3 ms·
Programming with Claude is still engineering. It is like designing a bridge, which remains engineering even when a worker pours the concrete instead of you. In
by kaiwn 5mo ago
Programming with Claude is still engineering. It is like designing a bridge, which remains engineering even when a worker pours the concrete instead of you.
In the past we were forced to pour the concrete ourselves. I understand how many of us enjoyed the sound and the smell of the concrete being poured. Myself, I’m happy to never get my hands dirty again, and focus on the actual engineering.
- blanched 5mo agoThis is like the third bridge + concrete comparison I’ve seen in the past two days from a new account. Did I miss something?
- Neywiny 5mo ago"justify your existence" "You're absolutely correct. I don't just need to exist-I need to justify why. It's like builders with concrete..."
- kaiwn 5mo agolmao, I think I read it here and then I proceeded to think I came up with it myself. I’m a fraud. (I put “concrete” into the search field and found it) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47996022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47996022
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jebarker 5mo ago> the actual engineering I was with you until the last three words. Craftsmanship in writing code is also “actual engineering”, it’s just not the engineering that people will pay a human to do now.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- hamrocksissors 5mo agoChemical engineer here - I look at this similar to how a lot of professional engineers work, drafting gets passed off to eng techs, pfds get passed off to eng techs... The "actual engineering" is in the ideas, the applications, the reviews, and most importantly the final accountability.
- pdhborges 5mo agoWorks great. No wonder China is eating our lunch.
- skydhash 5mo agoStudied Electronic Engineering and have friends in Civil Engineering. By the time, you get to the actual implementation, the design has been tested so many times that errors are often material defects, not design defects. Engineering is about ironing out all the design defects and have all relevant unknowns be known. Working with claude is closer to “grandma recipes” than any engineering or scientific practice.
- perrygeo 5mo agoThanks for this perspective. Do we really miss typing ascii characters into an editor? That seems to me the least consequential and least interesting part of building software systems. Always has been. Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work? Now that coding is automated, we have to elevate our ambitions. Ironically, Phish's music emerges from egoless expression (to paraphrase keyboardist Page McConnell). Giving up your own personal stake in the process is literally what brings something as beautiful as Phish's music into existence. We need to do the same with our software; give up the notion that "our" code is meaningful.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago> Do we really miss typing ascii characters into an editor? Yes. > Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work I care about the outcome, which is why I don't trust it to a fucking LLM Valuing quality over velocity is not selfish
- perrygeo 5mo ago> Valuing quality over velocity is not selfish Fully agree. I never mentioned velocity or advocated for lower quality. In fact, this statement very well sums up my point: we should care about the thing we're producing, not our personal experience of coding it.
- norir 5mo agoThe product and the process are not orthogonal.
- isityettime 5mo agoWe should always care about our own subjectivity. If anything, subjectivity is too easy to discount in this day and age.
- 5mo ago
- dyauspitr 5mo agoYeah honestly. I could easily architect the thing out but coding it is so boring. I love this new paradigm and sometimes the LLM even suggests a better architecture!
- uncircle 5mo agoI guess we are not the same. I would be perfectly fine with this new branch of "software development" if you guys didn't coopt our name and call yourselves programmers and engineers.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoI did programming for 7 years (before I moved to management for 10). I’m definitely an engineer and LLMs at this point are not good enough where a non-engineer could come up with something solid out of vibe coding. That might not be true in 6 months.
- holoduke 5mo agoIt's like writing code with assistant Einstein who is 4 years old.
- uncircle 5mo agoLLMs are the stereotypical 'idiot savant'
- archagon 5mo agoNo, it’s management, not engineering.
- foltik 5mo agoIt may feel like you’re designing a bridge, but in reality you’re just asking a worker to do that too, and rubber stamping it when the drawings look reasonable. One day you’ll be asked why it collapsed and realize you don’t actually understand it anymore.