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> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who

> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who are way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI. We need to push back against this arrogant attitude. Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw.

cool_dude85 11mo ago
>Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw. Some tools are table saws, and some tools are subcontracting work out to lowest cost bidders to do a crap job. Which of the two is AI?
- andai 11mo ago
  I've been programming for 20 years and GPT-4 (the one from early 2023) does it better than me. I'm the guy other programmers I know ask for advice. I think your metaphor might be a little uncharitable :) For straightforward stuff, they can handle it. For stuff that isn't straightforward, they've been trained on pattern matching some nontrivial subset of all human writing. So chances are they'll say, "oh, in this situation you need an X!", because the long tail is, mostly, where they grew up. -- To really drive the point home... it's easy to laugh at the AI clocks.[0] But I invite you, dear reader, to give it a try! Try making one of those clocks! Measure how long it takes you, how many bugs you write. And how well you'd do it if you only had one shot, and/or weren't allowed to look at the output! (Nor Google anything, for that matter...) I have tried it, and it was a humbling experience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930151
  - nasmorn 11mo ago
    AI doesn’t program better than me yet. It can do some things better than me and I use it for that but it has no taste and is way too willing to write a ton of code. What is great about it compared to an actual junior is if i find out it did something stupid it will redo the work super fast and without getting sad
    - QuercusMax 11mo ago
      Too willing to write a ton of code - this is absolutely one of the things that drives me nuts. I ask it to write me a stub implementation and it goes and makes up all the details of how it works, 99% of which is totally wrong. I tell it to rename a file and add a single header line, and it does that - but throws away everything after line 400. Just unreliable and headache-inducing.
  - rozap 11mo ago
    Now tell the AI to distill a bunch of user goals into a living system which has to evolve over time, integrate with other systems, etc etc. And deliver and support that system I use Claude code every day and it is a slam dunk for situations like the one above, fiddly UIs and the like. Seriously , some of the best money I spend. But it is not good at more abstract stuff. Still a massive time saver for me and does effectively do a lot of work that would have gotten farmed out to junior engineers. Maybe this will change in a few years and I'll have to become a potato farmer. I'm not going to get into predictions. But to act like it can do what an engineer with 20 years of experience can do means the AI brain worm got you or it says something about your abilities.
    - yawnxyz 11mo ago
      right, but this is akin to arguing why the table saw also does not do x/y/z — I don't know why we only complain about AI and how it does NOT do everything well yet. Maybe it's expectations set by all the AI companies, idk, but this kind of mentality seems very particular to AI products and nothing else.
      - rozap 11mo ago
        I'm not complaining about it, I said in my post that it's a huge time saver. It's here to stay, and that's pretty clear to see. It has mostly automated away the need for junior engineers, which just 5 years ago would have been a very unexpected outcome, but it's kind of the reality now. All that being said: There's a segment of the software eng population that has their heads in the sand about it and the argument basically boils down to "AI bad". Those people are in trouble because they are also the people who insist on a whole committee meeting and trail of design documents to change the color of a button on a website that sells shoes. Most of their actual hard skills are pretty easy to outsource to an AI. There's also a techbro segment of the population, who are selling snake oil about AGI being imminent, so fire your whole team and hire me in order to outsource your entire product to an army of AI agents. Their thoughts basically boil down to "I'm a grifter, and I smell money". Nevermind the fact that the outcome of such a program would be a smoldering tire fire, they'll be onto the next grift by then. As with literally everything, there are loud, crazy people on either side and the truth is in the middle somewhere.
- efdee 11mo ago
  For me, AI is definitely a table saw. YMMV.
bigstrat2003 11mo ago
That's because there's nothing "craftsman" about using AI to do stuff for you. Someone who uses AI to write their programs isn't the equivalent of a carpenter using a table saw, they are the equivalent of a carpenter who subcontracts the piece out to someone else. And we wouldn't show respect to the latter person either.
- MrDarcy 11mo ago
  I’m a hacker and I’d show respect to that latter person if they did the subcontracting and reviewed their craft well.
  - terminalbraid 11mo ago
    But you wouldn't call them a craftsperson because they didn't do any craft other than "be a manager". Reviewing work is not on the same plane as actually creating something.
    - pixl97 11mo ago
      Why are we crafting code? Simply put most industries started moving away from craftsmanship starting in the late 1700s to the mid 1900s. Craftsmanship does make a few nice things but it doesn't scale. Mass production lead to most people actually having stuff and the general condition of humanity improving greatly. Software did kind of get a cheat code here though, we can 'craft' software and then endlessly copy it without the restrictions of physical objects. With all that said, software is rarely crafted well anyway. HN has an air about it that software developers are the craftsman of their gilded age, but most software projects fail terribly and waste huge amounts of money.
    - fragmede 11mo ago
      Does Steve Jobs deserve any respect for building the iPhone then? What is this "actually creating"? I'm sure he wasn't the one to do any of the "actually creating" and yet, there's no doubt in my mind that he deserves credit for the iPhone existing and changing the world.
Survived 11mo ago
A LLM is more like a CNC panel saw; feed a sheet in one end, stack up parts from the other. It reduces craftsmanship to unskilled labor. The design work and thinking happen somewhere else. The operator comes in, punches a clock, and chokes on MDF dust for 8 hours.
- CamperBob2 11mo ago
  No, the idea is that such a CNC saw shouldn't need an operator at all. To the extent it still does, the operator doesn't even need to be in the same town, much less the same building. This is a GOOD thing.
  - Survived 11mo ago
    Good or bad, converting craft work to production work is not making the craft worker more productive, it's eliminating the craft worker. The unskilled operator's position is also precarious, as you point out, but while it lasts, it's a different and (arguably) less satisfying form of work. The LLM is not a table saw that makes a carpenter faster, it's an automatic machine that makes an owner's capital more efficient.
    - CamperBob2 11mo ago
      (Shrug) I don't know about "owners" and "capital," but used properly, they make me more efficient.
computerthings 11mo ago
[dead]
johnnyanmac 11mo ago
> way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI We need to find such craftsmen first. A true craftmaan should be able to let the code speak for itself. And ideally they'd be able to teach well enough to have other adapt such a workflow, which inevitably includes constraints and methodologies. That's the things I don't see enough of in these discussions. We're very afraid to talk about what AI is bad at, as if it's some sort of pampered child we need to keep pleasing. That's not how we attain progress in the craft. Maybe in the stock market, but at that point it's clear what the focus is.

cool_dude85 11mo ago

>Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw. Some tools are table saws, and some tools are subcontracting work out to lowest cost bidders to do a crap job. Which of the two is AI?

andai 11mo ago
I've been programming for 20 years and GPT-4 (the one from early 2023) does it better than me. I'm the guy other programmers I know ask for advice. I think your metaphor might be a little uncharitable :) For straightforward stuff, they can handle it. For stuff that isn't straightforward, they've been trained on pattern matching some nontrivial subset of all human writing. So chances are they'll say, "oh, in this situation you need an X!", because the long tail is, mostly, where they grew up. -- To really drive the point home... it's easy to laugh at the AI clocks.[0] But I invite you, dear reader, to give it a try! Try making one of those clocks! Measure how long it takes you, how many bugs you write. And how well you'd do it if you only had one shot, and/or weren't allowed to look at the output! (Nor Google anything, for that matter...) I have tried it, and it was a humbling experience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930151
- nasmorn 11mo ago
  AI doesn’t program better than me yet. It can do some things better than me and I use it for that but it has no taste and is way too willing to write a ton of code. What is great about it compared to an actual junior is if i find out it did something stupid it will redo the work super fast and without getting sad
  - QuercusMax 11mo ago
    Too willing to write a ton of code - this is absolutely one of the things that drives me nuts. I ask it to write me a stub implementation and it goes and makes up all the details of how it works, 99% of which is totally wrong. I tell it to rename a file and add a single header line, and it does that - but throws away everything after line 400. Just unreliable and headache-inducing.
- rozap 11mo ago
  Now tell the AI to distill a bunch of user goals into a living system which has to evolve over time, integrate with other systems, etc etc. And deliver and support that system I use Claude code every day and it is a slam dunk for situations like the one above, fiddly UIs and the like. Seriously , some of the best money I spend. But it is not good at more abstract stuff. Still a massive time saver for me and does effectively do a lot of work that would have gotten farmed out to junior engineers. Maybe this will change in a few years and I'll have to become a potato farmer. I'm not going to get into predictions. But to act like it can do what an engineer with 20 years of experience can do means the AI brain worm got you or it says something about your abilities.
  - yawnxyz 11mo ago
    right, but this is akin to arguing why the table saw also does not do x/y/z — I don't know why we only complain about AI and how it does NOT do everything well yet. Maybe it's expectations set by all the AI companies, idk, but this kind of mentality seems very particular to AI products and nothing else.
    - rozap 11mo ago
      I'm not complaining about it, I said in my post that it's a huge time saver. It's here to stay, and that's pretty clear to see. It has mostly automated away the need for junior engineers, which just 5 years ago would have been a very unexpected outcome, but it's kind of the reality now. All that being said: There's a segment of the software eng population that has their heads in the sand about it and the argument basically boils down to "AI bad". Those people are in trouble because they are also the people who insist on a whole committee meeting and trail of design documents to change the color of a button on a website that sells shoes. Most of their actual hard skills are pretty easy to outsource to an AI. There's also a techbro segment of the population, who are selling snake oil about AGI being imminent, so fire your whole team and hire me in order to outsource your entire product to an army of AI agents. Their thoughts basically boil down to "I'm a grifter, and I smell money". Nevermind the fact that the outcome of such a program would be a smoldering tire fire, they'll be onto the next grift by then. As with literally everything, there are loud, crazy people on either side and the truth is in the middle somewhere.
efdee 11mo ago
For me, AI is definitely a table saw. YMMV.

bigstrat2003 11mo ago

That's because there's nothing "craftsman" about using AI to do stuff for you. Someone who uses AI to write their programs isn't the equivalent of a carpenter using a table saw, they are the equivalent of a carpenter who subcontracts the piece out to someone else. And we wouldn't show respect to the latter person either.

MrDarcy 11mo ago
I’m a hacker and I’d show respect to that latter person if they did the subcontracting and reviewed their craft well.
- terminalbraid 11mo ago
  But you wouldn't call them a craftsperson because they didn't do any craft other than "be a manager". Reviewing work is not on the same plane as actually creating something.
  - pixl97 11mo ago
    Why are we crafting code? Simply put most industries started moving away from craftsmanship starting in the late 1700s to the mid 1900s. Craftsmanship does make a few nice things but it doesn't scale. Mass production lead to most people actually having stuff and the general condition of humanity improving greatly. Software did kind of get a cheat code here though, we can 'craft' software and then endlessly copy it without the restrictions of physical objects. With all that said, software is rarely crafted well anyway. HN has an air about it that software developers are the craftsman of their gilded age, but most software projects fail terribly and waste huge amounts of money.
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    Does Steve Jobs deserve any respect for building the iPhone then? What is this "actually creating"? I'm sure he wasn't the one to do any of the "actually creating" and yet, there's no doubt in my mind that he deserves credit for the iPhone existing and changing the world.

Survived 11mo ago

A LLM is more like a CNC panel saw; feed a sheet in one end, stack up parts from the other. It reduces craftsmanship to unskilled labor. The design work and thinking happen somewhere else. The operator comes in, punches a clock, and chokes on MDF dust for 8 hours.

CamperBob2 11mo ago
No, the idea is that such a CNC saw shouldn't need an operator at all. To the extent it still does, the operator doesn't even need to be in the same town, much less the same building. This is a GOOD thing.
- Survived 11mo ago
  Good or bad, converting craft work to production work is not making the craft worker more productive, it's eliminating the craft worker. The unskilled operator's position is also precarious, as you point out, but while it lasts, it's a different and (arguably) less satisfying form of work. The LLM is not a table saw that makes a carpenter faster, it's an automatic machine that makes an owner's capital more efficient.
  - CamperBob2 11mo ago
    (Shrug) I don't know about "owners" and "capital," but used properly, they make me more efficient.

computerthings 11mo ago

[dead]

johnnyanmac 11mo ago

> way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI We need to find such craftsmen first. A true craftmaan should be able to let the code speak for itself. And ideally they'd be able to teach well enough to have other adapt such a workflow, which inevitably includes constraints and methodologies. That's the things I don't see enough of in these discussions. We're very afraid to talk about what AI is bad at, as if it's some sort of pampered child we need to keep pleasing. That's not how we attain progress in the craft. Maybe in the stock market, but at that point it's clear what the focus is.