7 ms·

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and mad

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software. Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful. It was, for me, never about the code. It was always about making something useful for myself and others. And that has never been easier.

bnchrch 8mo ago
Well said. This sums up my own feeling. I joined this craft and love this craft for the simple ability to build beautiful and useful things. This new world makes me more effective at it. And this new world doesn’t prevent me from crafting elegant architectures either.
- croes 8mo ago
  Wait 5 years and your skills are down
  - Ronsenshi 8mo ago
    I don't think 5 years is necessary. I think after two years of this agentic orchestration if you rarely touch code yourself skill will degrade to the point they won't be able to write anything non-trivial without assistance.
    - SoftTalker 8mo ago
      Depends how long you've done it, and how much the landscape has changed since then. I can still hop back into SQL and it all comes back to me though I haven't done it regularly at all for nearly 10 years. In the web front-end world I'd be pretty much a newbie. I don't know any of the modern frameworks, everything I've used is legacy and obsolete today. I'd ramp up quicker than a new junior because I understand all the concepts of HTTP and how the web works, but I don't know any of the modern tooling.
    - AstroBen 8mo ago
      How much do you think Linus Torvalds has coded over the last decade? Why is he still able to do his job?
      - esafak 8mo ago
        His job is reviewing.
      - Xenoamorphous 8mo ago
        https://github.com/torvalds https://github.com/torvalds
  - dham 8mo ago
    What infrastructure has gone through the last 15 years would like a word. Half the people I work with can't do imperative jQuery interfaces. So what I guess. I can't code assembly.
    - croes 8mo ago
      A programming language is still an additional language with all the benefits of being multilingual. AI will kill that.
  - Xenoamorphous 8mo ago
    In 5 years coding skills will matter as much as being able to operate an elevator. (sadly)
  - shimman 8mo ago
    It won't be 5 years, it'll be less than a year. When you don't exercise, your muscles atrophy. It's the same for any other skill. I use to speak conversational french in college, fast forward 10 years later and my understanding is no different than a casual "Emily in Paris" fan. It'll be the same here, the only question is if those that do exercise will be able to command better salaries. I think this is possible but not with the current political climate.
fastasucan 8mo ago
>It was, for me, never about the code. Then it wasn't your craft.
- arduanika 8mo ago
  No true programmer is excited for the future.
  - heliumtera 8mo ago
    this is so true. never once in my life i saw anything get better. except for metal gear solid psx and gears of wars
    - bojan 8mo ago
      As someone who started with Borland DOS-era IDEs I can tell you that IDEs did get a lot better over the years. I'm still fascinated every day by JetBrains IDEs.
      - blibble 8mo ago
        > I'm still fascinated every day by JetBrains IDEs. have you used them recently? terrible, is the word I would use (as a customer since the 2010s)
  - boxedemp 8mo ago
    And no true scotsman puts sugar in his porridge
    - simonwsucks 8mo ago
      [dead]
    - arduanika 8mo ago
      Yes, that was the reference! Possibly too obscure. I can't tell whether I'm being downvoted by optimists who missed the joke, or by pessimists who got it.
popopopopoopop 8mo ago
[dead]
RGamma 8mo ago
AI agents seem to be a powerful shortcut to the drudgery. But let's not forget, that powerful software rests on substance. My hope is the substance will increase, after all.
altmanaltman 8mo ago
So when you "learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software", it wasn't about code? I don't get it. Yes, building useful things is the ultimate goal, but code is the medium through which you do it, and I don't understand how that cannot be an important part of the process. It's like a woodworker saying, "Even though I built all those tables using precise craft and practice, it was NEVER ABOUT THE CRAFT OR PRACTICE! It was about building useful things." Or a surgeon talking about saving lives and doing brain surgery, but "it was never about learning surgery, it was about making people get better!" I mean sure yeah but also not really.
- mikepurvis 8mo ago
  Not the GP I feel some of that energy. The parts I most enjoy are the interfaces, the abstractions, the state machines, the definitions. The code I enjoy too, and I would be sad to lose all contact with it, but I've really appreciated AI especially for helping me get over the initial hump on things like: - infrastructure bs, like scaffold me a JS GitHub action that does x and y. - porting, like take these kernel patches and adjust them from 6.14 to 6.17. - tools stuff, like here's a workplace shell script that fetches a bunch of tokens for different services, rewrite this from bash to Python. - fiddly things like dealing with systemd or kubernetes or ansible - fault analysis, like here's a massive syslog dump or build failure, what's the "real" issue here? In all these cases I'm very capable of assessing, tweaking, and owning the end result, but having the bot help me with a first draft saves a bunch of drudgery on the front end, which can be especially valuable for the ADHD types where that kind of thing can be a real barrier to getting off the ground.
  - altmanaltman 8mo ago
    But this just makes me feel like it's literally more ABOUT the code than less. The comment I replied to makes it seem like "code" and "solving humanity's problems" are two different things, when in reality, one leads to the other (if we assume you're working on good products, etc.). It's one thing to have your approach where you're using AI to help w/ the code, but it's totally another to pretend like "code" is not something you were ever interested in, so it's okay for the AI to write it while you're busy "solving problems," which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Fraterkes 8mo ago
I've seen a hundred ai-generated things, and they are rarely interesting. Not because the tools are insufficient, it's just that the kind of person that can't even stomach the charmed life of being a programmer will rarely be able to stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative. Why should someone be interested in you creations? In what part of your new frictionless life would you've picked up something that sets you apart from a million other vibe-coders?
- nubg 8mo ago
  What sets you apart from millions of manual programmers?
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  > stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative This strikes me as the opposite of what I experience when I say I'm "feeling creative", then everything comes easy. At least in the context of programming, making music, doing 3D animation and some other topics. If it's "dull and hard work" it's because I'm not feeling "creative" at all, when "creative mode" is on in my brain, there is nothing that feels neither dull nor hard. Maybe it works differently for others.
- dukeyukey 8mo ago
  I've been a professional programmer for 8+ years now. I've stomached that life. I've made things people used and paid for. If I can do that typing one line at a time, I can do it _way_ faster with AI.
- boxedemp 8mo ago
  You may be mistaking some ai dev with non, because it doesn't have tell tails
  - icedchai 8mo ago
    Many AI generated web sites have a “look” and it’s not just all the emojis.
croes 8mo ago
But you don’t make. You order it.
- derektank 8mo ago
  The transition is from author to editor/publisher. Both play an important role in bringing something new into the world.
  - zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    It's true, but ask an author and 99% of them will say they don't want to be an editor.
- FeteCommuniste 8mo ago
  Right. It's like learning to cook and regularly making your own meals, then shifting to a "new paradigm" of hiring a personal chef to cook for you. Food's getting made either way, but it's not really the same deal.
  - crazygringo 8mo ago
    No, it's more like moving from line cook, to head chef in charge of 30 cooks. Food's getting made, but you focus on the truly creative part -- the menu, the concept, the customer experience. You're not boiling pasta or cutting chives for the thousandth time. The same way now you're focusing on architecture and design now instead of writing your 10,000th list comprehension.
    - tatjam 8mo ago
      Except the cooks don't exist anymore as they all have become head chefs (or changed careers) and the food is being cooked by magical cooking black boxes
      - crazygringo 8mo ago
        Sure, but the point is you're now doing the most creative and satisfying part. Not the drudgery. It's not that you've stopped doing anything at all, like the other commenter claimed in their personal chef analogy.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
eranation 8mo ago
I like coding, I really do. But like you, I like building things more than I like the way I build them. I do not find myself miss writing code by hand as much. I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right". But I do worry. The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet) My main hope is this - AI can beat a human in chess for a while now, we still play chess, people earn money from playing chess, teaching chess, chess players are still celebrated, youtube influencers still get monetized for analyzing games of celebrity chess players, even though the top human chess player will likely lose to a stockfish engine running on my iPhone. So maybe there is hope.
- RivieraKid 8mo ago
  > I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right". I've always been strongly in the first category, but... the issue is that 10x more people will be able to build the right things. And if I build the right thing, it will be easy to copy. The market will get crowded, so distribution will become even harder than it is today. Success will be determined by personal brand, social media presence, social connections.
  - epicureanideal 8mo ago
    > Success will be determined by personal brand, social media presence, social connections. Always has been. (Meme)
- dynamite-ready 8mo ago
  For me, photography is the metaphor - https://raskie.com/post/we-have-ai-at-home https://raskie.com/post/we-have-ai-at-home - We've had the technology to produce a perfect 2D likeness of a subject for close to two centuries now, and people are still painting. Video didn't kill the radio star either. In fact the radio star has become more popular than ever in this, the era of the podcast.
Johnny_Bonk 8mo ago
I couldn't agree more.
voidhorse 8mo ago
In my opinion the relationship between level of detailed care and resulting beauty is proportional. Can you get the same level without getting your hands dirty? Sure, maybe, but I doubt a painter or novelist could really produce beautiful work without being intimately familiar with that work. The distance that heavy use of AI tools creates between you and the output does not really lend itself to beauty. Could you do it, sure, but at that point it's probably more efficient to just do things yourself and have complete intimate control. To me, you sound more utilitarian. The philosophy you are presenting is a kind of Ikea philosophy. Utility, mass production, and unique beauty are generally properties that do not cohere together, and there's a reason for this. I think the use of LLMs in the production of digital goods is very close to the use of automation lines in the production of physical goods. No matter how you try some of the human charm, and thus beauty will inevitably be lost, the number of goods will increase, but they'll all be barely differentiable souless replications of more or less the same shallow ideas repeated as infinitum.
- mversic 8mo ago
  only the true artist will survive the advent of LLMs
- bloomca 8mo ago
  I agree, LLMs definitely sand off a lot of personality, and you can see it in writing the most, at this point I'm sure tons of people are subconsciously trained to lower the trust for something where they recognize typical patterns. With the code, especially interfaces, the results will be similar -- more standardized palettes, predictable things. To be fair, the converging factor is going on pretty much forever, e.g. radio/TV led to the lots of local accents disappearing, our world is heavily globalized.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
RivieraKid 8mo ago
> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. Me too, but... The ability to code was a filter. With AI, the pool of people who can build beautiful elegant software products expands significantly. Good for the society, bad for me.
GeorgeTirebiter 8mo ago
I want to be in your camp, and am trying hard. But the OP's blog entry should at least give us a moment to "respect the dead". That's all he's asking, I think.
rdedev 8mo ago
Adam Neely has a video on GenAI and it's impact on the music industry. There is a section in the video about beauty and taste and it's pretty different from your conclusions. One example I remember is would an AI find beauty in a record scratch sound? https://youtu.be/U8dcFhF0Dlk https://youtu.be/U8dcFhF0Dlk
kelnos 8mo ago
I love building things too, but for me, the journey is a big part of what brings me joy. Herding an LLM doesn't give me joy like writing code does. And the finished project doesn't feel the same when my involvement is limited to prompting an LLM and reviewing its output. If I had an LLM generate a piece of artwork for me, I wouldn't call myself an artist, no matter how many hours I spent conversing with the LLM in order to refine the image. So I wouldn't call myself a coder if my process was to get an LLM to write most/all the code for me. Not saying the output of either doesn't have value, but I am absolutely fine gatekeeping in this way: you are not an artist/coder if this is how you build your product. You're an artistic director, a technical product manager, something of that nature. That said, I never derived joy from every single second of coding; there were and are plenty of parts to it that I find tedious or frustrating. I do appreciate being able to let an LLM loose on some of those parts. But sparing use is starting to really only work for hobby projects. I'm not sure I could get away with taking the time to write most of it manually when LLMs might make coworkers more "productive". Even if I can convince myself my code is still "better" than theirs, that's not what companies value.
libraryofbabel 8mo ago
So many people responding to you with snarky comments or questioning your programming ability. It makes me sad. You shared a personal take (in response to TFA which was also a personal take). There is so much hostility and pessimism directed at engineers who simply say that AI makes them more productive and allows them to accomplish their goals faster. To the skeptics: by all means, don't use AI if you don't want to; it's your choice, your career, your life. But I am not sure that hitching your identity to hating AI is altogether a good idea. It will make you increasingly bitter as these tools improve further and our industry and the wider world slowly shifts to incorporate them. Frankly, I consider the mourning of The Craft of Software to be just a little myopic. If there are things to worry about with AI they are bigger things, like widespread shifts in the labor force and economic disruption 10 or 20 years from now, or even the consequences of the current investment bubble popping. And there are bigger potential gains in view as well. I want AI to help us advance the frontiers of science and help us get to cures for more diseases and ameliorate human suffering. If a particular way of working in a particular late-20th and early-21st century profession that I happen to be in goes away but we get to those things, so be it. I enjoy coding. I still do it without AI sometimes. It's a pleasant activity to be good at. But I don't kid myself that my feelings about it are all that important in the grand scheme of things.
ori_b 8mo ago
> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. Why did you stop? Because, you realize, LLMs are giving up the process of creating for the immediacy of having. It's paying someone to make for you. Things are more convenient if you live the dream of the LLM, and hire a taskrabbit to run your wood shop. But it's not you that's making.
gamblor956 8mo ago
If AI can do the coding, those of us who aren't programmers don't need you anymore. We can just tell the AI what we want. Luckily for real programmers, AI's not actually very good at generating quality code. It generates the equivalent of Ali Baba code: it lasts for one week and then breaks. This is going to be the future of programming: low-paid AI clerks to generate the initial software, and then the highly paid programmers who fix all the broken parts.
- icedchai 8mo ago
  Yes. The problem is there is a huge invisible gap between "looks like it works" and "actually works", and everything that entails, like security and scaling beyond a couple users. Non-programmers and inexperienced ones will have trouble with those gaps. Welcome to our slop filled future.
  - stoneforger 8mo ago
    It's been here since it's inception. The more the market grew and the more computing became widespread, the greater the number of ravenous sociopaths with other people's money got involved. This is just another version of Rome burning. This is the terminal acceleration phase. The lunatics are running everything to the ground and the few sane people left are labeled the same way they always had been. The useful idiots are just thinking they're so much smarter. Noone asked if it is wise or not, they are thinking they can outrun the treadmill. Just add water and LLM, it's so much fun for the whole family.
throwawa14223 8mo ago
But why would someone pay you for that?
andyjohnson0 8mo ago
> Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful. For how long do you think this is sustainable? In the sense of you, or me, or all these other people here being able to earn a living. Six months? A couple of years? The time until the next-but-one Claude release drops? Does everyone have to just keep re-making themselves for whatever the next new paradigm turns out to be? How many times can a person do that? How many times can you do that?
- thedevilslawyer 8mo ago
  For your custom definition of sustainable, perhaps not. but this is definitely generally sustainable. by 2030 we're fully agentic coding for everything, and it's going to sustain.
wtetzner 8mo ago
This is the best description of value from AI that I've seen so far. It allows people who don't like writing code to build things without doing so. I don't think it's nearly as valuable to people who do enjoy writing code, because I don't think prompting an agent (at least in their current state) is actually more productive than just writing the code. So I don't see any reason to mourn on either side.

bnchrch 8mo ago

Well said. This sums up my own feeling. I joined this craft and love this craft for the simple ability to build beautiful and useful things. This new world makes me more effective at it. And this new world doesn’t prevent me from crafting elegant architectures either.

croes 8mo ago
Wait 5 years and your skills are down
- Ronsenshi 8mo ago
  I don't think 5 years is necessary. I think after two years of this agentic orchestration if you rarely touch code yourself skill will degrade to the point they won't be able to write anything non-trivial without assistance.
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    Depends how long you've done it, and how much the landscape has changed since then. I can still hop back into SQL and it all comes back to me though I haven't done it regularly at all for nearly 10 years. In the web front-end world I'd be pretty much a newbie. I don't know any of the modern frameworks, everything I've used is legacy and obsolete today. I'd ramp up quicker than a new junior because I understand all the concepts of HTTP and how the web works, but I don't know any of the modern tooling.
  - AstroBen 8mo ago
    How much do you think Linus Torvalds has coded over the last decade? Why is he still able to do his job?
    - esafak 8mo ago
      His job is reviewing.
    - Xenoamorphous 8mo ago
      https://github.com/torvalds https://github.com/torvalds
- dham 8mo ago
  What infrastructure has gone through the last 15 years would like a word. Half the people I work with can't do imperative jQuery interfaces. So what I guess. I can't code assembly.
  - croes 8mo ago
    A programming language is still an additional language with all the benefits of being multilingual. AI will kill that.
- Xenoamorphous 8mo ago
  In 5 years coding skills will matter as much as being able to operate an elevator. (sadly)
- shimman 8mo ago
  It won't be 5 years, it'll be less than a year. When you don't exercise, your muscles atrophy. It's the same for any other skill. I use to speak conversational french in college, fast forward 10 years later and my understanding is no different than a casual "Emily in Paris" fan. It'll be the same here, the only question is if those that do exercise will be able to command better salaries. I think this is possible but not with the current political climate.

fastasucan 8mo ago

>It was, for me, never about the code. Then it wasn't your craft.

arduanika 8mo ago
No true programmer is excited for the future.
- heliumtera 8mo ago
  this is so true. never once in my life i saw anything get better. except for metal gear solid psx and gears of wars
  - bojan 8mo ago
    As someone who started with Borland DOS-era IDEs I can tell you that IDEs did get a lot better over the years. I'm still fascinated every day by JetBrains IDEs.
    - blibble 8mo ago
      > I'm still fascinated every day by JetBrains IDEs. have you used them recently? terrible, is the word I would use (as a customer since the 2010s)
- boxedemp 8mo ago
  And no true scotsman puts sugar in his porridge
  - simonwsucks 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - arduanika 8mo ago
    Yes, that was the reference! Possibly too obscure. I can't tell whether I'm being downvoted by optimists who missed the joke, or by pessimists who got it.

popopopopoopop 8mo ago

[dead]

RGamma 8mo ago

AI agents seem to be a powerful shortcut to the drudgery. But let's not forget, that powerful software rests on substance. My hope is the substance will increase, after all.

altmanaltman 8mo ago

So when you "learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software", it wasn't about code? I don't get it. Yes, building useful things is the ultimate goal, but code is the medium through which you do it, and I don't understand how that cannot be an important part of the process. It's like a woodworker saying, "Even though I built all those tables using precise craft and practice, it was NEVER ABOUT THE CRAFT OR PRACTICE! It was about building useful things." Or a surgeon talking about saving lives and doing brain surgery, but "it was never about learning surgery, it was about making people get better!" I mean sure yeah but also not really.

mikepurvis 8mo ago
Not the GP I feel some of that energy. The parts I most enjoy are the interfaces, the abstractions, the state machines, the definitions. The code I enjoy too, and I would be sad to lose all contact with it, but I've really appreciated AI especially for helping me get over the initial hump on things like: - infrastructure bs, like scaffold me a JS GitHub action that does x and y. - porting, like take these kernel patches and adjust them from 6.14 to 6.17. - tools stuff, like here's a workplace shell script that fetches a bunch of tokens for different services, rewrite this from bash to Python. - fiddly things like dealing with systemd or kubernetes or ansible - fault analysis, like here's a massive syslog dump or build failure, what's the "real" issue here? In all these cases I'm very capable of assessing, tweaking, and owning the end result, but having the bot help me with a first draft saves a bunch of drudgery on the front end, which can be especially valuable for the ADHD types where that kind of thing can be a real barrier to getting off the ground.
- altmanaltman 8mo ago
  But this just makes me feel like it's literally more ABOUT the code than less. The comment I replied to makes it seem like "code" and "solving humanity's problems" are two different things, when in reality, one leads to the other (if we assume you're working on good products, etc.). It's one thing to have your approach where you're using AI to help w/ the code, but it's totally another to pretend like "code" is not something you were ever interested in, so it's okay for the AI to write it while you're busy "solving problems," which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Fraterkes 8mo ago

I've seen a hundred ai-generated things, and they are rarely interesting. Not because the tools are insufficient, it's just that the kind of person that can't even stomach the charmed life of being a programmer will rarely be able to stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative. Why should someone be interested in you creations? In what part of your new frictionless life would you've picked up something that sets you apart from a million other vibe-coders?

nubg 8mo ago
What sets you apart from millions of manual programmers?
embedding-shape 8mo ago
> stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative This strikes me as the opposite of what I experience when I say I'm "feeling creative", then everything comes easy. At least in the context of programming, making music, doing 3D animation and some other topics. If it's "dull and hard work" it's because I'm not feeling "creative" at all, when "creative mode" is on in my brain, there is nothing that feels neither dull nor hard. Maybe it works differently for others.
dukeyukey 8mo ago
I've been a professional programmer for 8+ years now. I've stomached that life. I've made things people used and paid for. If I can do that typing one line at a time, I can do it _way_ faster with AI.
boxedemp 8mo ago
You may be mistaking some ai dev with non, because it doesn't have tell tails
- icedchai 8mo ago
  Many AI generated web sites have a “look” and it’s not just all the emojis.

croes 8mo ago

But you don’t make. You order it.

derektank 8mo ago
The transition is from author to editor/publisher. Both play an important role in bringing something new into the world.
- zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
  It's true, but ask an author and 99% of them will say they don't want to be an editor.
FeteCommuniste 8mo ago
Right. It's like learning to cook and regularly making your own meals, then shifting to a "new paradigm" of hiring a personal chef to cook for you. Food's getting made either way, but it's not really the same deal.
- crazygringo 8mo ago
  No, it's more like moving from line cook, to head chef in charge of 30 cooks. Food's getting made, but you focus on the truly creative part -- the menu, the concept, the customer experience. You're not boiling pasta or cutting chives for the thousandth time. The same way now you're focusing on architecture and design now instead of writing your 10,000th list comprehension.
  - tatjam 8mo ago
    Except the cooks don't exist anymore as they all have become head chefs (or changed careers) and the food is being cooked by magical cooking black boxes
    - crazygringo 8mo ago
      Sure, but the point is you're now doing the most creative and satisfying part. Not the drudgery. It's not that you've stopped doing anything at all, like the other commenter claimed in their personal chef analogy.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

eranation 8mo ago

I like coding, I really do. But like you, I like building things more than I like the way I build them. I do not find myself miss writing code by hand as much. I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right". But I do worry. The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet) My main hope is this - AI can beat a human in chess for a while now, we still play chess, people earn money from playing chess, teaching chess, chess players are still celebrated, youtube influencers still get monetized for analyzing games of celebrity chess players, even though the top human chess player will likely lose to a stockfish engine running on my iPhone. So maybe there is hope.

RivieraKid 8mo ago
> I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right". I've always been strongly in the first category, but... the issue is that 10x more people will be able to build the right things. And if I build the right thing, it will be easy to copy. The market will get crowded, so distribution will become even harder than it is today. Success will be determined by personal brand, social media presence, social connections.
- epicureanideal 8mo ago
  > Success will be determined by personal brand, social media presence, social connections. Always has been. (Meme)
dynamite-ready 8mo ago
For me, photography is the metaphor - https://raskie.com/post/we-have-ai-at-home https://raskie.com/post/we-have-ai-at-home - We've had the technology to produce a perfect 2D likeness of a subject for close to two centuries now, and people are still painting. Video didn't kill the radio star either. In fact the radio star has become more popular than ever in this, the era of the podcast.

Johnny_Bonk 8mo ago

I couldn't agree more.

voidhorse 8mo ago

In my opinion the relationship between level of detailed care and resulting beauty is proportional. Can you get the same level without getting your hands dirty? Sure, maybe, but I doubt a painter or novelist could really produce beautiful work without being intimately familiar with that work. The distance that heavy use of AI tools creates between you and the output does not really lend itself to beauty. Could you do it, sure, but at that point it's probably more efficient to just do things yourself and have complete intimate control. To me, you sound more utilitarian. The philosophy you are presenting is a kind of Ikea philosophy. Utility, mass production, and unique beauty are generally properties that do not cohere together, and there's a reason for this. I think the use of LLMs in the production of digital goods is very close to the use of automation lines in the production of physical goods. No matter how you try some of the human charm, and thus beauty will inevitably be lost, the number of goods will increase, but they'll all be barely differentiable souless replications of more or less the same shallow ideas repeated as infinitum.

mversic 8mo ago
only the true artist will survive the advent of LLMs
bloomca 8mo ago
I agree, LLMs definitely sand off a lot of personality, and you can see it in writing the most, at this point I'm sure tons of people are subconsciously trained to lower the trust for something where they recognize typical patterns. With the code, especially interfaces, the results will be similar -- more standardized palettes, predictable things. To be fair, the converging factor is going on pretty much forever, e.g. radio/TV led to the lots of local accents disappearing, our world is heavily globalized.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

RivieraKid 8mo ago

> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. Me too, but... The ability to code was a filter. With AI, the pool of people who can build beautiful elegant software products expands significantly. Good for the society, bad for me.

GeorgeTirebiter 8mo ago

I want to be in your camp, and am trying hard. But the OP's blog entry should at least give us a moment to "respect the dead". That's all he's asking, I think.

rdedev 8mo ago

Adam Neely has a video on GenAI and it's impact on the music industry. There is a section in the video about beauty and taste and it's pretty different from your conclusions. One example I remember is would an AI find beauty in a record scratch sound? https://youtu.be/U8dcFhF0Dlk https://youtu.be/U8dcFhF0Dlk

kelnos 8mo ago

I love building things too, but for me, the journey is a big part of what brings me joy. Herding an LLM doesn't give me joy like writing code does. And the finished project doesn't feel the same when my involvement is limited to prompting an LLM and reviewing its output. If I had an LLM generate a piece of artwork for me, I wouldn't call myself an artist, no matter how many hours I spent conversing with the LLM in order to refine the image. So I wouldn't call myself a coder if my process was to get an LLM to write most/all the code for me. Not saying the output of either doesn't have value, but I am absolutely fine gatekeeping in this way: you are not an artist/coder if this is how you build your product. You're an artistic director, a technical product manager, something of that nature. That said, I never derived joy from every single second of coding; there were and are plenty of parts to it that I find tedious or frustrating. I do appreciate being able to let an LLM loose on some of those parts. But sparing use is starting to really only work for hobby projects. I'm not sure I could get away with taking the time to write most of it manually when LLMs might make coworkers more "productive". Even if I can convince myself my code is still "better" than theirs, that's not what companies value.

libraryofbabel 8mo ago

So many people responding to you with snarky comments or questioning your programming ability. It makes me sad. You shared a personal take (in response to TFA which was also a personal take). There is so much hostility and pessimism directed at engineers who simply say that AI makes them more productive and allows them to accomplish their goals faster. To the skeptics: by all means, don't use AI if you don't want to; it's your choice, your career, your life. But I am not sure that hitching your identity to hating AI is altogether a good idea. It will make you increasingly bitter as these tools improve further and our industry and the wider world slowly shifts to incorporate them. Frankly, I consider the mourning of The Craft of Software to be just a little myopic. If there are things to worry about with AI they are bigger things, like widespread shifts in the labor force and economic disruption 10 or 20 years from now, or even the consequences of the current investment bubble popping. And there are bigger potential gains in view as well. I want AI to help us advance the frontiers of science and help us get to cures for more diseases and ameliorate human suffering. If a particular way of working in a particular late-20th and early-21st century profession that I happen to be in goes away but we get to those things, so be it. I enjoy coding. I still do it without AI sometimes. It's a pleasant activity to be good at. But I don't kid myself that my feelings about it are all that important in the grand scheme of things.

ori_b 8mo ago

> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. Why did you stop? Because, you realize, LLMs are giving up the process of creating for the immediacy of having. It's paying someone to make for you. Things are more convenient if you live the dream of the LLM, and hire a taskrabbit to run your wood shop. But it's not you that's making.

gamblor956 8mo ago

If AI can do the coding, those of us who aren't programmers don't need you anymore. We can just tell the AI what we want. Luckily for real programmers, AI's not actually very good at generating quality code. It generates the equivalent of Ali Baba code: it lasts for one week and then breaks. This is going to be the future of programming: low-paid AI clerks to generate the initial software, and then the highly paid programmers who fix all the broken parts.

icedchai 8mo ago
Yes. The problem is there is a huge invisible gap between "looks like it works" and "actually works", and everything that entails, like security and scaling beyond a couple users. Non-programmers and inexperienced ones will have trouble with those gaps. Welcome to our slop filled future.
- stoneforger 8mo ago
  It's been here since it's inception. The more the market grew and the more computing became widespread, the greater the number of ravenous sociopaths with other people's money got involved. This is just another version of Rome burning. This is the terminal acceleration phase. The lunatics are running everything to the ground and the few sane people left are labeled the same way they always had been. The useful idiots are just thinking they're so much smarter. Noone asked if it is wise or not, they are thinking they can outrun the treadmill. Just add water and LLM, it's so much fun for the whole family.

throwawa14223 8mo ago

But why would someone pay you for that?

andyjohnson0 8mo ago

> Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful. For how long do you think this is sustainable? In the sense of you, or me, or all these other people here being able to earn a living. Six months? A couple of years? The time until the next-but-one Claude release drops? Does everyone have to just keep re-making themselves for whatever the next new paradigm turns out to be? How many times can a person do that? How many times can you do that?

thedevilslawyer 8mo ago
For your custom definition of sustainable, perhaps not. but this is definitely generally sustainable. by 2030 we're fully agentic coding for everything, and it's going to sustain.

wtetzner 8mo ago

This is the best description of value from AI that I've seen so far. It allows people who don't like writing code to build things without doing so. I don't think it's nearly as valuable to people who do enjoy writing code, because I don't think prompting an agent (at least in their current state) is actually more productive than just writing the code. So I don't see any reason to mourn on either side.