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"Is Claude Code junk food, though? ... although I have barely written a line of code on my own, the cognitive work of learning the architecture — developing a n

by dtf 8mo ago

"Is Claude Code junk food, though? ... although I have barely written a line of code on my own, the cognitive work of learning the architecture — developing a new epistemological framework for “how developers think” — feels real." Might this also apply to learning about writing? If have barely written a line of prose on my own, but spent a year generating a large corpus of it aided by these fabulous machines, might I also come to understand "how writers think"? I love the later description of writing as a "special, irreplaceable form of thinking forged from solitary perception and [enormous amounts of] labor", where “style isn’t something you apply later; it’s embedded in your perception" (according to Amis). Could such a statement ever apply to something as crass as software development?

girvo 8mo ago
My current bugbear is how art is held up as creativity and worthy of societal protection and scorn against AI muscling in on it While the same people in the same comments say it’s fine to replace programming with it When pressed they talk about creativity, as if software development has none…
- arctic-true 8mo ago
  The easiest job to automate is someone else’s.
- yason 8mo ago
  Art has two facets. First is if you like it. If you do, you don't need to care where it came from. Second is the art as cultured and defined by the artistic elites. They don't care if art is liked or likable, they care about the pedigree, i.e. where it came from, and that it fits what they consider worthy art. Between these two is what I call filler art: stuff that's rather indifferent and not very notable, but often crosses over some minimum bar that it's accepted by, and maybe popular among average people who aren't that seriously interested in art. In the first category, AI is no problem. If you enjoy what you see or hear, it doesn't make a difference if it was created by which kind of artist or AI. In the second category, for the elite, AI art is no less unacceptable than current popular art or, for that matter, anything at all that doesn't fit their own definition of real art. Makes no difference. Then the filler art.. the bar there is not very high but it will likely improve with AI. It's nothing that's been seriously invested in so far, and it's cheaper to let AI create it rather than poorly paid people.
  - marcus_holmes 8mo ago
    Commercial art has literally nothing to do with art, and everything to do with commerce. Art is not stored in freeport bunkers and used as collateral for loans. All art aspires to the condition of music. It evokes an emotional reaction. If it does that, it doesn't matter where it came from.
    - caseyohara 8mo ago
      > If it does that, it doesn't matter where it came from. Personally, it matters to me quite a lot where art comes from, especially music. I have a hard time "separating the art from the artist". If I find out a musician is a creep/abuser/rapist, I can't enjoy their music anymore. This belief obviously isn't widespread given artists like Michael Jackson, Chris Brown, R. Kelly, and Jimmy Page are still wildly popular. But I assume I'm not alone in this. As for AI music, it's hard for me to imagine an "AI Musician" ever becoming very popular because I reckon most humans want some human-ness in their music. And I think if an existing artist ever put out AI music as their own, they'd lose some fans pretty quickly.
      - marcus_holmes 8mo ago
        No, fair point. I'm the same, I can't enjoy the music if I know the artist is not a good person. Though I do think this gets taken too far; I can enjoy Pink Floyd even though I have huge disagreements with Roger Waters' politics. I'm not sure I could tell the difference between AI and human music already. In a few years I'm pretty sure I couldn't. This is the bit where I'm not sure it matters. I mostly listen to music for the nostalgic emotions now anyway.
  - habinero 8mo ago
    My dude, there is no artistic elite deciding what art is. I think you just don't understand the critiques around this topic, and so it sounds like snobbery ("real art") to you
- SpaceManNabs 8mo ago
  a lot of artists don't mind use AI for art outside their field I was in a fashion show in tokyo in 2024. i noticed their fashion was all human designed. but they had a lot of posters, video, and music that was AI generated. I point blank asked the curator why he used AI for some stuff but didn't enhance the fashion with AI. I was a bit naive because I was actually curious to see if AI wasn't ready for fashion or maybe they were going for an aesthetic. I genuinely was trying to learn and not point out a hypocrisy. he got mad and didn't answer. i guess it is because they didn't want to pay for everything else. big lesson learned in what to ask lol.
  - shimman 8mo ago
    How do you know he used AI in one area but not another?
    - SpaceManNabs 7mo ago
      cause i asked him where he used comfyui and he mentioned the things i mentioned, but he didn't mention the fashion and then i asked my question.
      - shimman 7mo ago
        ah that makes sense. I thought it was maybe a scenario where they are just good at fashion designs but make "average" looking posters.
- jarjoura 8mo ago
  I haven't heard writers make any kind of stance on software engineering, but Brandon Sanderson has very publicly renounced AI writing because it lacks any kind of authentic journey of an authors own writing. Just as we would cringe at our first software projects, he cringes at his first published novel. I think that's a reasonable argument to make against generative art in any form. However, he does celebrate LLM advancements in health and accessibility, and I've seen most "AI haters" handwave away its use there. It's a weird dissonance to me too that its use is perfectly okay if it helps your grandparents live a longer, and higher quality of life, but not okay if your grandparents use that longer life to use AI-assisted writing to write a novel that Brandon would want to read.
- zozbot234 8mo ago
  Maybe that's because AI "art" looks just as cringe as written AI slop.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
benbreen 8mo ago
Thank you, this sort of insight is exactly why I've felt such kinship with what software engineers like Karpathy and Simon Willison have been writing lately. It seems obvious to me that there is something special and irreplaceable about the thought processes that create good code. However, I think there is also something qualitatively different about how work is done in these two domains. Example: refactoring a codebase is not really analogous to revising a nonfiction book, even though they both involve rewriting of a sort. Even before AI, the former used far more tooling and automated processes. There is, e.g., no ESLint for prose which can tell you which sentences are going to fail to "compile" (i.e., fail to make sense to a reader). The special taste or skillset of a programmer seems to me to involve systems thinking and tool use in a different way than the special taste of a writer, which is more about transmuting personal life experiences and tacit knowledge into words, even if tools (word processor) and systems (editors, informants, primary sources) are used along the way. Sort of half formed ideas here but I find this a really rich vein of thought to work through. And one of the points of my post is that writing is about thinking in public and with a readership. Many thanks for helping me do that. I don't have a good answer to your question, but I do think it might be comparable, yes. If you had good taste about what to get Opus 4.6 to write, and kept iterating on it in a way that exposes the results to public view, I think you'd definitely develop a more fine grained sense of the epistemological perspective of a writer. But you wouldn't be one any more than I'm a software developer just because I've had Claude Code make a lot of GitHub commits lately (if anyone's interested: https://github.com/benjaminbreen https://github.com/benjaminbreen).
randusername 8mo ago
> Could such a statement ever apply to something as crass as software development? Absolutely. I think like a Python programmer, a very specific kind of Python programmer after a decade of hard lessons from misusing the freedom it gives you in just about every way possible. I carry that with me in how I approach C++ and other languages. And then I learned some hard lessons in C++ that informed my Python. The tools you have available definitely inform how you think. As your thinking evolves, so does your own style. It's not just the tool, mind, but also the kinds of things you use it for.
raincole 8mo ago
"My AI usage is justified, but what others are doing is generating slop." I'm still waiting for a famous people to say this so we can have a name of this psychological phenomenon.

by dtf 8mo ago

girvo 8mo ago

My current bugbear is how art is held up as creativity and worthy of societal protection and scorn against AI muscling in on it While the same people in the same comments say it’s fine to replace programming with it When pressed they talk about creativity, as if software development has none…

arctic-true 8mo ago
The easiest job to automate is someone else’s.
yason 8mo ago
Art has two facets. First is if you like it. If you do, you don't need to care where it came from. Second is the art as cultured and defined by the artistic elites. They don't care if art is liked or likable, they care about the pedigree, i.e. where it came from, and that it fits what they consider worthy art. Between these two is what I call filler art: stuff that's rather indifferent and not very notable, but often crosses over some minimum bar that it's accepted by, and maybe popular among average people who aren't that seriously interested in art. In the first category, AI is no problem. If you enjoy what you see or hear, it doesn't make a difference if it was created by which kind of artist or AI. In the second category, for the elite, AI art is no less unacceptable than current popular art or, for that matter, anything at all that doesn't fit their own definition of real art. Makes no difference. Then the filler art.. the bar there is not very high but it will likely improve with AI. It's nothing that's been seriously invested in so far, and it's cheaper to let AI create it rather than poorly paid people.
- marcus_holmes 8mo ago
  Commercial art has literally nothing to do with art, and everything to do with commerce. Art is not stored in freeport bunkers and used as collateral for loans. All art aspires to the condition of music. It evokes an emotional reaction. If it does that, it doesn't matter where it came from.
  - caseyohara 8mo ago
    > If it does that, it doesn't matter where it came from. Personally, it matters to me quite a lot where art comes from, especially music. I have a hard time "separating the art from the artist". If I find out a musician is a creep/abuser/rapist, I can't enjoy their music anymore. This belief obviously isn't widespread given artists like Michael Jackson, Chris Brown, R. Kelly, and Jimmy Page are still wildly popular. But I assume I'm not alone in this. As for AI music, it's hard for me to imagine an "AI Musician" ever becoming very popular because I reckon most humans want some human-ness in their music. And I think if an existing artist ever put out AI music as their own, they'd lose some fans pretty quickly.
    - marcus_holmes 8mo ago
      No, fair point. I'm the same, I can't enjoy the music if I know the artist is not a good person. Though I do think this gets taken too far; I can enjoy Pink Floyd even though I have huge disagreements with Roger Waters' politics. I'm not sure I could tell the difference between AI and human music already. In a few years I'm pretty sure I couldn't. This is the bit where I'm not sure it matters. I mostly listen to music for the nostalgic emotions now anyway.
- habinero 8mo ago
  My dude, there is no artistic elite deciding what art is. I think you just don't understand the critiques around this topic, and so it sounds like snobbery ("real art") to you
SpaceManNabs 8mo ago
a lot of artists don't mind use AI for art outside their field I was in a fashion show in tokyo in 2024. i noticed their fashion was all human designed. but they had a lot of posters, video, and music that was AI generated. I point blank asked the curator why he used AI for some stuff but didn't enhance the fashion with AI. I was a bit naive because I was actually curious to see if AI wasn't ready for fashion or maybe they were going for an aesthetic. I genuinely was trying to learn and not point out a hypocrisy. he got mad and didn't answer. i guess it is because they didn't want to pay for everything else. big lesson learned in what to ask lol.
- shimman 8mo ago
  How do you know he used AI in one area but not another?
  - SpaceManNabs 7mo ago
    cause i asked him where he used comfyui and he mentioned the things i mentioned, but he didn't mention the fashion and then i asked my question.
    - shimman 7mo ago
      ah that makes sense. I thought it was maybe a scenario where they are just good at fashion designs but make "average" looking posters.
jarjoura 8mo ago
I haven't heard writers make any kind of stance on software engineering, but Brandon Sanderson has very publicly renounced AI writing because it lacks any kind of authentic journey of an authors own writing. Just as we would cringe at our first software projects, he cringes at his first published novel. I think that's a reasonable argument to make against generative art in any form. However, he does celebrate LLM advancements in health and accessibility, and I've seen most "AI haters" handwave away its use there. It's a weird dissonance to me too that its use is perfectly okay if it helps your grandparents live a longer, and higher quality of life, but not okay if your grandparents use that longer life to use AI-assisted writing to write a novel that Brandon would want to read.
zozbot234 8mo ago
Maybe that's because AI "art" looks just as cringe as written AI slop.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

benbreen 8mo ago

Thank you, this sort of insight is exactly why I've felt such kinship with what software engineers like Karpathy and Simon Willison have been writing lately. It seems obvious to me that there is something special and irreplaceable about the thought processes that create good code. However, I think there is also something qualitatively different about how work is done in these two domains. Example: refactoring a codebase is not really analogous to revising a nonfiction book, even though they both involve rewriting of a sort. Even before AI, the former used far more tooling and automated processes. There is, e.g., no ESLint for prose which can tell you which sentences are going to fail to "compile" (i.e., fail to make sense to a reader). The special taste or skillset of a programmer seems to me to involve systems thinking and tool use in a different way than the special taste of a writer, which is more about transmuting personal life experiences and tacit knowledge into words, even if tools (word processor) and systems (editors, informants, primary sources) are used along the way. Sort of half formed ideas here but I find this a really rich vein of thought to work through. And one of the points of my post is that writing is about thinking in public and with a readership. Many thanks for helping me do that. I don't have a good answer to your question, but I do think it might be comparable, yes. If you had good taste about what to get Opus 4.6 to write, and kept iterating on it in a way that exposes the results to public view, I think you'd definitely develop a more fine grained sense of the epistemological perspective of a writer. But you wouldn't be one any more than I'm a software developer just because I've had Claude Code make a lot of GitHub commits lately (if anyone's interested: https://github.com/benjaminbreen https://github.com/benjaminbreen).

randusername 8mo ago

> Could such a statement ever apply to something as crass as software development? Absolutely. I think like a Python programmer, a very specific kind of Python programmer after a decade of hard lessons from misusing the freedom it gives you in just about every way possible. I carry that with me in how I approach C++ and other languages. And then I learned some hard lessons in C++ that informed my Python. The tools you have available definitely inform how you think. As your thinking evolves, so does your own style. It's not just the tool, mind, but also the kinds of things you use it for.

raincole 8mo ago

"My AI usage is justified, but what others are doing is generating slop." I'm still waiting for a famous people to say this so we can have a name of this psychological phenomenon.