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Architects went from drawing everything on paper, to using CAD products over a generation. That's a lot of years! They're still called architects. Our tooling

by keyle 8mo ago

Architects went from drawing everything on paper, to using CAD products over a generation. That's a lot of years! They're still called architects. Our tooling just had a refresh in less than 3 years and it leaves heads spinning. People are confused, fighting for or against it. Torn even between 2025 to 2026. I know I was. People need a way to describe it from 'agentic coding' to 'vibe coding' to 'modern AI assisted stack'. We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shovel... When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? ... The real issue this industry is facing, is the phenomenal speed of change. But what are we really doing? That's right, programming.

allworms 8mo ago
> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! > We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shovel... > When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? Sure, because those are categorically different. You are describing shortcuts of two classes: boilerplate (library of things) and (deterministic/intentional) automation. Vibe coding doesn't use either of those things. The LLM agents involved might use them, but the vibe coder doesn't. Vibe coding is delegation, which is a completely different class of shortcut or "tool" use. If an architect delegates all their work to interns, directs outcomes based on whims not principals, and doesn't actually know what the interns are delivering, yeah, I think it would be fair to call them a vibe architect. We didn't have that term before, so we usually just call those people "arrogant pricks" or "terrible bosses". I'm not super familiar but I feel like Steve Jobs was pretty famously that way - thus if he was an engineer, he was a vibe engineer. But don't let this last point detract from the message, which is that you're describing things which are not really even similar to vibe coding.
- djhn 8mo ago
  I think you are right in placing emphasis on delegation. There’s been a hypothesis floating around that I find appealing. Seemingly you can identify two distinct groups of experienced engineers. Manager, delegator, or team lead style senior engineers are broadly pro-AI. The craftsman, wizard, artist, IC style senior engineers are broadly anti-AI. But coming back to architects, or most professional services and academia to be honest, I do think the term vibe architect as you define it is exactly how the industry works. An underclass of underpaid interns and juniors do the work, hoping to climb higher and position themselves towards the top of the ponzi-like pyramid scheme.
- barrenko 8mo ago
  Architects still need to learn to draw manually quite well to pass exams and stuff.
- tjr 8mo ago
  Delegation, yes. I do not see LLM coding as another step up on the ladder of programming abstraction. If your project is in, say, Python, then by using LLMs, you are not writing software in English; you are having an LLM write software for you in Python. This is much more like delegation of work to someone else, than it is another layer in the machine-code/assembly/C/Python sort of hierarchy. In my regular day job, I am a project manager. I find LLM coding to be effectively project management. As a project manager, I am free to dive down to whatever level of technical detail I want, but by and large, it is others on the team who actually write the software. If I assign a task, I don't say "I wrote that code", because I didn't; someone else did, even if I directed it. And then, project management, delegating to the team, is most certainly nondeterministic behavior. Any programmer on the team might come up with a different solution, each of which works. The same programmer might come up with more than one solutions, all of which work. I don't expect the programmers to be deterministic. I do expect the compiler to be deterministic.
- tehnub 8mo ago
  Totally on point, except I'm pretty sure Jobs was not like that. From what I've read he'd be more of a hands on "agentic engineer". Baby-sitting his engineers and designers and steering them.
AlotOfReading 8mo ago
Don't take this as criticizing LLMs as a whole, but architects also don't call themselves engineers. Engineers are an entirely distinct set of roles that among other things validate the plan in its totality, not only the "new" 1/5th. Our job spans both of these. "Architect" is actually a whole career progression of people with different responsibilities. The bottom rung used to be the draftsmen, people usually without formal education who did the actual drawing. Then you had the juniors, mid-levels, seniors, principals, and partners who each oversaw different aspects. The architects with their name on the building were already issuing high level guidance before the transition instead of doing their own drawings. When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? Last week, to sanity check some code written by an LLM.
- throwup238 8mo ago
  > Engineers are an entirely distinct set of roles that among other things validate the plan in its totality, not only the "new" 1/5th. Our job spans both of these. Where this analogy breaks down is that the work you’re describing is done by Professional Engineers that have strict licensing and are (criminally) liable for the end result of the plans they approve. That is an entirely different role from the army of civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers (some who are PEs and some who are not) who do most of the work for the principal engineer/designated engineer/engineer of record, that have to trust building codes and tools like FEA/FEM that then get final approval from the most senior PE. I don’t think the analogy works, as software engineers rarely report to that kind of hierarchy. Architects of Record on construction projects are usually licensed with their own licensing organization too, with layers of licensed and unlicensed people working for them.
  - AlotOfReading 8mo ago
    That diversity of roles is what "among other things" was meant to convey. My job at least isn't terribly different, except that licensing doesn't exist and I don't get an actual stamp. My company (and possibly me depending on the facts of the situation) is simply liable if I do something egregious that results in someone being hurt.
  - 8mo ago
atomicnumber3 8mo ago
"When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler?" Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. I've never personally found a compiler bug. Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. That is to say, I would under no circumstances blindly follow the output of an LLM I asked to make soup. While I have, every day of my life, gladly sent all of the compiler output to the CPU without ever checking it. The compiler metaphor is simply incorrect and people trying to say LLMs compile English into code insult compiler devs and English speakers alike.
- jen729w 8mo ago
  > Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. Because there isn’t a canonical recipe for potato soup.
  - Jensson 8mo ago
    That is not the issue, any potato soup recipe would be fine, the issue is that it might fetch values from different recipes and give you an abomination.
    - D-Machine 8mo ago
      This exactly, I cook as passion, and LLMs just routinely very clearly (weighted) "average" together different recipes to produce, in the worst case, disgusting monstrosities, or, in the best case, just a near-replica of some established site's recipe.
      - antonvs 8mo ago
        > ... some established site's recipe. At least with the LLM, you don't have to wade through paragraph after paragraph of "I remember playing in the back yard as a child, I would get hungry..." In fact LLMs write better and more interesting prose than the average recipe site.
moregrist 8mo ago
> When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? ... Any time I’m doing serious optimization or knee-deep in debugging something where the bug emerged at -O2 but not at -O0. Sometimes just for fun to see what the compiler is doing in its optimization passes. You severely limit what you can do and what you can learn if you never peek underneath.
rhubarbtree 8mo ago
Reasoning by analogy is usually a bad idea, and nowhere is this worse than talking about software development. It’s just not analogous to architecture, or cooking, or engineering. Software development is just its own thing. So you can’t use analogy to get yourself anywhere with a hint of rigour. The problem is, AI is generating code that may be buggy, insecure, and unmaintainable. We have as a community spent decades trying to avoid producing that kind of code. And now we are being told that productivity gains mean we should abandon those goals and accept poor quality, as evidenced by MoltBook’s security problems. It’s a weird cognitive dissonance and it’s still not clear how this gets resolved.
- Applejinx 8mo ago
  Now then, Moltbook is a pathological case. Either it remains a pathological case or our whole technological world is gonna stumble HARD as all the fundamental things collapse. I prefer to think Moltbook is a pathological case and unrepresentative, but I've also been rethinking a sort of game idea from computer-based to entirely paper/card based (tariffs be damned) specifically for this reason. I wish to make things that people will have even in the event that all these nice blinky screens are ruined and go dark.
  - rhubarbtree 8mo ago
    Just the first system that was coded by AI could think of. Note this is unrelated to the fact that its users are LLMs - the problem was in the development of Moltbook itself.
blks 8mo ago
Compilers are deterministic.
lelanthran 8mo ago
> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! Maybe not, but we don't allow non-architects to vomit out thousands of diagrams that they cannot review, and that is never reviewed, which are subsequently used in the construction of the house. Your analogy to s/ware is fatally and irredeemably flawed, because you are comparing the regulated and certification-heavy production of content, which is subsequently double-checked by certified professionals, with an unregulated and non-certified production of content which is never checked by any human.
- snayan 8mo ago
  I don't see a flaw, I think you're just gatekeeping software creation. Anyone can pick up some CAD software and design a house if they so desire. Is the town going to let you build it without a certified engineer/architect signing off? Fuck no. But we don't lock down CAD software. And presumably, mission critical software is still going to be stamped off on by a certified engineer of some sort.
  - lelanthran 8mo ago
    > Anyone can pick up some CAD software and design a house if they so desire. Is the town going to let you build it without a certified engineer/architect signing off? Fuck no. But we don't lock down CAD software. No, we lock down using that output from the CAD software in the real world. > And presumably, mission critical software is still going to be stamped off on by a certified engineer of some sort. The "mission critical" qualifier is new to your analogy, but is irrelevant anyway - the analogy breaks because, while you can do what you like with CAD software on your own PC, that output never gets used outside of your PC without careful and multiple levels of review, while in the s/ware case, there is no review.
    - snayan 8mo ago
      I am not really sure what you are getting at here. Are you suggesting that people should need to acquire some sort of credential to be allowed to code?
samiv 8mo ago
It's not about the tooling it's about the reasoning. An architect copy pasting existing blueprints is still in charge and has to decide what the copy paste and where. Same as programmer slapping a bunch of code together, plumbing libraries or writing fresh code. They are the ones who drive the logical reasoning and the building process. The ai tooling reverses this where the thinking is outsourced to the machine and the user is borderline nothing more than a spectator, an observer and a rubber stamp on top. Anyone who is in this position seriously need to think their value added. How do they plan to justify their position and salary to the capital class. If the machine is doing the work for you, why would anyone pay you as much as they do when they can just replace you with someone cheaper, ideally with no-one for maximum profit. Everyone is now in a competition not only against each other but also against the machine. And any specialized. Expert knowledge moat that you've built over decades of hard work is about to evaporate. This is the real pressing issue. And the only way you can justify your value added, your position, your salary is to be able to undermine the AI, find flaws in it's output and reasoning. After all if/when it becomes flawless you have no purpose to the capital class!
- radarsat1 8mo ago
  > The ai tooling reverses this where the thinking is outsourced to the machine and the user is borderline nothing more than a spectator, an observer and a rubber stamp on top. I find it a bit rare that this is the case though. Usually I have to carefully review what it's doing and guide it. Either by specific suggestions, or by specific tests, etc. I treat it as a "code writer" that doesn't necessarily understand the big picture. So I expect it to fuck up, and correcting it feels far less frustrating if you consider it a tool you are driving rather than letting it drive you. It's great when it gets things right but even then it's you that is confirming this.
  - samiv 8mo ago
    This is exactly what I said in the end. Right now you rely on it fucking things up. What happens to you when the AI no longer fucks things up? Sorry to say, but your position is no longer needed.
dns_snek 8mo ago
> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! Architect's copy-pasting is equivalent to a software developer reusing a tried and tested code library. Generating or writing new code is fundamentally different and not at all comparable. > We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shovel... We would call them "vibe builders" if their machines threw bricks around randomly and the builders focused all of their time on engineering complex scaffolding around the machines to get the bricks flying roughly in the right direction. But we don't because their machines, like our compilers and linters, do one job and they do it predictably. Most trades spend obscene amounts of money on tools that produce repeatable results. > That's a lot of years! They're still called architects. Because they still architect, they don't subcontract their core duties to architecture students overseas and just sign their name under it. I find it fitting and amusing that people who are uncritical towards the quality of LLM-generated work seem to make the same sorts of reasoning errors that LLMs do. Something about blind spots?
- Applejinx 8mo ago
  Very likely, yes. One day we'll have a clearer understanding of how minds generalize concepts into well-trodden paths even when they're erroneous, and it'll probably shed a lot of light onto concepts like addiction.
latexr 8mo ago
> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though (…) > We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for (…) > When was the last time (…) None of those are the same thing. At all. They are still all deterministic approaches. The architect’s library of things doesn’t change every time they use it or present different things depending on how they hold it. It’s useful because it’s predictable. Same for all your other examples. If we want to have an honest discussion about the pros and cons of LLM-generated code, proponents need to stop being dishonest in their comparisons. They also need to stop plugging their ears and not ignore the other issues around the technology. It is possible to have something which is useful but whose advantages do not outweigh the disadvantages.
- cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
  I think the word predictable is doing a bit of heavy lifting there. Lets say you shovel some dirt, you’ve got a lot of control over where you get it from and where you put it.. Now get in your big digger’s cabin and try to have the same precision. At the level of a shovel-user, you are unpredictable even if you’re skilled. Some of your work might be out a decent fraction of the width of a shovel. That’d never happen if you did it the precise way! But you have a ton more leverage. And that’s the game-changer.
  - latexr 8mo ago
    That’s another dishonest comparison. Predictability is not the same as precision. You don’t need to be millimetric when shovelling dirt at a construction site. But you do need to do it when conducting brain surgery. Context matters.
    - cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
      Sure. If you’re racing your runway to go from 0 to 100 users you’d reach for a different set of tools than if you’re contributing to postgres. In other words I agree completely with you but these new tools open up new possibilities. We have historically not had super-shovels so we’ve had to shovel all the things no matter how giant or important they are.
nutjob2 8mo ago
> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! Maybe, but they do it through the filter of their knowledge, experience and wisdom, not by rolling a large number of dice to execute a design. LLMs are useful, just less useful than people think, for instance, 'technical debt' production has now become automated at an industrial scale.
borroka 8mo ago
Architects went from drawing everything on paper to using CAD, not over a generation, but over a few years, after CAD and computers got good enough. It therefore depends on where we place the discovery/availability of the product. If we place it at the time of prototype production (in the early 1960s for CAD), it took a generation (20-30 years), since by the early and mid-1990s, all professionals were already using CAD. But if we place it at the time when CAD and personal computers became available to the general public (e.g., mid-1980s), it took no more than 5-10 years. I attended a technical school in the 1990s, and we started with hand drawing in the first two years and used CAD systems in the remaining three years of school. The same can be said for AI. If we place the beginning of AI in the mid-1980s, the wider adoption of AI took more than a generation. If we place it at the time OpenAI developed GPT, it took 5-10 years.
franze 8mo ago
ad > when was the last time i once found a bug in https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler by borrowing a function from a not invoked Array broke the compiled code spent a weekend in reading minified code good times
tehnub 8mo ago
How can people still make such mistaken analogies when ChatGPT was released over three years ago?
gloosx 8mo ago
earth-moving machines don't really move earth because they are told so, machine requires fine-grained deterministic input in a certain language of motion to do what it does. imagine if machine operator was saying "move this earth here, not not this one, 30 cantimeters to the left... yes, move this one earth here, no not here, please a bit to the right", lol of course, someone with no exprerience with the machine would prefer telling it what to do, and he will even achieve something rough, but someone who knows what handles and pedals do would prefer the handles and pedals
_zagj 8mo ago
> When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? ... I use Godbolt regularly, as do many C and C++ devs, for the sake of optimization, but I'm not sure that's what you mean. Checking the generated output is sometimes still needed for correctness, probably more so in the past than now due to threads not being a part of the language and the memory model being under-specified (allowing compiler authors to assume a single-threaded execution model), but those were deficiencies in those languages in particular (since remedied). Paradoxically, it's also still sometimes needed to ensure the compiler doesn't optimize certain code away, for the sake of security.

by keyle 8mo ago

allworms 8mo ago

> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! > We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shovel... > When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? Sure, because those are categorically different. You are describing shortcuts of two classes: boilerplate (library of things) and (deterministic/intentional) automation. Vibe coding doesn't use either of those things. The LLM agents involved might use them, but the vibe coder doesn't. Vibe coding is delegation, which is a completely different class of shortcut or "tool" use. If an architect delegates all their work to interns, directs outcomes based on whims not principals, and doesn't actually know what the interns are delivering, yeah, I think it would be fair to call them a vibe architect. We didn't have that term before, so we usually just call those people "arrogant pricks" or "terrible bosses". I'm not super familiar but I feel like Steve Jobs was pretty famously that way - thus if he was an engineer, he was a vibe engineer. But don't let this last point detract from the message, which is that you're describing things which are not really even similar to vibe coding.

djhn 8mo ago
I think you are right in placing emphasis on delegation. There’s been a hypothesis floating around that I find appealing. Seemingly you can identify two distinct groups of experienced engineers. Manager, delegator, or team lead style senior engineers are broadly pro-AI. The craftsman, wizard, artist, IC style senior engineers are broadly anti-AI. But coming back to architects, or most professional services and academia to be honest, I do think the term vibe architect as you define it is exactly how the industry works. An underclass of underpaid interns and juniors do the work, hoping to climb higher and position themselves towards the top of the ponzi-like pyramid scheme.
barrenko 8mo ago
Architects still need to learn to draw manually quite well to pass exams and stuff.
tjr 8mo ago
Delegation, yes. I do not see LLM coding as another step up on the ladder of programming abstraction. If your project is in, say, Python, then by using LLMs, you are not writing software in English; you are having an LLM write software for you in Python. This is much more like delegation of work to someone else, than it is another layer in the machine-code/assembly/C/Python sort of hierarchy. In my regular day job, I am a project manager. I find LLM coding to be effectively project management. As a project manager, I am free to dive down to whatever level of technical detail I want, but by and large, it is others on the team who actually write the software. If I assign a task, I don't say "I wrote that code", because I didn't; someone else did, even if I directed it. And then, project management, delegating to the team, is most certainly nondeterministic behavior. Any programmer on the team might come up with a different solution, each of which works. The same programmer might come up with more than one solutions, all of which work. I don't expect the programmers to be deterministic. I do expect the compiler to be deterministic.
tehnub 8mo ago
Totally on point, except I'm pretty sure Jobs was not like that. From what I've read he'd be more of a hands on "agentic engineer". Baby-sitting his engineers and designers and steering them.

AlotOfReading 8mo ago

Don't take this as criticizing LLMs as a whole, but architects also don't call themselves engineers. Engineers are an entirely distinct set of roles that among other things validate the plan in its totality, not only the "new" 1/5th. Our job spans both of these. "Architect" is actually a whole career progression of people with different responsibilities. The bottom rung used to be the draftsmen, people usually without formal education who did the actual drawing. Then you had the juniors, mid-levels, seniors, principals, and partners who each oversaw different aspects. The architects with their name on the building were already issuing high level guidance before the transition instead of doing their own drawings. When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? Last week, to sanity check some code written by an LLM.

throwup238 8mo ago
> Engineers are an entirely distinct set of roles that among other things validate the plan in its totality, not only the "new" 1/5th. Our job spans both of these. Where this analogy breaks down is that the work you’re describing is done by Professional Engineers that have strict licensing and are (criminally) liable for the end result of the plans they approve. That is an entirely different role from the army of civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers (some who are PEs and some who are not) who do most of the work for the principal engineer/designated engineer/engineer of record, that have to trust building codes and tools like FEA/FEM that then get final approval from the most senior PE. I don’t think the analogy works, as software engineers rarely report to that kind of hierarchy. Architects of Record on construction projects are usually licensed with their own licensing organization too, with layers of licensed and unlicensed people working for them.
- AlotOfReading 8mo ago
  That diversity of roles is what "among other things" was meant to convey. My job at least isn't terribly different, except that licensing doesn't exist and I don't get an actual stamp. My company (and possibly me depending on the facts of the situation) is simply liable if I do something egregious that results in someone being hurt.
- 8mo ago

atomicnumber3 8mo ago

"When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler?" Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. I've never personally found a compiler bug. Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. That is to say, I would under no circumstances blindly follow the output of an LLM I asked to make soup. While I have, every day of my life, gladly sent all of the compiler output to the CPU without ever checking it. The compiler metaphor is simply incorrect and people trying to say LLMs compile English into code insult compiler devs and English speakers alike.

jen729w 8mo ago
> Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. Because there isn’t a canonical recipe for potato soup.
- Jensson 8mo ago
  That is not the issue, any potato soup recipe would be fine, the issue is that it might fetch values from different recipes and give you an abomination.
  - D-Machine 8mo ago
    This exactly, I cook as passion, and LLMs just routinely very clearly (weighted) "average" together different recipes to produce, in the worst case, disgusting monstrosities, or, in the best case, just a near-replica of some established site's recipe.
    - antonvs 8mo ago
      > ... some established site's recipe. At least with the LLM, you don't have to wade through paragraph after paragraph of "I remember playing in the back yard as a child, I would get hungry..." In fact LLMs write better and more interesting prose than the average recipe site.

moregrist 8mo ago

> When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? ... Any time I’m doing serious optimization or knee-deep in debugging something where the bug emerged at -O2 but not at -O0. Sometimes just for fun to see what the compiler is doing in its optimization passes. You severely limit what you can do and what you can learn if you never peek underneath.

rhubarbtree 8mo ago

Reasoning by analogy is usually a bad idea, and nowhere is this worse than talking about software development. It’s just not analogous to architecture, or cooking, or engineering. Software development is just its own thing. So you can’t use analogy to get yourself anywhere with a hint of rigour. The problem is, AI is generating code that may be buggy, insecure, and unmaintainable. We have as a community spent decades trying to avoid producing that kind of code. And now we are being told that productivity gains mean we should abandon those goals and accept poor quality, as evidenced by MoltBook’s security problems. It’s a weird cognitive dissonance and it’s still not clear how this gets resolved.

Applejinx 8mo ago
Now then, Moltbook is a pathological case. Either it remains a pathological case or our whole technological world is gonna stumble HARD as all the fundamental things collapse. I prefer to think Moltbook is a pathological case and unrepresentative, but I've also been rethinking a sort of game idea from computer-based to entirely paper/card based (tariffs be damned) specifically for this reason. I wish to make things that people will have even in the event that all these nice blinky screens are ruined and go dark.
- rhubarbtree 8mo ago
  Just the first system that was coded by AI could think of. Note this is unrelated to the fact that its users are LLMs - the problem was in the development of Moltbook itself.

blks 8mo ago

Compilers are deterministic.

lelanthran 8mo ago

> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! Maybe not, but we don't allow non-architects to vomit out thousands of diagrams that they cannot review, and that is never reviewed, which are subsequently used in the construction of the house. Your analogy to s/ware is fatally and irredeemably flawed, because you are comparing the regulated and certification-heavy production of content, which is subsequently double-checked by certified professionals, with an unregulated and non-certified production of content which is never checked by any human.

snayan 8mo ago
I don't see a flaw, I think you're just gatekeeping software creation. Anyone can pick up some CAD software and design a house if they so desire. Is the town going to let you build it without a certified engineer/architect signing off? Fuck no. But we don't lock down CAD software. And presumably, mission critical software is still going to be stamped off on by a certified engineer of some sort.
- lelanthran 8mo ago
  > Anyone can pick up some CAD software and design a house if they so desire. Is the town going to let you build it without a certified engineer/architect signing off? Fuck no. But we don't lock down CAD software. No, we lock down using that output from the CAD software in the real world. > And presumably, mission critical software is still going to be stamped off on by a certified engineer of some sort. The "mission critical" qualifier is new to your analogy, but is irrelevant anyway - the analogy breaks because, while you can do what you like with CAD software on your own PC, that output never gets used outside of your PC without careful and multiple levels of review, while in the s/ware case, there is no review.
  - snayan 8mo ago
    I am not really sure what you are getting at here. Are you suggesting that people should need to acquire some sort of credential to be allowed to code?

samiv 8mo ago

It's not about the tooling it's about the reasoning. An architect copy pasting existing blueprints is still in charge and has to decide what the copy paste and where. Same as programmer slapping a bunch of code together, plumbing libraries or writing fresh code. They are the ones who drive the logical reasoning and the building process. The ai tooling reverses this where the thinking is outsourced to the machine and the user is borderline nothing more than a spectator, an observer and a rubber stamp on top. Anyone who is in this position seriously need to think their value added. How do they plan to justify their position and salary to the capital class. If the machine is doing the work for you, why would anyone pay you as much as they do when they can just replace you with someone cheaper, ideally with no-one for maximum profit. Everyone is now in a competition not only against each other but also against the machine. And any specialized. Expert knowledge moat that you've built over decades of hard work is about to evaporate. This is the real pressing issue. And the only way you can justify your value added, your position, your salary is to be able to undermine the AI, find flaws in it's output and reasoning. After all if/when it becomes flawless you have no purpose to the capital class!

radarsat1 8mo ago
> The ai tooling reverses this where the thinking is outsourced to the machine and the user is borderline nothing more than a spectator, an observer and a rubber stamp on top. I find it a bit rare that this is the case though. Usually I have to carefully review what it's doing and guide it. Either by specific suggestions, or by specific tests, etc. I treat it as a "code writer" that doesn't necessarily understand the big picture. So I expect it to fuck up, and correcting it feels far less frustrating if you consider it a tool you are driving rather than letting it drive you. It's great when it gets things right but even then it's you that is confirming this.
- samiv 8mo ago
  This is exactly what I said in the end. Right now you rely on it fucking things up. What happens to you when the AI no longer fucks things up? Sorry to say, but your position is no longer needed.

dns_snek 8mo ago

> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! Architect's copy-pasting is equivalent to a software developer reusing a tried and tested code library. Generating or writing new code is fundamentally different and not at all comparable. > We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shovel... We would call them "vibe builders" if their machines threw bricks around randomly and the builders focused all of their time on engineering complex scaffolding around the machines to get the bricks flying roughly in the right direction. But we don't because their machines, like our compilers and linters, do one job and they do it predictably. Most trades spend obscene amounts of money on tools that produce repeatable results. > That's a lot of years! They're still called architects. Because they still architect, they don't subcontract their core duties to architecture students overseas and just sign their name under it. I find it fitting and amusing that people who are uncritical towards the quality of LLM-generated work seem to make the same sorts of reasoning errors that LLMs do. Something about blind spots?

Applejinx 8mo ago
Very likely, yes. One day we'll have a clearer understanding of how minds generalize concepts into well-trodden paths even when they're erroneous, and it'll probably shed a lot of light onto concepts like addiction.

latexr 8mo ago

> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though (…) > We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for (…) > When was the last time (…) None of those are the same thing. At all. They are still all deterministic approaches. The architect’s library of things doesn’t change every time they use it or present different things depending on how they hold it. It’s useful because it’s predictable. Same for all your other examples. If we want to have an honest discussion about the pros and cons of LLM-generated code, proponents need to stop being dishonest in their comparisons. They also need to stop plugging their ears and not ignore the other issues around the technology. It is possible to have something which is useful but whose advantages do not outweigh the disadvantages.

cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
I think the word predictable is doing a bit of heavy lifting there. Lets say you shovel some dirt, you’ve got a lot of control over where you get it from and where you put it.. Now get in your big digger’s cabin and try to have the same precision. At the level of a shovel-user, you are unpredictable even if you’re skilled. Some of your work might be out a decent fraction of the width of a shovel. That’d never happen if you did it the precise way! But you have a ton more leverage. And that’s the game-changer.
- latexr 8mo ago
  That’s another dishonest comparison. Predictability is not the same as precision. You don’t need to be millimetric when shovelling dirt at a construction site. But you do need to do it when conducting brain surgery. Context matters.
  - cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
    Sure. If you’re racing your runway to go from 0 to 100 users you’d reach for a different set of tools than if you’re contributing to postgres. In other words I agree completely with you but these new tools open up new possibilities. We have historically not had super-shovels so we’ve had to shovel all the things no matter how giant or important they are.

nutjob2 8mo ago

> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! Maybe, but they do it through the filter of their knowledge, experience and wisdom, not by rolling a large number of dice to execute a design. LLMs are useful, just less useful than people think, for instance, 'technical debt' production has now become automated at an industrial scale.

borroka 8mo ago

Architects went from drawing everything on paper to using CAD, not over a generation, but over a few years, after CAD and computers got good enough. It therefore depends on where we place the discovery/availability of the product. If we place it at the time of prototype production (in the early 1960s for CAD), it took a generation (20-30 years), since by the early and mid-1990s, all professionals were already using CAD. But if we place it at the time when CAD and personal computers became available to the general public (e.g., mid-1980s), it took no more than 5-10 years. I attended a technical school in the 1990s, and we started with hand drawing in the first two years and used CAD systems in the remaining three years of school. The same can be said for AI. If we place the beginning of AI in the mid-1980s, the wider adoption of AI took more than a generation. If we place it at the time OpenAI developed GPT, it took 5-10 years.

franze 8mo ago

ad > when was the last time i once found a bug in https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler by borrowing a function from a not invoked Array broke the compiled code spent a weekend in reading minified code good times

tehnub 8mo ago

How can people still make such mistaken analogies when ChatGPT was released over three years ago?

gloosx 8mo ago

earth-moving machines don't really move earth because they are told so, machine requires fine-grained deterministic input in a certain language of motion to do what it does. imagine if machine operator was saying "move this earth here, not not this one, 30 cantimeters to the left... yes, move this one earth here, no not here, please a bit to the right", lol of course, someone with no exprerience with the machine would prefer telling it what to do, and he will even achieve something rough, but someone who knows what handles and pedals do would prefer the handles and pedals

_zagj 8mo ago

> When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? ... I use Godbolt regularly, as do many C and C++ devs, for the sake of optimization, but I'm not sure that's what you mean. Checking the generated output is sometimes still needed for correctness, probably more so in the past than now due to threads not being a part of the language and the memory model being under-specified (allowing compiler authors to assume a single-threaded execution model), but those were deficiencies in those languages in particular (since remedied). Paradoxically, it's also still sometimes needed to ensure the compiler doesn't optimize certain code away, for the sake of security.