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> People who love using AI to create software are loving it because they don’t value the act of creating & understanding the software. Speak for yourself, OP.

> People who love using AI to create software are loving it because they don’t value the act of creating & understanding the software. Speak for yourself, OP. I have my gripes with LLMs but they absolutely can and will help me create and understand the code I write. > At least, they value it far less than the end result. This does not appear to apply to OP at all, but plenty of programmers who like code for the sake of code create more problems than they solve. In summary, LLMs amplify. The bad gets worse and the good gets better.

szundi 9mo ago
[dead]
simonw 9mo ago
Right - it's not that I don't value "the act of creating & understanding the software" - that's the part I care about and enjoy the most. The thing I don't value is typing out all of that code myself.
- horsawlarway 9mo ago
  Just to poke at this a bit - Isn't this a bit like saying you love storytelling, but you don't value actually speaking the words? Because this feels very close to skating across a line where you don't actually understand or value the real medium. Basically - the architectural equivalent of this leads to things like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse Where the architects are divorced from the actual construction, and the end result is genuinely terrible.
  - simonw 9mo ago
    Not typing every line of code myself doesn't divorce me from the construction. I frequently find that the code I write using agents is better code, because small improvements no longer cost me velocity or time. If I think "huh, I should really have used a different pattern for that but it's already in 100+ places around the codebase" fixing it used to be a big decision... now it's a prompt. None of my APIs lack interactive debugging tools any more. Everything that needs documentation is documented. I'm much less likely to take on technical debt - you take that on when fixing it would cost more time than you have available, but those constraints have changed for me.
    - horsawlarway 9mo ago
      But... that's exactly the kind of thing I'm referring to. You're blanket replacing chunks of code without actually considering the context of each one. Personally - I still have mixed feelings about it. The Hyatt Regency walkway was literally one of the examples brought up in my engineering classes about the risks of doing "simple pattern changes". I'm not referencing it out of thin air... --- Havens Steel Company had manufactured the rods, and the company objected that the whole rod below the fourth floor would have to be threaded in order to screw on the nuts to hold the fourth-floor walkway in place. These threads would be subject to damage as the fourth-floor structure was hoisted into place. Havens Steel proposed that two separate and offset sets of rods be used: the first set suspending the fourth-floor walkway from the ceiling, and the second set suspending the second-floor walkway from the fourth-floor walkway.[22] This design change would be fatal. In the original design, the beams of the fourth-floor walkway had to support the weight of the fourth-floor walkway, with the weight of the second-floor walkway supported completely by the rods. In the revised design, however, the fourth-floor beams supported both the fourth- and second-floor walkways, but were strong enough for 30% of that load. --- Just use a different pattern? In this case, the steel company also believed it was a quick pattern improvement... they avoided a complex installation issue with threaded rods. Too bad it killed some 114 people.
      - simonw 9mo ago
        But I am considering the context of each one. It's just quicker not to modify the code by hand. I'm going to use a human comparison here, even though I try to avoid them. It's like having a team of interns who you explain the refactoring to, send them off to help get it done and review their work at the end. If the interns are screwing it up you notice and update your instructions to them so they can try again.
        horsawlarway 9mo ago
        I guess. And I don't mean that as a jab at you, I read a lot of your content and agree with quite a bit of it - I'm just personally conflicted here still. I've worked in a couple positions where the software I've written does actually deal directly with the physical safety of people (medical, aviation, defense) - which I know is rare for a lot of folks here. Applying that line of thinking to those positions... I find it makes me a tad itchy. I think there's a lot of software where I don't really mind much (ex - almost every SaaS service under the sun, most consumer grade software, etc). And I'm absolutely using these tools in those positions - so I'm not really judging that. I'm just wondering if there's a line we should be considering somewhere here.
  - quest88 9mo ago
    No, I don't think so. But my context is different as is anyone's reply about their LLM usage. I'm still creating software but with English that's compiled down to some other language. I'm personally comfortable reading code in many languages. That means I'm able (hopefully!) to spot something that doesn't look quite right. I don't have to be the one pressing keys on the keyboard but I'm still accountable for the code i compile and submit.
  - sanjayjc 9mo ago
    I share your concern. I'm flummoxed by the prevalent sentiment that code is the nasty underbelly of software. To me, a programming language is a medium both for precisely directing a computer's behavior and for precisely communicating a process to fellow programmers (cue the Alan Perlis quote [1].) I will concede that mainstream code is often characterized by excessive verbosity and boilerplate. This I attribute to the immaturity of today's crop of programming languages. Techniques like language-oriented-programming [2] hint at a path I find appealing: DSLs that are tailored to the problem while promising more precision than a natural language specification could. To speculate, I could see LLMs helping during the creation of a DSL (surfacing limitations in the DSL's design) and when adding features to a DSL, to help migrate code written in the old version to the new one. Perhaps DSLs aren't the future. However will there be as much interest in designing new and superior programming languages now that code is seen as little more than assembly language? [1] https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/full-text/book/book-Z-H-7.html https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b... [2] https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-lop-why-racket.html https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-lop-why-racket.html
- nobleach 9mo ago
  I think I can get on board with this view. In the earlier LLM days, I was working on a project that had me building models of different CSV's we'd receive from clients. I needed to build classes that represented all the fields. I asked AI to do it for me and I was very pleased with the results. It saved me an hour-long slog of copying the header rows, pasting into a class, ensuring that everything was camel-cased, etc. But the key thing here is that that work was never going to be the "hard part". That was the slog. The real dopamine hit was from solving the actual problem at hand - parsing many different variants of a file, and unifying the output in a homogenous way. Now, if I had just said, "Dear Claude, make it so I can read files from any client and figure out how to represent the results in the same way, no matter what the input is". I can agree, I _might_ be stepping into "you're not gonna understand the software"-land. That's where responsibility comes into play. Reading the code that's produced is vital. I however, am still not at the point where I'm giivng feature work to LLMs. I make a plan for what I want to do, and give the mundane stuff to the AI.
- lifeisoverforme 9mo ago
  [flagged]
dgacmu 9mo ago
The thing that gets me is the assumption that we're not complex creatures who might each value different things at different times and in different contexts. As for me, sometimes I code because I want something to do a specific thing, and I honestly couldn't be bothered to care how it happens. Sometimes I code because I want something to work a very specific way or to learn how to make something work better, and I want to have my brain so deep in a chunk of code I can see it in my sleep. Sometimes the creative expression is in the 'what' - one of my little startup tasks these days is experimenting with UI designs for helping a human get a task done as efficiently as possible. Sometimes it's in the 'how' - implementing the backend to that thing to be ridiculously fast and efficient. Sometimes it's both and sometimes it's neither! A beautiful thing about code is that it can be a tool and it can be an expressive medium that scratches our urge to create and dive into things, or it can be both at the same time. Code is the most flexible substance on earth, for good and for creating incredible messes.
- PaulHoule 9mo ago
  I'll argue the the LLM can be a great ally when "I want to have my brain so deep in a chunk of code I can see it in my sleep" because it can help you see the whole picture.
  - cindyllm 9mo ago
    [dead]
lifeisoverforme 9mo ago
I think you’re in the pleading stage. The AI tools this year will do the whole process without you. Reading the code will be a luxury for little benefit.

szundi 9mo ago

[dead]

simonw 9mo ago

Right - it's not that I don't value "the act of creating & understanding the software" - that's the part I care about and enjoy the most. The thing I don't value is typing out all of that code myself.

horsawlarway 9mo ago
Just to poke at this a bit - Isn't this a bit like saying you love storytelling, but you don't value actually speaking the words? Because this feels very close to skating across a line where you don't actually understand or value the real medium. Basically - the architectural equivalent of this leads to things like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse Where the architects are divorced from the actual construction, and the end result is genuinely terrible.
- simonw 9mo ago
  Not typing every line of code myself doesn't divorce me from the construction. I frequently find that the code I write using agents is better code, because small improvements no longer cost me velocity or time. If I think "huh, I should really have used a different pattern for that but it's already in 100+ places around the codebase" fixing it used to be a big decision... now it's a prompt. None of my APIs lack interactive debugging tools any more. Everything that needs documentation is documented. I'm much less likely to take on technical debt - you take that on when fixing it would cost more time than you have available, but those constraints have changed for me.
  - horsawlarway 9mo ago
    But... that's exactly the kind of thing I'm referring to. You're blanket replacing chunks of code without actually considering the context of each one. Personally - I still have mixed feelings about it. The Hyatt Regency walkway was literally one of the examples brought up in my engineering classes about the risks of doing "simple pattern changes". I'm not referencing it out of thin air... --- Havens Steel Company had manufactured the rods, and the company objected that the whole rod below the fourth floor would have to be threaded in order to screw on the nuts to hold the fourth-floor walkway in place. These threads would be subject to damage as the fourth-floor structure was hoisted into place. Havens Steel proposed that two separate and offset sets of rods be used: the first set suspending the fourth-floor walkway from the ceiling, and the second set suspending the second-floor walkway from the fourth-floor walkway.[22] This design change would be fatal. In the original design, the beams of the fourth-floor walkway had to support the weight of the fourth-floor walkway, with the weight of the second-floor walkway supported completely by the rods. In the revised design, however, the fourth-floor beams supported both the fourth- and second-floor walkways, but were strong enough for 30% of that load. --- Just use a different pattern? In this case, the steel company also believed it was a quick pattern improvement... they avoided a complex installation issue with threaded rods. Too bad it killed some 114 people.
    - simonw 9mo ago
      But I am considering the context of each one. It's just quicker not to modify the code by hand. I'm going to use a human comparison here, even though I try to avoid them. It's like having a team of interns who you explain the refactoring to, send them off to help get it done and review their work at the end. If the interns are screwing it up you notice and update your instructions to them so they can try again.
      - horsawlarway 9mo ago
        I guess. And I don't mean that as a jab at you, I read a lot of your content and agree with quite a bit of it - I'm just personally conflicted here still. I've worked in a couple positions where the software I've written does actually deal directly with the physical safety of people (medical, aviation, defense) - which I know is rare for a lot of folks here. Applying that line of thinking to those positions... I find it makes me a tad itchy. I think there's a lot of software where I don't really mind much (ex - almost every SaaS service under the sun, most consumer grade software, etc). And I'm absolutely using these tools in those positions - so I'm not really judging that. I'm just wondering if there's a line we should be considering somewhere here.
- quest88 9mo ago
  No, I don't think so. But my context is different as is anyone's reply about their LLM usage. I'm still creating software but with English that's compiled down to some other language. I'm personally comfortable reading code in many languages. That means I'm able (hopefully!) to spot something that doesn't look quite right. I don't have to be the one pressing keys on the keyboard but I'm still accountable for the code i compile and submit.
- sanjayjc 9mo ago
  I share your concern. I'm flummoxed by the prevalent sentiment that code is the nasty underbelly of software. To me, a programming language is a medium both for precisely directing a computer's behavior and for precisely communicating a process to fellow programmers (cue the Alan Perlis quote [1].) I will concede that mainstream code is often characterized by excessive verbosity and boilerplate. This I attribute to the immaturity of today's crop of programming languages. Techniques like language-oriented-programming [2] hint at a path I find appealing: DSLs that are tailored to the problem while promising more precision than a natural language specification could. To speculate, I could see LLMs helping during the creation of a DSL (surfacing limitations in the DSL's design) and when adding features to a DSL, to help migrate code written in the old version to the new one. Perhaps DSLs aren't the future. However will there be as much interest in designing new and superior programming languages now that code is seen as little more than assembly language? [1] https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/full-text/book/book-Z-H-7.html https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b... [2] https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-lop-why-racket.html https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-lop-why-racket.html
nobleach 9mo ago
I think I can get on board with this view. In the earlier LLM days, I was working on a project that had me building models of different CSV's we'd receive from clients. I needed to build classes that represented all the fields. I asked AI to do it for me and I was very pleased with the results. It saved me an hour-long slog of copying the header rows, pasting into a class, ensuring that everything was camel-cased, etc. But the key thing here is that that work was never going to be the "hard part". That was the slog. The real dopamine hit was from solving the actual problem at hand - parsing many different variants of a file, and unifying the output in a homogenous way. Now, if I had just said, "Dear Claude, make it so I can read files from any client and figure out how to represent the results in the same way, no matter what the input is". I can agree, I _might_ be stepping into "you're not gonna understand the software"-land. That's where responsibility comes into play. Reading the code that's produced is vital. I however, am still not at the point where I'm giivng feature work to LLMs. I make a plan for what I want to do, and give the mundane stuff to the AI.
lifeisoverforme 9mo ago
[flagged]

dgacmu 9mo ago

The thing that gets me is the assumption that we're not complex creatures who might each value different things at different times and in different contexts. As for me, sometimes I code because I want something to do a specific thing, and I honestly couldn't be bothered to care how it happens. Sometimes I code because I want something to work a very specific way or to learn how to make something work better, and I want to have my brain so deep in a chunk of code I can see it in my sleep. Sometimes the creative expression is in the 'what' - one of my little startup tasks these days is experimenting with UI designs for helping a human get a task done as efficiently as possible. Sometimes it's in the 'how' - implementing the backend to that thing to be ridiculously fast and efficient. Sometimes it's both and sometimes it's neither! A beautiful thing about code is that it can be a tool and it can be an expressive medium that scratches our urge to create and dive into things, or it can be both at the same time. Code is the most flexible substance on earth, for good and for creating incredible messes.

PaulHoule 9mo ago
I'll argue the the LLM can be a great ally when "I want to have my brain so deep in a chunk of code I can see it in my sleep" because it can help you see the whole picture.
- cindyllm 9mo ago
  [dead]

lifeisoverforme 9mo ago

I think you’re in the pleading stage. The AI tools this year will do the whole process without you. Reading the code will be a luxury for little benefit.