who ever saw a computer could hardly help but see them. Maybe you'd learn to use those tools and maybe you wouldn't, but you knew they were there for you and the assumption was that you could learn enough to use them. More did than I think a lot of folks in their 20s today easily imagine. I don't blame them; if all I'd ever seen was how things are now, I'm sure I'd be the same. But people made things the way they are now. People can make them otherwise. There's also no assumption in the talk that everyone involved is a loner, an atomized individual, the way you seem to assume would be true. Indeed, quite the contrary: community, in word and in concept, suffuses the text in its entirety, to such an extent it seems surprising its constant immanence could be overlooked even on a brief skim. Admittedly, that's a difficult concept for many to fathom in 2020s America. I'm certainly among that number. But I'm also old enough to remember when things were better, and young enough still to imagine a future where things are better again. I just hope I'm not too old to still make myself useful by the time they start to be.

throwanem 2y ago

It's not conceived as an LLM dependency, but really more similar to the way I currently use LLMs as an engineer: as a consultant. I don't think current models are up to that task on their own, certainly not for someone without significant programming knowledge - but the sense I got, especially as the talk touched on still needing access to a skilled dev for a while at least, was that the author also understands this. Too, in sketching out so broad a vision as this, I wouldn't necessarily expect any author to treat what's possible today as a hard limit, any more than anyone else working in tech does or should. I also don't understand why you'd consider LLMs as a blocker to local-only. You can run a 7B model on a $600 refurbished M1 Mac mini today. It won't be the fastest or the cleverest, and you probably will need an hour or so from someone who knows how to set up Ollama and Open WebUI, but it is absolutely usable after that with no Internet connection at all - I have a Mac mini so configured on my desk right now, actually. Or for an order of magnitude more outlay, you can get a Studio capable of supporting multiple concurrent users with 70B models producing tokens faster than you can read them. Again, sure, it won't be GPT-4o, and it won't be up to the standard of the sorts of tools described in the talk - not this year, anyway. In 2026 or 2027, though? Again, this talk looks to a possible future, not just today. And with a setup based on open models running locally as I've described, there is the countervailing advantage that once you have it, you own it. As for the term 'barefoot developer' itself - it's a cavil, I grant, but I still want to quibble, because as a child in rural Mississippi with an Apple IIc and a couple of books, I was a barefoot developer, writing my own programs to solve my own problems, and often enough going to play in the woods by the road cut when I got stuck. (It helped! These days I'm more likely to chase wasps with a camera, but it still helps, when I can force the time. For what it's worth, though, I do wear shoes these days.) Now I'm what Amazon would call an L5, earning as highly as almost anyone in this generation of my family - and not for a lot of student debt, because I never went to college. Whatever I am as a professional, I am in large part because I've been discovering and developing my craft since my single-digit days - and was free to do so without my parents having to pay anyone a damned subscription, besides. True, the technology has grown far away from the kind of locally and individually empowering model this talk describes, and that I recall from my own childhood and early career days - that proto-SPA I mentioned nearby, for example, was hosted on a machine that everyone who ever worked on it could physically touch without leaving the office we all shared. And this in 2011! It really has not been that long a time since a model very much like what this talk describes was actually present in reality. I see no reason in principle why that can't be true again. Certainly I'm convinced that it should.

skydhash 2y ago
The thing is you can learn a lot with a bootable FreeBSD usb, an old PC and a copy of the "Absolute FreeBSD" or the equivalent for Linux. I strongly believe that anyone who is not willing to put in the time to learn those stuff won't be able to do anything custom with computers. Shortcut has been there for years now and most people haven't touch it. Many only learn a few actions that apps provide and are content. Their phone are mostly for the things they replace (flashlight, camera, landline, magazines, tv,..). Computing is not one of these. Even taking the time to properly learn Word and Excel is no longer a thing. Anything LLM can do locally, you can do it better with another, less demanding tool. And what they help with, it would be faster to just learn how to do it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- throwanem 2y ago
  Hence the time the talk spends dwelling on how this isn't an "everyone" thing any more than it's a "professional devs" thing. The point, or at least the point as I understood it, is to broaden the space for people who want to learn enough to support the things that matter to them, and no more. Again, there's nothing new in this; in fact it's much the way things were when 8-bit micros and BASIC were about as fancy as most ever saw, yet anyone who ever saw a computer could hardly help but see them. Maybe you'd learn to use those tools and maybe you wouldn't, but you knew they were there for you and the assumption was that you could learn enough to use them. More did than I think a lot of folks in their 20s today easily imagine. I don't blame them; if all I'd ever seen was how things are now, I'm sure I'd be the same. But people made things the way they are now. People can make them otherwise. There's also no assumption in the talk that everyone involved is a loner, an atomized individual, the way you seem to assume would be true. Indeed, quite the contrary: community, in word and in concept, suffuses the text in its entirety, to such an extent it seems surprising its constant immanence could be overlooked even on a brief skim. Admittedly, that's a difficult concept for many to fathom in 2020s America. I'm certainly among that number. But I'm also old enough to remember when things were better, and young enough still to imagine a future where things are better again. I just hope I'm not too old to still make myself useful by the time they start to be.