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Perhaps the experts have decided that, for this specific instance, the thing we need to do is ad-hoc and throwaway, and is simply not worth paying the extra cos
by stavros 6mo ago
Perhaps the experts have decided that, for this specific instance, the thing we need to do is ad-hoc and throwaway, and is simply not worth paying the extra cost to make it tasteful.
- jurgenburgen 6mo agoHow can a bash one-liner be more expensive to build than a full-blown CLI tool with the maintenance burden that comes with it?
- stavros 6mo agoWhat expert would build a cli tool to avoid writing a bash one-liner?
- dgellow 6mo agoI cannot judge without more context. Depending on the one liner, the problem at hand, and overall situation that can be justified. A CLI is straightforward to create. A bash oneliner can be a chain of 5+ programs, each buffering the stdin/out, what if the CLI is doing the same operation via streams instead? Just a random example but that can easily be worth it
- stavros 6mo agoSure, then there's a point where the extra taste isn't worth its cost. I just don't like the fictional straw man where an expert has somehow been brainwashed by AI into forgetting everything they ever knew.
- daveguy 6mo agoWait... Did you just fictional strawman a fictional strawman? Because I don't think I've ever heard anyone say an expert gets brainwashed by AI into forgetting everything they ever knew. Maybe losing some skills that require regular exercise. Or get lazy about implementations when spawning dozens of super useful agents. But come on. Don't build your strawman out of a fictional strawman.
- stavros 6mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48048322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48048322
- leafarlua 6mo agoPerhaps the ones that were experts before letting their brain rotten by AI.
- marshray 6mo agoBash is one of the most complicated languages in common use and is horribly error-prone. It's almost never useful alone, but as an interface to call other CLI tools. I don't think this is a particularly useful comparison.
- tardedmeme 6mo agoSame way an excel spreadsheet can be more expensive to maintain than a web app.
- adamtulinius 6mo agoI'm sorry but "extensive documentation, scalable, high test coverage, perfect code style" seems to me to be the opposite of throwaway. It sounds like the kind of thing people will think surely must be very important and in use, because why go through all those hoops instead of doing a quick hack? But I guess we can just throw AI at the maintenance burden anyways..
- stavros 6mo agoI agree, so you should ask yourself "why would the expert do this?" I decided to go for the charitable interpretation of "the alternatives are close enough in functionality that writing by hand is not worth it", instead of the uncharitable interpretation of "these examples are completely made up".
- adamtulinius 6mo agoBecause the expert has forgotten. Skills that we don't use are forgotten, and there's nothing new in that. Except for the proverbial bicycle.
- stavros 6mo agoOk, if you think the expert has forgotten that a problem can be solved by a bash one-liner and instead think they need a whole extensive CLI with documentation, our viewpoints are too far apart for fruitful discussion.
- dingdongditchme 6mo agoand here I am reading an interaction and thinking you two are saying exactly the same thing. Language be, what it is I guess: open to interpretation.
- buran77 6mo agoThe bash one-liner might be hyperbolic but with the advent of AI everything is artificially longer, stuffier, more complex and convoluted for no reason other than because the AI allows this increase in volume with little to no extra effort. It used to be the proverbial one-liner with zero documentation because that was the best ratio of effort to results. Now the effort is on the AI and the results look more impressive. Today that will still impress a lot of people, bosses, colleagues. Very soon everyone will see through it and anything overly stuffy will have the opposite effect of looking low-effort.