5 ms·

The fun is in the journey, not necessarily the destination, to me. Should the goal of dancing be to get it over with as quickly as possible too? Should the idea

The fun is in the journey, not necessarily the destination, to me. Should the goal of dancing be to get it over with as quickly as possible too? Should the ideal piece of music you play be a single crashing chord so you can get done with playing the piano? To me these are direct analogues. Sure, there are some boring rote parts of coding, just like sawing boards might not be the most enjoyable part of woodworking. I guess you could use AI as the analog of power tools (would that be using AI to generate awk and jq command lines?). But I wouldn't want to use a CNC router and take all the fun and skill out of the craft, nor do I find agentic AI enjoyable. And AIs fail badly anyway when you are doing things not found much online, e.g. in embedded microcontroller development (which I do) or with company internal frameworks.

andrewstuart 9mo ago
>> The fun is in the journey, not necessarily the destination, to me. I fully respect this. Lots of craftspeople love to work with wood by hand whilst factories build furniture on an industrial scale. >> AIs fail badly anyway when you are doing things not found much online, e.g. in embedded microcontroller development (which I do) But you are very wrong about embedded systems development and AI. I do a huge amount of microcontroller programming and AI is a massive productivity multiplier and the LLMs are extremely good at it.
- VorpalWay 9mo ago
  > But you are very wrong about embedded systems development and AI. I do a huge amount of microcontroller programming and AI is a massive productivity multiplier and the LLMs are extremely good at it. Probably true if you use an SDK there are lots of examples for. I have worked with embassy in Rust and AIs were not good, not with a company internal SDK in C++ at work. They will frequently hallucinate non-existing methods or get the parameters wrong. And for larger systems (e.g. targeting embedded Linux) they can't keep enough context in their head to work with large (millions of lines) existing proprietary code bases. They make mistakes and you end up with unmaintainable soup. Humans can learn on the job, AIs can't yet do that.
  - andrewstuart 9mo ago
    Get the AI to read the datasheets and technical reference manual for the device you are using.

andrewstuart 9mo ago

>> The fun is in the journey, not necessarily the destination, to me. I fully respect this. Lots of craftspeople love to work with wood by hand whilst factories build furniture on an industrial scale. >> AIs fail badly anyway when you are doing things not found much online, e.g. in embedded microcontroller development (which I do) But you are very wrong about embedded systems development and AI. I do a huge amount of microcontroller programming and AI is a massive productivity multiplier and the LLMs are extremely good at it.

VorpalWay 9mo ago
> But you are very wrong about embedded systems development and AI. I do a huge amount of microcontroller programming and AI is a massive productivity multiplier and the LLMs are extremely good at it. Probably true if you use an SDK there are lots of examples for. I have worked with embassy in Rust and AIs were not good, not with a company internal SDK in C++ at work. They will frequently hallucinate non-existing methods or get the parameters wrong. And for larger systems (e.g. targeting embedded Linux) they can't keep enough context in their head to work with large (millions of lines) existing proprietary code bases. They make mistakes and you end up with unmaintainable soup. Humans can learn on the job, AIs can't yet do that.
- andrewstuart 9mo ago
  Get the AI to read the datasheets and technical reference manual for the device you are using.