3 ms·

I'm tired of the carpentry analogy. It feels like a thought stopping cliche, because it's used in every thread where this topic comes up. It misses the fact tha

I'm tired of the carpentry analogy. It feels like a thought stopping cliche, because it's used in every thread where this topic comes up. It misses the fact that coding is fundamentally different, and that there are still distinct advantages to writing at least some code by hand, both for the individual and the company.

hirako2000 8mo ago
The question nobody asks, is what will happen once atrophy kicks in and nobody is able fire fight production genAI isn't able to fix without making things worse, with broke system bleeding a million dollars per day or more. It's at least possible that we would eventually do a rollback to status quo and swear to never devalue human knowledge of the problems we solve.
- Trasmatta 8mo ago
  > swear to never devalue human knowledge of the problems we solve. Love this way of putting it. I hate that we can mostly agree that devaluing expertise of artists or musicians is bad, but that devaluing the experience of software engineers is perfectly fine, and actually preferable. Doing so will have negative downstream effects.
Xenoamorphous 8mo ago
To me the biggest difference is that there’s some place for high quality, beautiful and expensive handcrafted woodwork, even if it’s niche in a world where Ikea exists. Nobody will ever care whether some software was written by humans or a machine, as long as it works and works well.
- 13415 8mo ago
  ^This. Even if there was a demand for hand-crafted software, it would be very hard to prove it was hand-crafted, but it's unlikely there could be a demand for the same reasons as there is no market for e.g. luxury software. As opposed to physical goods, software consumers care for the result, not how it was created.
- xigoi 8mo ago
  I, for one, prefer to use software where the person who wrote it understands how it works.

3 ms·

I'm tired of the carpentry analogy. It feels like a thought stopping cliche, because it's used in every thread where this topic comes up. It misses the fact tha

by Trasmatta 8mo ago

hirako2000 8mo ago
The question nobody asks, is what will happen once atrophy kicks in and nobody is able fire fight production genAI isn't able to fix without making things worse, with broke system bleeding a million dollars per day or more. It's at least possible that we would eventually do a rollback to status quo and swear to never devalue human knowledge of the problems we solve.
- Trasmatta 8mo ago
  > swear to never devalue human knowledge of the problems we solve. Love this way of putting it. I hate that we can mostly agree that devaluing expertise of artists or musicians is bad, but that devaluing the experience of software engineers is perfectly fine, and actually preferable. Doing so will have negative downstream effects.
Xenoamorphous 8mo ago
To me the biggest difference is that there’s some place for high quality, beautiful and expensive handcrafted woodwork, even if it’s niche in a world where Ikea exists. Nobody will ever care whether some software was written by humans or a machine, as long as it works and works well.
- 13415 8mo ago
  ^This. Even if there was a demand for hand-crafted software, it would be very hard to prove it was hand-crafted, but it's unlikely there could be a demand for the same reasons as there is no market for e.g. luxury software. As opposed to physical goods, software consumers care for the result, not how it was created.
- xigoi 8mo ago
  I, for one, prefer to use software where the person who wrote it understands how it works.