6 ms·

Making

442 points by erikschoster 2mo ago

royal__ 2mo ago
We continue to grapple with AI and how it's impacting our lives by trying to find comfort in comparisons to the past, or to other things that we do. But the reality is, there's never been anything quite like this before, and it's forcing us to redefine how we value work, art, craftsmanship, and output. Sometimes, those redefinitions are extremely uncomfortable.
- arnitdo 2mo ago
  How does this even contribute to the content posted? The only thing being "redefined" is corporate agendas to push the bar of "good enough" lower to the point where it lies below cheap, and equals wasteful.
  - royal__ 2mo ago
    OP seems to be wrestling with this feeling that LLMs are simultaneously incredibly useful and also leave a very hollow feeling inside, like it's cheating. The redefinition is how we choose to move forward with hobbies and art when we know these tools are available.
sashank_1509 2mo ago
Very well said. I don’t like seeing hackernews submissions that are LLM generated. The joy of hackernews was seeing applied human ingenuity, most of these weren’t successful products anyway. Just like I don’t watch computer chess games, we should have an easy way to distinguish AI generated software, art etc and then I can happily avoid them.
layer8 2mo ago
> What's the real difference in that gray area? I'm not sure. I think it hinges on something that has to do with making versus asking to be made, even if that line isn't particularly clear. For me the difference is in the extent that I can reason about how changes in the input affect the observable behavior of the output. When the executable the compiler outputs doesn’t behave in the way I intended, then in 99.99% of cases this is completely on me, and, importantly, I could have predicted it from the source code. Conversely, I can analyze any such misbehavior by reasoning on the source code. This doesn’t hold to any remotely comparable extent for the relation between vibecoded programs and the prompts used to create them.
- ike_a 2mo ago
  This seems like a very clear way of thinking about it. In making something, you develop a tangible understanding of and opinions for how and why your creation is how it is. I have a lot of vibecoded projects. I feel "ownership" in varying degrees proportional to the amount of care and depth I put into them.
- skydhash 2mo ago
  Sounds very much like agency over the process versus agency over the outcome. Some are ok with deciding if and when the process should be started and whether the outcome is good and bad. But often they lack the judgment to truly decide what is good and what is bad. They trust the makers to provide equally good options in terms of lower concerns (that matters to the makers) and only make the judgment according to some other concerns. The main difference when using a compiler is that the compiler will (99.999...%) produce correct binary code for my programs and will fail loudly if it cannot. But the compiler is not concerned about correctness of the algorithm written in the programming language. Responsibilities are clearly outlined and the compiler does the job perfectly, while I try to do mine as well. So when I do a good job, I don't have to worry about the compiler part and I can assume the result will be good as well. LLM usage has no such clear line. Assuming the user can judge whether the outcome is good or bad according to the prompt, the LLM tool is not reliable enough to produce a good result for everything that was not specified in the prompt. Which is different when collaborating with humans. If you say to a professional artist "I want a batman drawing", you needn't check for missing toes and the numbers of arms.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- dmrivers 2mo ago
  But does this mean that a 99.99% reliable LLM would turn us back into the mode of us building it again? I would not say so. I think for tasks that are about decisions, having the LLM make decisions is what makes it feel like the LLM did something for me. Consider mowing the lawn. Imagine I had a lawnmower robot that does the mowing all on its own. Despite perfect accuracy, I didn't mow the lawn; it did. If I sit on that lawnmower the whole time and start driving it instead of letting it go on its own, then I mowed the lawn. Even if I stand there and control it with a joystick, I still mowed the lawn. Ownership comes from the decisions about where to mow.
spiresofagartha 2mo ago
I agree with the article. I've never understood the notion of some LLM people saying you shouldn't care about the end result, and you should do it for its sake. It made me feel like a narcissist and that I was programming for showmanship, but I think making is inherent to (most) people's satisfaction and it's hard to tell something was made by you when all you did was prompting. Maybe a hot take, but I do think, that even from seasoned developers, the idea they've been doing the 'logical' part so long they'd have it done anyway without AI and it'd only take more time is delusional, when, from personal experience, even when I code something I 'know' and I've 'done', I have to remember stuff, google what isn't ingrained in my brain, and so on. I don't know if the author would consider this a part of making, but a single thing you build is, obviously, a mix of things you've built. I no longer sense this minor feeling of 'making' when I'm doing something. To make a logic that's part of a bigger system and see it running, thinking how it's gonna be once it's all done... I no longer feel that.
- phaedrus 2mo ago
  There was this persistent meme in bodybuilding discussions - I don't know if it's still a thing - to say about steroids "well they're just a shortcut". The justification that it just got you faster to where you could have gotten slower naturally was used by former steroid users to justify themselves, as an accusation of cheating, as an accusation of laziness, and as hope for dreamers who go to the gym but do not see those extreme results. In reality, steroids do allow some to achieve a body that would not be possible under a natural/genetic with any amount of time due to how anabolism and catabolism balance and scale. I think there's a lot of parallel with experienced programmers using LLMs and that idea about steroids that it just gets you there faster. I'm pretty sure I could eventually program most of the things I've used AI to write, and what it produces at the top end I/you can't really prove that I wouldn't have thought of it. But is that really true?
saulpw 2mo ago
I have been using vi/vim for 30 years and I had no idea about using ^K-M to insert an em-dash.
- PennRobotics 2mo ago
  Same here, and to anyone trying it out for the first time and confused why it's not working: - insert mode - that is a (typed) dash between Ctrl+K and M - uppercase M (aside: the K can be upper or lower case)
- MathMonkeyMan 2mo ago
  Yep: https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/digraph.html https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/digraph.html I started using them a long time ago to type Greek characters, but then I switched to vscode with a vim extension and it didn't support that keybinding so I lost the habit. Might work with the neovim extension now. edit: Yep, but you have to add "k" to the list of "control characters handled by neovim" in the extension's settings.
hbcdbff 2mo ago
This, I’ve completely lost interest in side projects outside of work since the emergence of LLMs. It does nothing for me any more
- jvanderbot 2mo ago
  I found _many_ of my side projects just evaporated. Total disinterest. But some were now front and center. I think the distinction was some of them were for learning or technically complex accomplishments, and some were genuinely things I wanted to have/use. That second category is getting ground down by LLMs now, and I enjoy that. The first category has only a few very slow/analog learning projects left.
  - kretaceous 2mo ago
    This is relatable. I find myself using LLMs more in cases where I don't care about learning and have made multiple tools to fir my workflow (Swift apps, etc. without ever touching Swift code). When it comes to things I do know about or want to learn about, I'm avoidant towards them because I know I can do better even if slower; but the procrastination for these has definitely turned into disinterest.
- corysama 2mo ago
  I'm the opposite. Between work and family, I don't get a lot of time to hole up in a cave with an IDE for fun. Prior to LLMs, it was a struggle to get much of anything done. So, I rarely tried. But, now I can get ideas fleshed out and even get code down in the small breaks I get to myself. Now I'm making progress where I wasn't before. Sometimes I'm not interested in the inner workings of a technology, I just want a one-off tool. Ex: No interest in web tech. But, vibe-coded a tool to scrape and cross-reference a couple of online reports. Now I have the info I need for other projects. Sometimes I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to hand-hold the AI through making it for me. Ex: Put together yet another SIMD math lib recently. SIMD intrisics are an obnoxious API. But, a non-SIMD implementation is easy to verify and many SIMD implementations are easy to validate vs. the non-SIMD reference. It's just a huge amount of obtuse code. Sometimes I don't know exactly what I want and it's great to have a always-online partner to bounce questions off of, do rapid-prototyping for me, do code reviews for me. AIs aren't perfect. But, being instant, patient and often right makes them a huge improvement over online forums.
jvanderbot 2mo ago
Does a machinist who uses CNC qualify as a machinist? Is his required knowledge of metals, assembly complexity, tolerances, just waved away because he doesn't turn the dials or change the tools any more?
- ian-g 2mo ago
  At least personally, parts of the differences for me are that the same instructions to a different CNC machine should produce the same product and that the machinist, presumably, created the instructions themselves. Instead of saying "create instructions for CNC to make me a _thing_, then instruct the CNC machine to actually create the _thing_" they went and created the instructions themselves.
- pwillia7 2mo ago
  yeah I think he's not an 'artisan' anymore at least not in an applied way. They're more of a technician at that point.
- WillAdams 2mo ago
  Depends. To some degree, some folks esp. for "lights out" machining are just pushing buttons and loading/unloading pallets of stock/parts, but usually the job description for that is "machine operator". A machinist is expected to understand feeds and speeds and how they interact with toolpaths and materials and tooling. The big question of course will be how things fall out with the on-coming generation of 5-axis machines which are intended to be AI-driven: https://toolguyd.com/new-ai-powered-desktop-cnc-machines-2026-thoughts/ https://toolguyd.com/new-ai-powered-desktop-cnc-machines-202...
- wpm 2mo ago
  > Does a machinist who uses CNC qualify as a machinist? Yes. The CNC doesn't act on its own. If I ask the CNC "make me a widget", am I a machinist?
  - 1970-01-01 2mo ago
    I think you nailed it. If the CNC machine makes your widget, then you made it. If it didn't make you the widget correctly, then you made a paperweight, and you're not a machinist, you're somebody making paperweights.
giancarlostoro 2mo ago
> And when I do have Claude create something for me, I just can't say that I made it. Other people can, but I just can't. This is basically me. I still love having Claude build things for me, a lot of it is just things only I will ever use, but it fulfills my needs, and that's worth it for me. I use it two ways I guess: to get unstuck while coding something myself, and to automate building side-projects I have no time for but that linger in my head for years.
bufbupa 2mo ago
>It's not just the loss of the craft and the problem-solving challenge and whatever else. It's the loss of making. It's the loss of understanding. When you make something, you gain a deeper appreciation for the nuance of all that is required to breath life into it. When you outsource understanding to another (agent, contractor, w/e), you're losing the nuanced understanding of the creation. >After all, you create the prompts, don't you? You said you were proud of doing things. Isn't that doing a thing? This feels like the difference between putting together an ikea futon and building a hand-hewn table from logs. The fidelity of your understanding is different depending on how deeply you're engaging. But not felling and drying your own timber doesn't mean you can never make something from dimensional lumber. I'd take the author's word "making" to mean something more like "having enough understanding of the implementation of the task, that you could recreate the output without recourse to the same set of tools". Tested against their examples: >I had a new front deck put in [by a contractor] As a consequence of this addition, did you learn enough about decks so that you could you reproduce this feat if no contractor were available? If no, you didn't make the deck. If yes, you were probably watching/helping the whole time, and you can claim (at least partial) makesmanship. > any more than using a hammer to drive nails does. If you didn't have access to the hammer, could you still accomplish the task of attaching two boards together with a nail? Likely yes, use a rock. It's harder, but the understanding of driving the nail is transferable to other implements. > What if I had an AI-powered hammer and asked it to hit a nail for me? What's the difference? But at that point, I can't say that I hammered it. This one contradicted his compiler example. He says that he did write the Fibonacci program, even if the AI-powered compiler translated it to assembly. So by similar reasoning, you can claim you hammered a nail with an AI hammer, so long as you understood the aspects of hammering which the AI took care for you to such a degree that you could reproduce the effects even in the absence of the AI hammer. The crux of the tension is around "what did you learn from the implementation of this task". If you learned enough to reproduce the objective without the assistance of AI (perhaps much slower), then you can claim the high fidelity understanding that came from making. If you didn't internalize anything, and the AI/contractor managed complexity on your behalf, then the output was commissioned, not made. I think where people get worked up about this, is that it's not easy to tell what understanding other folks are taking away from their AI usage. It does seem like a bifurcating event where some people are going to net gain understanding of their world due to these new tools, while others will net lose understanding.
jddj 2mo ago
I struggle to even remember the course grained details of things I've had AI do recently. Conversely, there are 100k+ LoC codebases from years ago that I can still generally walk through in my mind's eye
- sevenseacat 2mo ago
  I can look at a project I worked with others on a decade ago, and pick out which parts I wrote, which parts others wrote, remember pitfalls from this part, a struggle we had in that part, even if I have no memory of actually doing them. I can't do that with a project we worked with AI on two weeks ago. It all just blurs together into "someone wrote a prompt and code came out".
guybedo 2mo ago
i guess there's different point of views here and it depends a lot on what you're trying to do. As a swe i've always enjoyed the process of designing solutions to problems: design a great architecture, find the right abstractions that make everything fit naturally, write good clean code, etc ... that's what i enjoy doing. Now there's the part where i've had these ideas for years that i've always though that i'd be cool to work on. But basically it would have required a 10 person team for months, out of reach. Now i have Claude, Codex and Grok and i've already built many projects. The code isn't pretty, i didn't enjoy it as much as i would have if it were done manually, but i did something i never could have done otherwise. There's some fun in the process though. I feel like a team manager and i occasionally step in to push for some architectural changes or code rewrites because things become too brittle because of not good enough architecture.
ge96 2mo ago
I'm trying to get it back. I went through a period of 2 months or so where I didn't want to do anything not even watch TV except drink. So I've been sober for a couple weeks now, think I'm starting to get it back. But I'm still lazy af right now. I miss making hardware, I design/make my own cameras and little self navigating robots. I did finally fix my camera after it rolled across the floor of my car during a tight turn and something inside it broke/wouldn't turn on. Idk... I bought so many old vintage c-mount lenses and would take each one out, produce a video, and then I lost interest doing that... so now I have a bin of random vintage c-mount lenses and a desk trinket (camera). The positive though is I got two SWE jobs out of these hardware projects. But yeah hope I get it back. I usually do instantly lose respect when I hear some project is vibe coded... I get that's how it is now but yeah. To me when you say "I made this" but it's actually claude code that shat out the code well... ultimately though it's about money and freedom. You can do whatever you want to do, I need to get my own freedom then do what I enjoy.
- vector_spaces 2mo ago
  I think don't be too hard on yourself. If you haven't already, it may be worth considering whether ADHD or something else might be playing a role. We aren't machines, we're messy bundles of biology and understanding our own particular messy bundle can go a long way towards getting it rolling in the right direction.
  - ge96 2mo ago
    oh yeah I definitely have some flavor of ADHD, I'm not medicated so I just use music (looping a song or album over and over). Thankfully I have a chill job now where I don't have to get much work done, kind of coasting lately. Currently trying to figure out the right kind of caffeine intake, seems hot chocolate might be my jam vs. coffee. I'm lucky we have a gym at work so I work out first 30 minutes of the day helps and do walks. I have to grind on the side though to get out as I have $100K in debt. That six fig day job still means I'm check to check.
planb 2mo ago
I know many people agree but I can’t really follow this sentiment. I can still take pride in something I “made” with an LLM even if I did not write a single line of code for it. I wouldn’t show it around and proclaim what a great programmer I am, because I did not program it, but coding was never the main goal, it was always the means to create the finished end product. When I plan a remake of my garden and then hire a professional landscaping company to build it, I can still sit on my patio in the sunset with a cold beer and be proud of my new cozy environment. I feed the same way about software. My vibe coded guitar tab editor has features that no other software has that I needed and it’s solving a real problem I had. I would never have created it without AI, because I simply don’t have the time besides my job, family and other hobbies (like really practicing playing guitar). So fine, tell me I shouldn’t be proud of it, but don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it.
- Zolomon 2mo ago
  To me there is a difference that lies in the words. E.g. `making` and `producing` both result in the creation of something, but `making` has a more active part while `producing` has a more supervisory part. This became more relevant to me when I began meeting producers as a software engineer in game development.
  - revetkn 2mo ago
    To me, the idea is that you have something in your head and you want to "project" it into reality. I suppose the difference between makers and producers then is that makers happen to enjoy the labor part of that projection, while producers don't particularly care about it (nor want to care).
  - planb 2mo ago
    But that’s just arguing about the meaning of the word “make” now. The real discussion does not seem to be about words though but about value. If you find vibe-coded software worthless, you value the process and work that went into it more than the finished end product. I can fully understand this. But it’s just not the way I feel about it.
RazorBucksICO 2mo ago
[flagged]
bredren 2mo ago
This goes straight to the compiler and whether that precludes original craft. But I think it would be more relevant to discuss the use of open source packages. Because I absolutely feel I made entire SaaS products, cool ones, by hand and they sat on a multitude of packages and infra I but glued together. For frontend, I tailored templates, and instead put energy and time into making modern frontend toolchains and Django backends work together. This was satisfying to understand and build. Being at ease with the minute details of Django or latest flags of esbuild felt like knowing the various modes of my Dewalt or Dewalt-colored power tools. Building with AI is not a passive activity, and doing so well and efficiently, there is a ton to master and it evolved a great deal in the past six months. So leveraging the tools using custom skills, custom CLIs, etc this is very important and very valuable thing to do. I would classify it as a serious contemporary computer science skill that should be taught in addition to the fundamentals. Presume now, you're making and leveraging all of the modern bells and whistles of Claude Code and Codex. That is, you're reading the release notes and you have personal tooling so you can switch between them easily. You can build incredible things with sustainable release workflows and reasonable security and possibly more than what a solo dev's "production quality" of yore. I know this because I had Fable look at an entirely "hand crafted" SaaS I built over two years and it found about a page of bullets just in p0-p1 that I had not caught in my artisanal best effort. They were real issues, maybe unlikely but still things that I would have fixed if I had known. But what can not be replaced is *taste*. You can build all day and night and if it ain't good people won't use it. If you can't describe it in a way that makes sense to people they won't care. If you build something people don't want you've not really made anything more than we did before we had AI as a tool. I do think it can still achieve the same level of satisfaction if it is built well. Because it actually does take a lot of skill and knowledge to make something well using agentic programming. This is regardless of whether people want it.
Multiplayer 2mo ago
One area that I find really compelling and useful now is controlling hardware that I've struggled to use in the past, like the BlackMagic ATEM video switcher/controller. They are very powerful and can turn your space into an incredible video studio. The software that ships with them is probably appropriate for experienced video techs. The last time I setup a studio to run a webinar with one it took me a couple of days to get it working how I needed. Yes, I love tinkering with hardware so there is that and I did enjoy figuring it out. Today I had a webinar that needed to be setup quickly and thought it would just be a raw Zoom feed. Instead, within an hour, I had a full video switching system with embedded graphics, feeds from a laptop configured with live content, multiple cameras, etc and a custom html page specific just to todays webinar to drive it all. I've used a number of 3rd party apps for the ATEM series. They all have to boil the ocean. This kind of personalized project tech is the perfect software hole for llm's to fill.
unshavedyak 2mo ago
I have a slightly different approach. I've done this as both a profession and a hobby for around 18 years now, and even these days i spend quite a bit of time "making" things i take pride in. Be it decisions (decision fatigue is a battle), code written, architectural improvements, etc. I don't generally feel lacking in this area. Where i've felt lacking for the last ~5 years though is output. Specifically blocked by having the energy to create all these damn ideas. I find LLMs neat, albeit their own type of exhausting, as they open up a lot of possibilities for things i want. Ie software i've wanted but have never cared to find the time for or didn't have the time for. LLMs feel like a software equivalent to a 3D Printer. I don't have to carve it out of wood now. But also like a 3D printer there are some tasks that LLMs are just horrible for. So it's a niche, a skill even, to find software you want that also are a good for for unsupervised development. It's also of course massively more risky than a 3D printed doohickey depending on its internet access/etc. With that said i still don't really take pride in something vibe coded. I just take enjoyment out of using a thing that i've wanted but never had time for.
1970-01-01 2mo ago
>Convert this C program into x86_64 assembly for Linux. I made this argument yesterday that this is the real breakthrough for coding. Languages, syntax, frameworks, etc. no longer matters. ASM, Fortran, even punch cards are back on the menu if you're bold enough to prompt for it.
wxw 2mo ago
Firstly, this is the best TLDR I've read in a while and it convinced me to read the whole thing. > TLDR: I gain a lot of fulfillment by making things. I don't consider things built by others at my request to be made by me, and are therefore much less fulfilling. And then I feel sad. This article starts strong and then heads off into the weeds. Secondly, maybe this conversations boils into: what level of abstraction are we comfortable working at? I mean that to the tune of "To bake an apple pie, you must first create the universe". Few people will create the universe (please introduce yourself, if you are one); some will buy the apples and the crust and put them together; some will make the crust from scratch; some will grow the apples from seed; some will follow a recipe; some will buy a frozen pie; some will simply buy the pie. I think we can all agree that buying the pie is not baking it. But what about the others? To me, there's an argument that all of them are "baking the pie", just taking place at different levels of abstraction. And I think you can take pride in any of them, and hopefully more pride in whether the pie is delicious and well-shared.
matrix87 2mo ago
We're in a big interconnected social system. If you're landing changes, it's dependent on the internal tooling, internal documentation, and the broader social system that you're a part of. Attachment to individual outcomes is the problem. The productivity comes from the integration. Maybe the sense of alienation people are experiencing right now is because code is the one concrete thing they drive which is "independent" from this social matrix. Most of the real value I've ever delivered doing this SWE thing wasn't through code, it was through understanding the system, recognizing issues, and working with leadership on addressing them
russell_h 2mo ago
Whoa, I had no idea Beej is teaching at OSU! Back when I was an OSU student I taught myself a lot about practical systems programming, and I was consulting Beej's Guide to Network Programming daily. I kept lamenting to myself that I wished the expensive university was proving as useful as this guy's free website. Awesome that it has come full circle, great hire by someone.
- beej71 2mo ago
  Thanks! :) Crazy time for it, for sure. I'm teaching the two Software Engineering courses next year and have basically thrown the existing ones out. We'll see what rises from the ashes. More systems-level design stuff, more AI forward, larger projects, larger teams. I still believe it's vital to learn how to code, but now we have to front-load more of the SE skills that have historically been obtained on the job. "What a time to be alive!" I admit that I wouldn't have minded if all this LLM stuff has waited another 15 years to happen. :)
ozhero 2mo ago
Your literally a legend IMHO. Hugely generous in all the work you put into the public domain and I've been reading your guides for years. BTW I also started in computing in 1978 on a DEC 10 Mainframe (in Assembler and then C) and Lunar Lander was my first game but played on a DECwriter (basically a line printer with a keyboard). I'm still as passionate about IT as I was then!
redlewel 2mo ago
I mean its not the same at all. There is a very satisfying and gratifying experience from writing software yourself, AI hardly comes close. When writing the code and having to understand, I feel real connections being made in my brain and a deeper understanding of the language, domain area, and logical concepts. AI is simply not the same level of mental engagement and exertion. But clearly for work/business requirements using AI is a no brainer for efficiency and speed(which are key concerns for a business). This is under the assumption that a professional is able to review and guide the agentic tooling for a proper output. In order to truly be a professional in terms of software engineering, you need to write a significant amount of programs manually for some time. I don't think that people with 0 prior experience with programming will be effective if handed AI. I use AI for programs for work, and have written manual programs in the past. I want to go back to writing things manually(as to not atrophy important brain regions) so will probably do some personal projects in this manner. But I don't see a point in writing a book with AI, writing an email with AI, composing a message with AI. Because using AI is leveraging a predictive machine to expand on intent, and the intent in communicating is best done yourself. In my opinion sending AI content as posts, messages, or correspondence is poor application of AI at best, downright disrespectful at worst.
logged4upvoting 2mo ago
I do "take pride" in things I put my time and thinking into, regardless of whether it is assisted or not. For example, I am somehow proud and like some songs that I produced using Suno because of the days I spent iterating on them. Also in vibed projects that I put my time on. It is also true that it's been a long time without going back to a class or system I coded by hand just to "admire it" and get that feeling of, "omg, this class is fire!"
jterrys 2mo ago
In my opinion, the personal threshold of 'making' says more about the remnant era in which you were raised in rather than about the specificity of the act itself? Your grandparents lived in an era where it was common for men to build their own homes. Your parents lived in an era where it was inconceivable for a piece of furniture to not come fully assembled in their per-fabricated home. We now live in an era where homes are made in mass scale and we assemble our own furniture. Did I make an IKEA table? I don't know. I paid for it, drove it home, and assembled the machined parts and added the same size Allen key to my collection. It's certainly not a table without my contribution. But I couldn't have built it myself from scratch. I now tell the computer with the magic words please and thank you because I skimmed a research paper saying it'll be more cooperative in completing my tasks. Did I make a game in unity where I just mishmoshed the preassembled assets together? I don't know. The only difference between IKEA furniture and my game is the permutations of my asset combinations, really.
avilay 2mo ago
I have been grappling with a similar sentiment for a while now. I hate to think of myself as a Luddite, but I love the act of writing code. A blank VS Code in front of me is a beautiful sight full of wonder and possibilities :-) Here is how I rationalize the two - the pride and satisfaction I get from my work depends on how much effort I put in applying some previously acquired specialist knowledge, which itself took some decent amount of effort to acquire. This is why a beginner programmer is just as proud of their temperature convertor as a professional distributed systems engineer of their new 2PC module. A quote that I read somewhere, possibly by Naval Ravikant, strikes at the heart of this - "a creation without a (human) creator is meaningless".
haickernews 2mo ago
This article has a narrow view of "making" which is stuck hopelessly in the past, in my honest opinion. A human in the loop guiding the process is 100% making something, no matter how much you torture the definition of "make." When I write software with Claude, I'm the one with the agency, not Claude. Without me, the software wouldn't even exist. A director "makes" movies. A collage artist "makes" images. A fisherman "makes" a catch. Someone searching YouTube and clicking on a video "makes" a video. These are widely agreed upon definitions, so it should not be controversial to say you "make" software with LLMs.
- tmseidman 2mo ago
  Someone clicking on a YouTube video makes that video?
- orphereus 2mo ago
  "I made this company goddamnit, I made all of the iPhones because I had my VPs build factories in China that make iPhones." - imaginary Steve Jobs
- globular-toast 2mo ago
  But the author doesn't feel like they are making it. I feel the same way if the agent moves too quickly. If I ask for a feature in high-level language the LLM will make many guesses and assumptions to carry that out. I don't feel like I'm involved in the creation of that software at all. It feels more like running a find and replace on someone else's code to make it to what I want. That's why I instruct the LLM at a low level, that is at the level of the code itself. I'll ask for refactors, I'll ask for a new class etc. This cuts down on time spent typing while I still remain on top of the code. At least that's the idea. But there's still a problem. LLMs are trained to want to write working code. If what you asked for won't work, it'll just fill in the blanks and guess to make it work. And then you don't feel like you made it again. Basically, we kid ourselves into thinking it's just a supercharged text editor that we control, but it's actually an LLM that just doesn't work that way.
- storkhound 2mo ago
  There's a word for what you're doing there: equivocation. > A director "makes" movies. You clearly don't appreciate what that means. It's a deeply creative and involved process, not just waving a film into being with their flapping arms. Moreover, there are dozens to hundreds (or more!) people working as a team on everything from sets to cameras to post-production to ... When we say a director "made" that movie, we don't mean that was the extent of the making, nor do we mean they did no heavy lifting themselves. Neither of those sentiments are true. > A collage artist "makes" images They do! You seem to be trying to equivocate their use of previous components to create a new expression directly with .. well .. not. A more accurate analogy here between software development and the collage artist might be using libraries others have written in your projects from which you create something new. Collage is not the same process or product as directing an LLM. Again, equivocation. > A fisherman "makes" a catch. Words have more than one meaning, but the meanings can be (and in this case, are) divergent. "Synonyms", they are called! Literally equivocating, and entirely meaningless. > Someone searching YouTube and clicking on a video "makes" a video. Literally nobody says this, thinks this, or refers to the act in this way. This is taking equivocation into "making up new meanings from whole cloth" territory. > These are widely agreed upon definitions No, they aren't. You're making an argument hoping it justifies your choices, but mostly just demonstrating you don't understand the words you are using. > so it should not be Your premise is rubbish, so there can be no "so...". If you wish to use LLMs to spit out source code, that's your choice to make. How hard is it for you to just also own the fact that the act is not a creative one, and you are "making" in the same way that a customer delivering a set of requirements to a dev team is "making" software. There ought to be no shame in that if it isn't shameful.
petesergeant 2mo ago
I wrote a very similar article called "The prompt is not the work", which also touches on honesty about creation, and disclaimers on where your contribution lies: https://sgnt.ai/p/prompt-is-not-the-work/ https://sgnt.ai/p/prompt-is-not-the-work/
arximboldi 2mo ago
I sympathise with a lot of the negative and pesimistic sentiment shared here and in other comments and been drowning in some of it over the last few months. However I have slowly been having a shift towards a way more optimistic outlook on the current state of affairs. One side of it is the advent of open-weights models. This alleviates part of my fears, fears of my free software and open-source tools being made irrelevant by black-box machines built by American corporations that absorb infinite capital, with capital gaining infinite power against labour. But the other side, is that I am slowly witnessing how LLM's are not diminishing my value as a software engineer, more on the contrary. I see the outcome of projects that are vibe-coded to oblivion, immediately turning into unmaintainable messes no matter how many tokens you drop into them. Architectural insight, establishing proper processes, properly trading off features, applying engineering restrain, are more important than ever. I see my influence in projects even more crucial than before. Furthermore, the skills that I gained by sculpting code with my bare hands are only gonna become more and more rare, as I belong to one of the last generations that wrote code on their own. I realized this weekend that a good analogy, is that we are like airplane pilots. Modern commercial planes run mostly on auto-pilot; the job of the pilot is nonetheless of uttermost importance, and is remunerated accordingly. We are code pilots with auto-pilot for code, and because of that a small team can build systems with levels of complexity before unimaginable used by thousands or millions of users, and for this reason, our responsibility and impact on projects is greater than ever. I do miss some of the craft. As others wrote here, I can visualize in my head codebases I wrote even two decades ago, I even remember the color scheme of the editor I used for them. This won't happen with the code of the new era. I miss hand-optimizing a clever algorithm, designing elegant abstractions using rare language features, obsessing about a crucial piece of code. I worry about some of my brainpower atrophying. But maybe, if I open my heart to it, there will be good things that come on the other end of all this crazy time. Even if I sometimes feel like I am "just" a manager now, if I look closely, I can notice how I am still an engineer, perhaps, more than ever. And with my intelligence I can build great things, perhaps, greater than ever.
jjice 2mo ago
Captures my feelings as well. I don't get the same joy I used to because I end up using an LLM because it'll be faster. I need to come to terms with speed not taking precedence over fun. The act of writing is something I need to learn to refocus on again without the thought of the "inefficiency" of doing so. I want to feel like I did when I was 13 and writing code in the middle of the night. Beej's writing always impresses me.
- fantasizr 2mo ago
  steve vai the guitarist talks about how learning and doing the act gives you dignity and self respect for having done something. That's what's being cutout when you just 'prompt' it, be it words, code, or music.
e808 2mo ago
This is definitely something I have been mulling as I 'made' several software projects that I have been tossing around in my head over my lifetime via vibe-coding recently that would have taken me 10x to 100x the time to a MVP, with AI, i can push it way beyond the MVP and enchance and enrich with features I may not have considered without the almost immediate MVP production. What is the end-product value? I definitely have found value for myself since its things that I considered for a while for myself. Others may appreciate the end product. But is the value of the end product the 'original idea'? or the comprehensive prompt to produce it again? the number of tokens it burned to produce the end product? The number hours it took me to work on it to get the end product? (debugging, enchancing, user interface, design)? Answers I dont have, but questions I have been mulling while immensely enjoying being able to produce random ideas I have had in me head for decades fairly quickly.
koinedad 2mo ago
I generally agree. If I build something bigger with smaller AI generated pieces I still built that thing, but even that thing doesn’t feel the same. I’m not as connected to the components that’s for sure. There’s a loss that is occurring
davizao4 2mo ago
[flagged]
julienmarie 2mo ago
Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright etc... don't make buildings but design them. But the buildings are theirs, no question asked. Steve Jobs created the Mac, the IPod, the iPhone. He didn't code or designed any of the PCBs. Painters of the Renaissance had whole workshops with apprentices painting for them. Creating a software is way more than just lines of code. It's understanding a market, a need or a want, it's marketing, it's copywriting. It's defining what to build, what not to build, and envisionning the final form of it. Yes, the individual craftmen who worked on a Frank Lloyd Wright house can all be very proud of their work. They can say I built this roof. I built this wall. I built this waterfall. But the house is undeniably Wright's. What we are all lamenting about is the fear of losing the monopoly of a craft. Which is legitimate. The same way furniture used to be hand crafted by skilled woodworkers, bespoke and expensively, have been replaced by IKEA. Now the skilled woodworkers left are now focusing on the high end of the market. The issue with programming is that clients are companies and the acceptance criteria are binary: does it work or not.
jeffreyrogers 2mo ago
I think some people are drawn to technical careers because they like details and others are drawn to them because they like systems (now people are drawn for money too, but I'm talking about people who are more technically oriented). My theory is that if you are a systems person you find using LLMs fun and fulfilling and if you are a details person you find that they are the opposite. I have an acquaintance who is fairly well known for some of the work he did in computer vision (pre-neural net/deep learning), he's a details guy, and he was telling me how software is boring now because when he was young they were still figuring out how to do tons of things for the first time and now most software is just putting things together that we already know how to do. LLMs seem to be continuing this trend.
- never_inline 2mo ago
  What if I am a quality person and I am disappointed because LLMs are squandering any remaining commitment to quality in favor of quantity and speed in certain environments?
  - jillesvangurp 2mo ago
    Then you might want to spend more time on the quality of your guard rails. It's the best way to ensure LLMs produce higher quality output. To get the best results, you need to get systematic about enforcing what you want. Guardrails are one of the tools for doing that. A lot of developers are acting like passive bystanders here. You can take a more active role in the whole process, including doing quality assurance and correcting LLMs when needed. And like it or not, QA is actually still part of your job. A lot of developers never liked doing QA. The good news is that you can make the LLM do most of that. But it helps if you are a bit opinionated about how to do QA. Again, guardrails. For example, if you care about performance, get systematic about performance testing and tell the LLM to find and fix your performance bottlenecks. I did that with a Go server a few months ago. It was functionally correct but it had a few bottlenecks. So, I generated a benchmark and then made the LLM suggest and implement solutions for all these bottlenecks. Once it had the benchmark, it got good at testing and validating its own solutions. After a few iterations, I had very decent throughput.
marcus_holmes 2mo ago
I think there's a difference between making something because you want the experience of making it, and making something because you want the end product. I make my own furniture. It's not very good furniture. I could probably get better furniture cheaper by just buying it. But I love the experience of making it. I don't write code any more. I used to really enjoy writing code, but mostly code became plumbing together bits of other people's work anyway and I stopped really enjoying it a while back. Having the tool do that for the last six months has been great. I really just want the end product for most of the situations where I would write code. That may change. I might get back into hand-crafting the code for a project. Either way, I make things. I don't see that having the tool write the code invalidates the making part. Writing the code is only a part of the overall process of making an application, and not even the most important part.
vhwalke 2mo ago
I spent the past few weeks building what turned out to be a much bigger project than I thought it would be - with more AI assistance than I've ever had on any project, and I've been thinking about this. In the end, I'm happy with the AI development. The machine laid a lot of bricks. But every judgment that makes the thing itself was mine: which typeface felt right, which historically accurate detail to reject because it hurt readability, what tone the notes should take, what to cut. Some days that feels like making. Some days it feels like being an editor with a very fast staff. Editors are proud of their papers too. The important part: I built it for my mom. She can't tell which lines I typed and which I asked for. She can tell it was made for her. Maybe that's the part that survives every new tool — who it's for. And aside from any question of "pride" .... this project would never have existed without AI support. I wouldn't have had the time. Wouldn't have pushed it to the level of excellence that it shows. And, would have been pulled off to other distractions, projects, and work long before it got over the finish line. It may be a different world. But, I'm all in.
ares623 2mo ago
A thought experiment: Suppose there were two Hacker News's. One version guarantees only 100% human made content and comments, with no LLM in the pipeline at all. The other version is the opposite, only LLM (assisted or 100%) content and comments. Human-only content is disallowed. Which version would you prefer to be part of?
andai 2mo ago
> I gain a lot of fulfillment by making things. I don't consider things built by others at my request to be made by me, and are therefore much less fulfilling. And then I feel sad. I've been wondering about this. Nobody would argue that Peter Jackson didn't make the Lord of the Rings movies, even though he was just telling other people what to do. Though depending on the degree of autonomy you give the AI, you start being less Director and more Producer? (Rick Rubin: "I have no actual musical ability [... only] confidence in my taste.") Not defending either position, just trying to make sense of this strange new world. Yesterday I unplugged the internet for a few hours and spent them programming "the old way", and found it quite painful, but also deeply satisfying. It's kind of like cardio. If I stop doing it for too long, I start to feel a little gross.
zorobo 2mo ago
Old as time itself → https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1595733.Who_Built_the_Pyramid_ https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1595733.Who_Built_the...
andai 2mo ago
> Carpentry: Please replace my front deck. I've been thinking, the way things are going with robotics it won't be long until you can vibe code a house. Arguably you already can, it's just very expensive, because most of the work is done by humans.
hollowturtle 2mo ago
> I did use Claude to learn some basics, like the easiest way to get the data out of a Google Sheet You can still use it like this, it's a super power, using it as a tool it's like wearing the iron man suite. Imo using it to 100% write the code it's like telling bumb ai iron man what to do
allanrbo 2mo ago
Fondly remember Beej's Guide to Network Programming back in the day :-)
maxrimue 2mo ago
I find this topic super interesting because I recently created some side-projects using Claude (not in their entirety, but major parts of them) and felt strangely disconnected to them afterwards, even though they accomplished what I was looking for. That made me think about how AI usage for me should look like in my free time. Maybe what the author is talking about, and what I felt to a degree, is the act of deciding and formulating decisions. Looking at the compiler vs. AI example for machine code, one aspect that immediately stands out to me is that a compiler should deterministically produce consistent outcomes for precise instructions. Claude, on the other hand, will take your instructions, which are likely less precise than code, and "reason" about them. It will produce output that varies each time you would ask it and it will bake in behavior you didn't explicitly ask for. AI makes decisions for you. And maybe that's what makes AI so useful in the first place. One way around this may be to be just as strict with your instructions. Giving AI an exact spec to work with, like large Markdown specs or detailed tests to run against. But then again, if you take the time to formulate those, is it much of a jump to write the code yourself? What's clear is that AI is awesome for helping with issues you can't resolve, or explaining concepts in a personalized way. But letting it make decisions for you prioritizes outcome over creation, and for side-projects you build out of the love for creation, that may just not make sense, just like as a consumer I feel disinterested in "AI art". AI is for products, not for art, and that dumb little idea to work on in the afternoon might just be more art than product.
broccoluvr 2mo ago
yikes
fishbacon 2mo ago
The intro followed immediately by obvious AI slop put me so off that I stopped reading. They may be trying to make a point. But the way they are doing it is off putting.
- rjh29 2mo ago
  The prose and art is obvious AI slop. If the author somehow thinks that can deceive an intelligent reader then they've lost me already.
ramon156 2mo ago
Only positive thing I can say about LLM assisted projects is how fast you can get from zero to something (but not quite hero). For example, I want to learn more about algorithms for a rubiks cube project. I already read through the speedcubers wiki, and the algorithms you can apply irl (note I am not fast by hand, hence the project). At some point I need to get hands-on with algorithms. I can copy-paste existing algorithms into my project, but it's much more fun to ask GLM 5.2 what it would do, and why. I can reason, ask questions, then throw away the entire chat; having learned something during that session. Doing the same thing by hand would get me blocked at least three times, and would've taken me almost two weeks. This took two days.
relativeadv 2mo ago
Oh boy, my useless art degree is coming in handy here! This is precisely like the authorship debates that occurred when Warhol hit the scene, or Damien Hirst and many others. It goes further back than that. Duchamp and his urinal, renaissance painters and their workshops. On and on, artists making work for other artists and people debating whether the signee is the one who really created it. "Authorship" is the term for this debate. If you choose to side with the modern art establishment, this has been a settled debate for decades. Managing signs, systems, instructions, and context is itself a creative act. If you choose to side with the atelier movement (as one example) it would be a resounding "no". This does not count.
Pigo 2mo ago
I've been trying to rebuild my back deck this summer. I've wasted so much material, cut myself several times, and I was stung by a paper wasp, it has not been going well so far.
- jjice 2mo ago
  But hopefully you'll feel very accomplished once it's finished and you can enjoy the fruits of your labor!
dosman33 2mo ago
AI is the industrial revolution finally arriving at the land of information and software development, full stop. Read Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope if you want to understand whats happening and see a roadmap of whats ahead. What happened during the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, and financial revolution is already happening to software development. IR brings cheap material goods to everyone in your civilization, not just the elite. Before, only the king and his court could afford to have skilled tradesmen hand-crafting clocks and pocket watches. After the IR, now everyone has a cheap wrist watch available to them for pennies. It doesn't mean everyone has the best stuff, but it raises the quantity of whats practically available to everyone at the base level and it does this cheaply. The timex wrist watch works fine and is only $15. Not everyone has a Rolex, and there will always be a market for artisanally crafted items that predate the IR. A lot of people don't care how the Timex works, they just need to get back to work from lunch on time. There will always be a market for those that desire (and have the money) to have a wrist watch that works the way they want it to work. In the future, artisanally crafted code will matter to some people who understand code. Most people just need a program to do the thing. Humans will still be able to outperform AI when it comes to making clever, compact, and beautiful code. Go to any local pottery show if you want to see the future. Everyone already has IR manufactured cups, plates, and silverware at home. Yet people still go out and buy hand-crafted versions of these items because they have more character in various dimensions they care about. On the downside, everything will become slop. But it increases the slop available to everyone, while smaller numbers of those who care will still buy artisinally crafted code. But there's another downside too that Quigley talks about: the arrival of the railroad at your previously isolated village. Suddenly now you have food, medicine and people arriving at a far greater pace. Your towns demographic suddenly starts to shift as your townspeople start to live longer as knowledge can instantly penetrate from the outside world. People can leave much easier too which facilitates brain drain. The railroad brings the industrial revolution to your door. The countries that survived the best were the ones that created these revolutions and then exported them. If the railroad did not originate from your country then the railroad arrived at your doorstep quite literally before you were ready for it. I don't fully understand what this means for AI, but I'm certain this is part of the reason the US is trying to lead the charge. You absolutely do not want the railroad arriving at your doorstep: you want to be the one pushing the railroad out to your neighbors. The only guarantee is change whether you want it or not. If you want some control over that change then you had better be driving the change rather than just reacting to it.
Willish42 2mo ago
I think another aspect is the deep understanding one gains from building the thing, and the idea of the thing being entirely the creator's and translated into "reality" through some kind of physical or mental labor. An author of fiction prose would have their vision in their mind or some other ideas of what the prose "should" be, and then created it with their own word choice, and tools. Similar for visual art. This applies even if parts of the creative vision were improvised while the creation was happening, but it started in the creator's mind and if faced with the final product, they could remember the small details and understand the work that went into it. I think if I'm honest about when I look at LLM output for code, it feels close to a code review of code written by another person, where I spend a decent amount of cognitive effort figuring out those similar small details in reverse, without knowledge or memory of the specific motivations. And furthermore, if I were to read every single line of code, word in a written work, and pixel or brush stroke in visual art of some kind, it would feel like an artificial understanding, rather than something I can fully sign my name to as a thing I understood the ins and outs of while creating it. I fully get that some people don't care about this, and see themselves more as "designers", but I think those are the same sorts of people who if given a choice, would rather "build" by leading a team of people and claiming credit for "building" as part of their leadership, rather than by doing it themselves by hand and getting a sense of fulfillment from that effort. Also, "agentic" workflows feel a bit like giving up even the leading / designing aspects. With Claude specifically, I'm often impressed (albeit other times often frustrated too) by the small design choices it made while building the code that I hadn't explicitly asked for but end up preferring once I see the output. This to me indicates I didn't really build it

442 points by erikschoster 2mo ago

We continue to grapple with AI and how it's impacting our lives by trying to find comfort in comparisons to the past, or to other things that we do. But the reality is, there's never been anything quite like this before, and it's forcing us to redefine how we value work, art, craftsmanship, and output. Sometimes, those redefinitions are extremely uncomfortable.

arnitdo 2mo ago
How does this even contribute to the content posted? The only thing being "redefined" is corporate agendas to push the bar of "good enough" lower to the point where it lies below cheap, and equals wasteful.
- royal__ 2mo ago
  OP seems to be wrestling with this feeling that LLMs are simultaneously incredibly useful and also leave a very hollow feeling inside, like it's cheating. The redefinition is how we choose to move forward with hobbies and art when we know these tools are available.

sashank_1509 2mo ago

Very well said. I don’t like seeing hackernews submissions that are LLM generated. The joy of hackernews was seeing applied human ingenuity, most of these weren’t successful products anyway. Just like I don’t watch computer chess games, we should have an easy way to distinguish AI generated software, art etc and then I can happily avoid them.

layer8 2mo ago

> What's the real difference in that gray area? I'm not sure. I think it hinges on something that has to do with making versus asking to be made, even if that line isn't particularly clear. For me the difference is in the extent that I can reason about how changes in the input affect the observable behavior of the output. When the executable the compiler outputs doesn’t behave in the way I intended, then in 99.99% of cases this is completely on me, and, importantly, I could have predicted it from the source code. Conversely, I can analyze any such misbehavior by reasoning on the source code. This doesn’t hold to any remotely comparable extent for the relation between vibecoded programs and the prompts used to create them.

ike_a 2mo ago
This seems like a very clear way of thinking about it. In making something, you develop a tangible understanding of and opinions for how and why your creation is how it is. I have a lot of vibecoded projects. I feel "ownership" in varying degrees proportional to the amount of care and depth I put into them.
skydhash 2mo ago
Sounds very much like agency over the process versus agency over the outcome. Some are ok with deciding if and when the process should be started and whether the outcome is good and bad. But often they lack the judgment to truly decide what is good and what is bad. They trust the makers to provide equally good options in terms of lower concerns (that matters to the makers) and only make the judgment according to some other concerns. The main difference when using a compiler is that the compiler will (99.999...%) produce correct binary code for my programs and will fail loudly if it cannot. But the compiler is not concerned about correctness of the algorithm written in the programming language. Responsibilities are clearly outlined and the compiler does the job perfectly, while I try to do mine as well. So when I do a good job, I don't have to worry about the compiler part and I can assume the result will be good as well. LLM usage has no such clear line. Assuming the user can judge whether the outcome is good or bad according to the prompt, the LLM tool is not reliable enough to produce a good result for everything that was not specified in the prompt. Which is different when collaborating with humans. If you say to a professional artist "I want a batman drawing", you needn't check for missing toes and the numbers of arms.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
dmrivers 2mo ago
But does this mean that a 99.99% reliable LLM would turn us back into the mode of us building it again? I would not say so. I think for tasks that are about decisions, having the LLM make decisions is what makes it feel like the LLM did something for me. Consider mowing the lawn. Imagine I had a lawnmower robot that does the mowing all on its own. Despite perfect accuracy, I didn't mow the lawn; it did. If I sit on that lawnmower the whole time and start driving it instead of letting it go on its own, then I mowed the lawn. Even if I stand there and control it with a joystick, I still mowed the lawn. Ownership comes from the decisions about where to mow.

spiresofagartha 2mo ago

I agree with the article. I've never understood the notion of some LLM people saying you shouldn't care about the end result, and you should do it for its sake. It made me feel like a narcissist and that I was programming for showmanship, but I think making is inherent to (most) people's satisfaction and it's hard to tell something was made by you when all you did was prompting. Maybe a hot take, but I do think, that even from seasoned developers, the idea they've been doing the 'logical' part so long they'd have it done anyway without AI and it'd only take more time is delusional, when, from personal experience, even when I code something I 'know' and I've 'done', I have to remember stuff, google what isn't ingrained in my brain, and so on. I don't know if the author would consider this a part of making, but a single thing you build is, obviously, a mix of things you've built. I no longer sense this minor feeling of 'making' when I'm doing something. To make a logic that's part of a bigger system and see it running, thinking how it's gonna be once it's all done... I no longer feel that.

phaedrus 2mo ago
There was this persistent meme in bodybuilding discussions - I don't know if it's still a thing - to say about steroids "well they're just a shortcut". The justification that it just got you faster to where you could have gotten slower naturally was used by former steroid users to justify themselves, as an accusation of cheating, as an accusation of laziness, and as hope for dreamers who go to the gym but do not see those extreme results. In reality, steroids do allow some to achieve a body that would not be possible under a natural/genetic with any amount of time due to how anabolism and catabolism balance and scale. I think there's a lot of parallel with experienced programmers using LLMs and that idea about steroids that it just gets you there faster. I'm pretty sure I could eventually program most of the things I've used AI to write, and what it produces at the top end I/you can't really prove that I wouldn't have thought of it. But is that really true?

saulpw 2mo ago

I have been using vi/vim for 30 years and I had no idea about using ^K-M to insert an em-dash.

PennRobotics 2mo ago
Same here, and to anyone trying it out for the first time and confused why it's not working: - insert mode - that is a (typed) dash between Ctrl+K and M - uppercase M (aside: the K can be upper or lower case)
MathMonkeyMan 2mo ago
Yep: https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/digraph.html https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/digraph.html I started using them a long time ago to type Greek characters, but then I switched to vscode with a vim extension and it didn't support that keybinding so I lost the habit. Might work with the neovim extension now. edit: Yep, but you have to add "k" to the list of "control characters handled by neovim" in the extension's settings.

hbcdbff 2mo ago

This, I’ve completely lost interest in side projects outside of work since the emergence of LLMs. It does nothing for me any more

jvanderbot 2mo ago
I found _many_ of my side projects just evaporated. Total disinterest. But some were now front and center. I think the distinction was some of them were for learning or technically complex accomplishments, and some were genuinely things I wanted to have/use. That second category is getting ground down by LLMs now, and I enjoy that. The first category has only a few very slow/analog learning projects left.
- kretaceous 2mo ago
  This is relatable. I find myself using LLMs more in cases where I don't care about learning and have made multiple tools to fir my workflow (Swift apps, etc. without ever touching Swift code). When it comes to things I do know about or want to learn about, I'm avoidant towards them because I know I can do better even if slower; but the procrastination for these has definitely turned into disinterest.
corysama 2mo ago
I'm the opposite. Between work and family, I don't get a lot of time to hole up in a cave with an IDE for fun. Prior to LLMs, it was a struggle to get much of anything done. So, I rarely tried. But, now I can get ideas fleshed out and even get code down in the small breaks I get to myself. Now I'm making progress where I wasn't before. Sometimes I'm not interested in the inner workings of a technology, I just want a one-off tool. Ex: No interest in web tech. But, vibe-coded a tool to scrape and cross-reference a couple of online reports. Now I have the info I need for other projects. Sometimes I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to hand-hold the AI through making it for me. Ex: Put together yet another SIMD math lib recently. SIMD intrisics are an obnoxious API. But, a non-SIMD implementation is easy to verify and many SIMD implementations are easy to validate vs. the non-SIMD reference. It's just a huge amount of obtuse code. Sometimes I don't know exactly what I want and it's great to have a always-online partner to bounce questions off of, do rapid-prototyping for me, do code reviews for me. AIs aren't perfect. But, being instant, patient and often right makes them a huge improvement over online forums.

jvanderbot 2mo ago

Does a machinist who uses CNC qualify as a machinist? Is his required knowledge of metals, assembly complexity, tolerances, just waved away because he doesn't turn the dials or change the tools any more?

ian-g 2mo ago
At least personally, parts of the differences for me are that the same instructions to a different CNC machine should produce the same product and that the machinist, presumably, created the instructions themselves. Instead of saying "create instructions for CNC to make me a _thing_, then instruct the CNC machine to actually create the _thing_" they went and created the instructions themselves.
pwillia7 2mo ago
yeah I think he's not an 'artisan' anymore at least not in an applied way. They're more of a technician at that point.
WillAdams 2mo ago
Depends. To some degree, some folks esp. for "lights out" machining are just pushing buttons and loading/unloading pallets of stock/parts, but usually the job description for that is "machine operator". A machinist is expected to understand feeds and speeds and how they interact with toolpaths and materials and tooling. The big question of course will be how things fall out with the on-coming generation of 5-axis machines which are intended to be AI-driven: https://toolguyd.com/new-ai-powered-desktop-cnc-machines-2026-thoughts/ https://toolguyd.com/new-ai-powered-desktop-cnc-machines-202...
wpm 2mo ago
> Does a machinist who uses CNC qualify as a machinist? Yes. The CNC doesn't act on its own. If I ask the CNC "make me a widget", am I a machinist?
- 1970-01-01 2mo ago
  I think you nailed it. If the CNC machine makes your widget, then you made it. If it didn't make you the widget correctly, then you made a paperweight, and you're not a machinist, you're somebody making paperweights.

giancarlostoro 2mo ago

> And when I do have Claude create something for me, I just can't say that I made it. Other people can, but I just can't. This is basically me. I still love having Claude build things for me, a lot of it is just things only I will ever use, but it fulfills my needs, and that's worth it for me. I use it two ways I guess: to get unstuck while coding something myself, and to automate building side-projects I have no time for but that linger in my head for years.

bufbupa 2mo ago

>It's not just the loss of the craft and the problem-solving challenge and whatever else. It's the loss of making. It's the loss of understanding. When you make something, you gain a deeper appreciation for the nuance of all that is required to breath life into it. When you outsource understanding to another (agent, contractor, w/e), you're losing the nuanced understanding of the creation. >After all, you create the prompts, don't you? You said you were proud of doing things. Isn't that doing a thing? This feels like the difference between putting together an ikea futon and building a hand-hewn table from logs. The fidelity of your understanding is different depending on how deeply you're engaging. But not felling and drying your own timber doesn't mean you can never make something from dimensional lumber. I'd take the author's word "making" to mean something more like "having enough understanding of the implementation of the task, that you could recreate the output without recourse to the same set of tools". Tested against their examples: >I had a new front deck put in [by a contractor] As a consequence of this addition, did you learn enough about decks so that you could you reproduce this feat if no contractor were available? If no, you didn't make the deck. If yes, you were probably watching/helping the whole time, and you can claim (at least partial) makesmanship. > any more than using a hammer to drive nails does. If you didn't have access to the hammer, could you still accomplish the task of attaching two boards together with a nail? Likely yes, use a rock. It's harder, but the understanding of driving the nail is transferable to other implements. > What if I had an AI-powered hammer and asked it to hit a nail for me? What's the difference? But at that point, I can't say that I hammered it. This one contradicted his compiler example. He says that he did write the Fibonacci program, even if the AI-powered compiler translated it to assembly. So by similar reasoning, you can claim you hammered a nail with an AI hammer, so long as you understood the aspects of hammering which the AI took care for you to such a degree that you could reproduce the effects even in the absence of the AI hammer. The crux of the tension is around "what did you learn from the implementation of this task". If you learned enough to reproduce the objective without the assistance of AI (perhaps much slower), then you can claim the high fidelity understanding that came from making. If you didn't internalize anything, and the AI/contractor managed complexity on your behalf, then the output was commissioned, not made. I think where people get worked up about this, is that it's not easy to tell what understanding other folks are taking away from their AI usage. It does seem like a bifurcating event where some people are going to net gain understanding of their world due to these new tools, while others will net lose understanding.

jddj 2mo ago

I struggle to even remember the course grained details of things I've had AI do recently. Conversely, there are 100k+ LoC codebases from years ago that I can still generally walk through in my mind's eye

sevenseacat 2mo ago
I can look at a project I worked with others on a decade ago, and pick out which parts I wrote, which parts others wrote, remember pitfalls from this part, a struggle we had in that part, even if I have no memory of actually doing them. I can't do that with a project we worked with AI on two weeks ago. It all just blurs together into "someone wrote a prompt and code came out".

guybedo 2mo ago

i guess there's different point of views here and it depends a lot on what you're trying to do. As a swe i've always enjoyed the process of designing solutions to problems: design a great architecture, find the right abstractions that make everything fit naturally, write good clean code, etc ... that's what i enjoy doing. Now there's the part where i've had these ideas for years that i've always though that i'd be cool to work on. But basically it would have required a 10 person team for months, out of reach. Now i have Claude, Codex and Grok and i've already built many projects. The code isn't pretty, i didn't enjoy it as much as i would have if it were done manually, but i did something i never could have done otherwise. There's some fun in the process though. I feel like a team manager and i occasionally step in to push for some architectural changes or code rewrites because things become too brittle because of not good enough architecture.

ge96 2mo ago

I'm trying to get it back. I went through a period of 2 months or so where I didn't want to do anything not even watch TV except drink. So I've been sober for a couple weeks now, think I'm starting to get it back. But I'm still lazy af right now. I miss making hardware, I design/make my own cameras and little self navigating robots. I did finally fix my camera after it rolled across the floor of my car during a tight turn and something inside it broke/wouldn't turn on. Idk... I bought so many old vintage c-mount lenses and would take each one out, produce a video, and then I lost interest doing that... so now I have a bin of random vintage c-mount lenses and a desk trinket (camera). The positive though is I got two SWE jobs out of these hardware projects. But yeah hope I get it back. I usually do instantly lose respect when I hear some project is vibe coded... I get that's how it is now but yeah. To me when you say "I made this" but it's actually claude code that shat out the code well... ultimately though it's about money and freedom. You can do whatever you want to do, I need to get my own freedom then do what I enjoy.

vector_spaces 2mo ago
I think don't be too hard on yourself. If you haven't already, it may be worth considering whether ADHD or something else might be playing a role. We aren't machines, we're messy bundles of biology and understanding our own particular messy bundle can go a long way towards getting it rolling in the right direction.
- ge96 2mo ago
  oh yeah I definitely have some flavor of ADHD, I'm not medicated so I just use music (looping a song or album over and over). Thankfully I have a chill job now where I don't have to get much work done, kind of coasting lately. Currently trying to figure out the right kind of caffeine intake, seems hot chocolate might be my jam vs. coffee. I'm lucky we have a gym at work so I work out first 30 minutes of the day helps and do walks. I have to grind on the side though to get out as I have $100K in debt. That six fig day job still means I'm check to check.

planb 2mo ago

I know many people agree but I can’t really follow this sentiment. I can still take pride in something I “made” with an LLM even if I did not write a single line of code for it. I wouldn’t show it around and proclaim what a great programmer I am, because I did not program it, but coding was never the main goal, it was always the means to create the finished end product. When I plan a remake of my garden and then hire a professional landscaping company to build it, I can still sit on my patio in the sunset with a cold beer and be proud of my new cozy environment. I feed the same way about software. My vibe coded guitar tab editor has features that no other software has that I needed and it’s solving a real problem I had. I would never have created it without AI, because I simply don’t have the time besides my job, family and other hobbies (like really practicing playing guitar). So fine, tell me I shouldn’t be proud of it, but don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it.

Zolomon 2mo ago
To me there is a difference that lies in the words. E.g. `making` and `producing` both result in the creation of something, but `making` has a more active part while `producing` has a more supervisory part. This became more relevant to me when I began meeting producers as a software engineer in game development.
- revetkn 2mo ago
  To me, the idea is that you have something in your head and you want to "project" it into reality. I suppose the difference between makers and producers then is that makers happen to enjoy the labor part of that projection, while producers don't particularly care about it (nor want to care).
- planb 2mo ago
  But that’s just arguing about the meaning of the word “make” now. The real discussion does not seem to be about words though but about value. If you find vibe-coded software worthless, you value the process and work that went into it more than the finished end product. I can fully understand this. But it’s just not the way I feel about it.

RazorBucksICO 2mo ago

[flagged]

bredren 2mo ago

This goes straight to the compiler and whether that precludes original craft. But I think it would be more relevant to discuss the use of open source packages. Because I absolutely feel I made entire SaaS products, cool ones, by hand and they sat on a multitude of packages and infra I but glued together. For frontend, I tailored templates, and instead put energy and time into making modern frontend toolchains and Django backends work together. This was satisfying to understand and build. Being at ease with the minute details of Django or latest flags of esbuild felt like knowing the various modes of my Dewalt or Dewalt-colored power tools. Building with AI is not a passive activity, and doing so well and efficiently, there is a ton to master and it evolved a great deal in the past six months. So leveraging the tools using custom skills, custom CLIs, etc this is very important and very valuable thing to do. I would classify it as a serious contemporary computer science skill that should be taught in addition to the fundamentals. Presume now, you're making and leveraging all of the modern bells and whistles of Claude Code and Codex. That is, you're reading the release notes and you have personal tooling so you can switch between them easily. You can build incredible things with sustainable release workflows and reasonable security and possibly more than what a solo dev's "production quality" of yore. I know this because I had Fable look at an entirely "hand crafted" SaaS I built over two years and it found about a page of bullets just in p0-p1 that I had not caught in my artisanal best effort. They were real issues, maybe unlikely but still things that I would have fixed if I had known. But what can not be replaced is *taste*. You can build all day and night and if it ain't good people won't use it. If you can't describe it in a way that makes sense to people they won't care. If you build something people don't want you've not really made anything more than we did before we had AI as a tool. I do think it can still achieve the same level of satisfaction if it is built well. Because it actually does take a lot of skill and knowledge to make something well using agentic programming. This is regardless of whether people want it.

Multiplayer 2mo ago

One area that I find really compelling and useful now is controlling hardware that I've struggled to use in the past, like the BlackMagic ATEM video switcher/controller. They are very powerful and can turn your space into an incredible video studio. The software that ships with them is probably appropriate for experienced video techs. The last time I setup a studio to run a webinar with one it took me a couple of days to get it working how I needed. Yes, I love tinkering with hardware so there is that and I did enjoy figuring it out. Today I had a webinar that needed to be setup quickly and thought it would just be a raw Zoom feed. Instead, within an hour, I had a full video switching system with embedded graphics, feeds from a laptop configured with live content, multiple cameras, etc and a custom html page specific just to todays webinar to drive it all. I've used a number of 3rd party apps for the ATEM series. They all have to boil the ocean. This kind of personalized project tech is the perfect software hole for llm's to fill.

unshavedyak 2mo ago

I have a slightly different approach. I've done this as both a profession and a hobby for around 18 years now, and even these days i spend quite a bit of time "making" things i take pride in. Be it decisions (decision fatigue is a battle), code written, architectural improvements, etc. I don't generally feel lacking in this area. Where i've felt lacking for the last ~5 years though is output. Specifically blocked by having the energy to create all these damn ideas. I find LLMs neat, albeit their own type of exhausting, as they open up a lot of possibilities for things i want. Ie software i've wanted but have never cared to find the time for or didn't have the time for. LLMs feel like a software equivalent to a 3D Printer. I don't have to carve it out of wood now. But also like a 3D printer there are some tasks that LLMs are just horrible for. So it's a niche, a skill even, to find software you want that also are a good for for unsupervised development. It's also of course massively more risky than a 3D printed doohickey depending on its internet access/etc. With that said i still don't really take pride in something vibe coded. I just take enjoyment out of using a thing that i've wanted but never had time for.

1970-01-01 2mo ago

>Convert this C program into x86_64 assembly for Linux. I made this argument yesterday that this is the real breakthrough for coding. Languages, syntax, frameworks, etc. no longer matters. ASM, Fortran, even punch cards are back on the menu if you're bold enough to prompt for it.

wxw 2mo ago

Firstly, this is the best TLDR I've read in a while and it convinced me to read the whole thing. > TLDR: I gain a lot of fulfillment by making things. I don't consider things built by others at my request to be made by me, and are therefore much less fulfilling. And then I feel sad. This article starts strong and then heads off into the weeds. Secondly, maybe this conversations boils into: what level of abstraction are we comfortable working at? I mean that to the tune of "To bake an apple pie, you must first create the universe". Few people will create the universe (please introduce yourself, if you are one); some will buy the apples and the crust and put them together; some will make the crust from scratch; some will grow the apples from seed; some will follow a recipe; some will buy a frozen pie; some will simply buy the pie. I think we can all agree that buying the pie is not baking it. But what about the others? To me, there's an argument that all of them are "baking the pie", just taking place at different levels of abstraction. And I think you can take pride in any of them, and hopefully more pride in whether the pie is delicious and well-shared.

matrix87 2mo ago

We're in a big interconnected social system. If you're landing changes, it's dependent on the internal tooling, internal documentation, and the broader social system that you're a part of. Attachment to individual outcomes is the problem. The productivity comes from the integration. Maybe the sense of alienation people are experiencing right now is because code is the one concrete thing they drive which is "independent" from this social matrix. Most of the real value I've ever delivered doing this SWE thing wasn't through code, it was through understanding the system, recognizing issues, and working with leadership on addressing them

russell_h 2mo ago

Whoa, I had no idea Beej is teaching at OSU! Back when I was an OSU student I taught myself a lot about practical systems programming, and I was consulting Beej's Guide to Network Programming daily. I kept lamenting to myself that I wished the expensive university was proving as useful as this guy's free website. Awesome that it has come full circle, great hire by someone.

beej71 2mo ago
Thanks! :) Crazy time for it, for sure. I'm teaching the two Software Engineering courses next year and have basically thrown the existing ones out. We'll see what rises from the ashes. More systems-level design stuff, more AI forward, larger projects, larger teams. I still believe it's vital to learn how to code, but now we have to front-load more of the SE skills that have historically been obtained on the job. "What a time to be alive!" I admit that I wouldn't have minded if all this LLM stuff has waited another 15 years to happen. :)

ozhero 2mo ago

Your literally a legend IMHO. Hugely generous in all the work you put into the public domain and I've been reading your guides for years. BTW I also started in computing in 1978 on a DEC 10 Mainframe (in Assembler and then C) and Lunar Lander was my first game but played on a DECwriter (basically a line printer with a keyboard). I'm still as passionate about IT as I was then!

redlewel 2mo ago

I mean its not the same at all. There is a very satisfying and gratifying experience from writing software yourself, AI hardly comes close. When writing the code and having to understand, I feel real connections being made in my brain and a deeper understanding of the language, domain area, and logical concepts. AI is simply not the same level of mental engagement and exertion. But clearly for work/business requirements using AI is a no brainer for efficiency and speed(which are key concerns for a business). This is under the assumption that a professional is able to review and guide the agentic tooling for a proper output. In order to truly be a professional in terms of software engineering, you need to write a significant amount of programs manually for some time. I don't think that people with 0 prior experience with programming will be effective if handed AI. I use AI for programs for work, and have written manual programs in the past. I want to go back to writing things manually(as to not atrophy important brain regions) so will probably do some personal projects in this manner. But I don't see a point in writing a book with AI, writing an email with AI, composing a message with AI. Because using AI is leveraging a predictive machine to expand on intent, and the intent in communicating is best done yourself. In my opinion sending AI content as posts, messages, or correspondence is poor application of AI at best, downright disrespectful at worst.

logged4upvoting 2mo ago

I do "take pride" in things I put my time and thinking into, regardless of whether it is assisted or not. For example, I am somehow proud and like some songs that I produced using Suno because of the days I spent iterating on them. Also in vibed projects that I put my time on. It is also true that it's been a long time without going back to a class or system I coded by hand just to "admire it" and get that feeling of, "omg, this class is fire!"

jterrys 2mo ago

In my opinion, the personal threshold of 'making' says more about the remnant era in which you were raised in rather than about the specificity of the act itself? Your grandparents lived in an era where it was common for men to build their own homes. Your parents lived in an era where it was inconceivable for a piece of furniture to not come fully assembled in their per-fabricated home. We now live in an era where homes are made in mass scale and we assemble our own furniture. Did I make an IKEA table? I don't know. I paid for it, drove it home, and assembled the machined parts and added the same size Allen key to my collection. It's certainly not a table without my contribution. But I couldn't have built it myself from scratch. I now tell the computer with the magic words please and thank you because I skimmed a research paper saying it'll be more cooperative in completing my tasks. Did I make a game in unity where I just mishmoshed the preassembled assets together? I don't know. The only difference between IKEA furniture and my game is the permutations of my asset combinations, really.

avilay 2mo ago

I have been grappling with a similar sentiment for a while now. I hate to think of myself as a Luddite, but I love the act of writing code. A blank VS Code in front of me is a beautiful sight full of wonder and possibilities :-) Here is how I rationalize the two - the pride and satisfaction I get from my work depends on how much effort I put in applying some previously acquired specialist knowledge, which itself took some decent amount of effort to acquire. This is why a beginner programmer is just as proud of their temperature convertor as a professional distributed systems engineer of their new 2PC module. A quote that I read somewhere, possibly by Naval Ravikant, strikes at the heart of this - "a creation without a (human) creator is meaningless".

haickernews 2mo ago

This article has a narrow view of "making" which is stuck hopelessly in the past, in my honest opinion. A human in the loop guiding the process is 100% making something, no matter how much you torture the definition of "make." When I write software with Claude, I'm the one with the agency, not Claude. Without me, the software wouldn't even exist. A director "makes" movies. A collage artist "makes" images. A fisherman "makes" a catch. Someone searching YouTube and clicking on a video "makes" a video. These are widely agreed upon definitions, so it should not be controversial to say you "make" software with LLMs.

tmseidman 2mo ago
Someone clicking on a YouTube video makes that video?
orphereus 2mo ago
"I made this company goddamnit, I made all of the iPhones because I had my VPs build factories in China that make iPhones." - imaginary Steve Jobs
globular-toast 2mo ago
But the author doesn't feel like they are making it. I feel the same way if the agent moves too quickly. If I ask for a feature in high-level language the LLM will make many guesses and assumptions to carry that out. I don't feel like I'm involved in the creation of that software at all. It feels more like running a find and replace on someone else's code to make it to what I want. That's why I instruct the LLM at a low level, that is at the level of the code itself. I'll ask for refactors, I'll ask for a new class etc. This cuts down on time spent typing while I still remain on top of the code. At least that's the idea. But there's still a problem. LLMs are trained to want to write working code. If what you asked for won't work, it'll just fill in the blanks and guess to make it work. And then you don't feel like you made it again. Basically, we kid ourselves into thinking it's just a supercharged text editor that we control, but it's actually an LLM that just doesn't work that way.
storkhound 2mo ago
There's a word for what you're doing there: equivocation. > A director "makes" movies. You clearly don't appreciate what that means. It's a deeply creative and involved process, not just waving a film into being with their flapping arms. Moreover, there are dozens to hundreds (or more!) people working as a team on everything from sets to cameras to post-production to ... When we say a director "made" that movie, we don't mean that was the extent of the making, nor do we mean they did no heavy lifting themselves. Neither of those sentiments are true. > A collage artist "makes" images They do! You seem to be trying to equivocate their use of previous components to create a new expression directly with .. well .. not. A more accurate analogy here between software development and the collage artist might be using libraries others have written in your projects from which you create something new. Collage is not the same process or product as directing an LLM. Again, equivocation. > A fisherman "makes" a catch. Words have more than one meaning, but the meanings can be (and in this case, are) divergent. "Synonyms", they are called! Literally equivocating, and entirely meaningless. > Someone searching YouTube and clicking on a video "makes" a video. Literally nobody says this, thinks this, or refers to the act in this way. This is taking equivocation into "making up new meanings from whole cloth" territory. > These are widely agreed upon definitions No, they aren't. You're making an argument hoping it justifies your choices, but mostly just demonstrating you don't understand the words you are using. > so it should not be Your premise is rubbish, so there can be no "so...". If you wish to use LLMs to spit out source code, that's your choice to make. How hard is it for you to just also own the fact that the act is not a creative one, and you are "making" in the same way that a customer delivering a set of requirements to a dev team is "making" software. There ought to be no shame in that if it isn't shameful.

petesergeant 2mo ago

I wrote a very similar article called "The prompt is not the work", which also touches on honesty about creation, and disclaimers on where your contribution lies: https://sgnt.ai/p/prompt-is-not-the-work/ https://sgnt.ai/p/prompt-is-not-the-work/

arximboldi 2mo ago

I sympathise with a lot of the negative and pesimistic sentiment shared here and in other comments and been drowning in some of it over the last few months. However I have slowly been having a shift towards a way more optimistic outlook on the current state of affairs. One side of it is the advent of open-weights models. This alleviates part of my fears, fears of my free software and open-source tools being made irrelevant by black-box machines built by American corporations that absorb infinite capital, with capital gaining infinite power against labour. But the other side, is that I am slowly witnessing how LLM's are not diminishing my value as a software engineer, more on the contrary. I see the outcome of projects that are vibe-coded to oblivion, immediately turning into unmaintainable messes no matter how many tokens you drop into them. Architectural insight, establishing proper processes, properly trading off features, applying engineering restrain, are more important than ever. I see my influence in projects even more crucial than before. Furthermore, the skills that I gained by sculpting code with my bare hands are only gonna become more and more rare, as I belong to one of the last generations that wrote code on their own. I realized this weekend that a good analogy, is that we are like airplane pilots. Modern commercial planes run mostly on auto-pilot; the job of the pilot is nonetheless of uttermost importance, and is remunerated accordingly. We are code pilots with auto-pilot for code, and because of that a small team can build systems with levels of complexity before unimaginable used by thousands or millions of users, and for this reason, our responsibility and impact on projects is greater than ever. I do miss some of the craft. As others wrote here, I can visualize in my head codebases I wrote even two decades ago, I even remember the color scheme of the editor I used for them. This won't happen with the code of the new era. I miss hand-optimizing a clever algorithm, designing elegant abstractions using rare language features, obsessing about a crucial piece of code. I worry about some of my brainpower atrophying. But maybe, if I open my heart to it, there will be good things that come on the other end of all this crazy time. Even if I sometimes feel like I am "just" a manager now, if I look closely, I can notice how I am still an engineer, perhaps, more than ever. And with my intelligence I can build great things, perhaps, greater than ever.

jjice 2mo ago

Captures my feelings as well. I don't get the same joy I used to because I end up using an LLM because it'll be faster. I need to come to terms with speed not taking precedence over fun. The act of writing is something I need to learn to refocus on again without the thought of the "inefficiency" of doing so. I want to feel like I did when I was 13 and writing code in the middle of the night. Beej's writing always impresses me.

fantasizr 2mo ago
steve vai the guitarist talks about how learning and doing the act gives you dignity and self respect for having done something. That's what's being cutout when you just 'prompt' it, be it words, code, or music.

e808 2mo ago

This is definitely something I have been mulling as I 'made' several software projects that I have been tossing around in my head over my lifetime via vibe-coding recently that would have taken me 10x to 100x the time to a MVP, with AI, i can push it way beyond the MVP and enchance and enrich with features I may not have considered without the almost immediate MVP production. What is the end-product value? I definitely have found value for myself since its things that I considered for a while for myself. Others may appreciate the end product. But is the value of the end product the 'original idea'? or the comprehensive prompt to produce it again? the number of tokens it burned to produce the end product? The number hours it took me to work on it to get the end product? (debugging, enchancing, user interface, design)? Answers I dont have, but questions I have been mulling while immensely enjoying being able to produce random ideas I have had in me head for decades fairly quickly.

koinedad 2mo ago

I generally agree. If I build something bigger with smaller AI generated pieces I still built that thing, but even that thing doesn’t feel the same. I’m not as connected to the components that’s for sure. There’s a loss that is occurring

davizao4 2mo ago

[flagged]

julienmarie 2mo ago

Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright etc... don't make buildings but design them. But the buildings are theirs, no question asked. Steve Jobs created the Mac, the IPod, the iPhone. He didn't code or designed any of the PCBs. Painters of the Renaissance had whole workshops with apprentices painting for them. Creating a software is way more than just lines of code. It's understanding a market, a need or a want, it's marketing, it's copywriting. It's defining what to build, what not to build, and envisionning the final form of it. Yes, the individual craftmen who worked on a Frank Lloyd Wright house can all be very proud of their work. They can say I built this roof. I built this wall. I built this waterfall. But the house is undeniably Wright's. What we are all lamenting about is the fear of losing the monopoly of a craft. Which is legitimate. The same way furniture used to be hand crafted by skilled woodworkers, bespoke and expensively, have been replaced by IKEA. Now the skilled woodworkers left are now focusing on the high end of the market. The issue with programming is that clients are companies and the acceptance criteria are binary: does it work or not.

jeffreyrogers 2mo ago

I think some people are drawn to technical careers because they like details and others are drawn to them because they like systems (now people are drawn for money too, but I'm talking about people who are more technically oriented). My theory is that if you are a systems person you find using LLMs fun and fulfilling and if you are a details person you find that they are the opposite. I have an acquaintance who is fairly well known for some of the work he did in computer vision (pre-neural net/deep learning), he's a details guy, and he was telling me how software is boring now because when he was young they were still figuring out how to do tons of things for the first time and now most software is just putting things together that we already know how to do. LLMs seem to be continuing this trend.

never_inline 2mo ago
What if I am a quality person and I am disappointed because LLMs are squandering any remaining commitment to quality in favor of quantity and speed in certain environments?
- jillesvangurp 2mo ago
  Then you might want to spend more time on the quality of your guard rails. It's the best way to ensure LLMs produce higher quality output. To get the best results, you need to get systematic about enforcing what you want. Guardrails are one of the tools for doing that. A lot of developers are acting like passive bystanders here. You can take a more active role in the whole process, including doing quality assurance and correcting LLMs when needed. And like it or not, QA is actually still part of your job. A lot of developers never liked doing QA. The good news is that you can make the LLM do most of that. But it helps if you are a bit opinionated about how to do QA. Again, guardrails. For example, if you care about performance, get systematic about performance testing and tell the LLM to find and fix your performance bottlenecks. I did that with a Go server a few months ago. It was functionally correct but it had a few bottlenecks. So, I generated a benchmark and then made the LLM suggest and implement solutions for all these bottlenecks. Once it had the benchmark, it got good at testing and validating its own solutions. After a few iterations, I had very decent throughput.

marcus_holmes 2mo ago

I think there's a difference between making something because you want the experience of making it, and making something because you want the end product. I make my own furniture. It's not very good furniture. I could probably get better furniture cheaper by just buying it. But I love the experience of making it. I don't write code any more. I used to really enjoy writing code, but mostly code became plumbing together bits of other people's work anyway and I stopped really enjoying it a while back. Having the tool do that for the last six months has been great. I really just want the end product for most of the situations where I would write code. That may change. I might get back into hand-crafting the code for a project. Either way, I make things. I don't see that having the tool write the code invalidates the making part. Writing the code is only a part of the overall process of making an application, and not even the most important part.

vhwalke 2mo ago

I spent the past few weeks building what turned out to be a much bigger project than I thought it would be - with more AI assistance than I've ever had on any project, and I've been thinking about this. In the end, I'm happy with the AI development. The machine laid a lot of bricks. But every judgment that makes the thing itself was mine: which typeface felt right, which historically accurate detail to reject because it hurt readability, what tone the notes should take, what to cut. Some days that feels like making. Some days it feels like being an editor with a very fast staff. Editors are proud of their papers too. The important part: I built it for my mom. She can't tell which lines I typed and which I asked for. She can tell it was made for her. Maybe that's the part that survives every new tool — who it's for. And aside from any question of "pride" .... this project would never have existed without AI support. I wouldn't have had the time. Wouldn't have pushed it to the level of excellence that it shows. And, would have been pulled off to other distractions, projects, and work long before it got over the finish line. It may be a different world. But, I'm all in.

ares623 2mo ago

A thought experiment: Suppose there were two Hacker News's. One version guarantees only 100% human made content and comments, with no LLM in the pipeline at all. The other version is the opposite, only LLM (assisted or 100%) content and comments. Human-only content is disallowed. Which version would you prefer to be part of?

andai 2mo ago

> I gain a lot of fulfillment by making things. I don't consider things built by others at my request to be made by me, and are therefore much less fulfilling. And then I feel sad. I've been wondering about this. Nobody would argue that Peter Jackson didn't make the Lord of the Rings movies, even though he was just telling other people what to do. Though depending on the degree of autonomy you give the AI, you start being less Director and more Producer? (Rick Rubin: "I have no actual musical ability [... only] confidence in my taste.") Not defending either position, just trying to make sense of this strange new world. Yesterday I unplugged the internet for a few hours and spent them programming "the old way", and found it quite painful, but also deeply satisfying. It's kind of like cardio. If I stop doing it for too long, I start to feel a little gross.

zorobo 2mo ago

Old as time itself → https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1595733.Who_Built_the_Pyramid_ https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1595733.Who_Built_the...

andai 2mo ago

> Carpentry: Please replace my front deck. I've been thinking, the way things are going with robotics it won't be long until you can vibe code a house. Arguably you already can, it's just very expensive, because most of the work is done by humans.

hollowturtle 2mo ago

> I did use Claude to learn some basics, like the easiest way to get the data out of a Google Sheet You can still use it like this, it's a super power, using it as a tool it's like wearing the iron man suite. Imo using it to 100% write the code it's like telling bumb ai iron man what to do

allanrbo 2mo ago

Fondly remember Beej's Guide to Network Programming back in the day :-)

maxrimue 2mo ago

I find this topic super interesting because I recently created some side-projects using Claude (not in their entirety, but major parts of them) and felt strangely disconnected to them afterwards, even though they accomplished what I was looking for. That made me think about how AI usage for me should look like in my free time. Maybe what the author is talking about, and what I felt to a degree, is the act of deciding and formulating decisions. Looking at the compiler vs. AI example for machine code, one aspect that immediately stands out to me is that a compiler should deterministically produce consistent outcomes for precise instructions. Claude, on the other hand, will take your instructions, which are likely less precise than code, and "reason" about them. It will produce output that varies each time you would ask it and it will bake in behavior you didn't explicitly ask for. AI makes decisions for you. And maybe that's what makes AI so useful in the first place. One way around this may be to be just as strict with your instructions. Giving AI an exact spec to work with, like large Markdown specs or detailed tests to run against. But then again, if you take the time to formulate those, is it much of a jump to write the code yourself? What's clear is that AI is awesome for helping with issues you can't resolve, or explaining concepts in a personalized way. But letting it make decisions for you prioritizes outcome over creation, and for side-projects you build out of the love for creation, that may just not make sense, just like as a consumer I feel disinterested in "AI art". AI is for products, not for art, and that dumb little idea to work on in the afternoon might just be more art than product.

broccoluvr 2mo ago

yikes

fishbacon 2mo ago

The intro followed immediately by obvious AI slop put me so off that I stopped reading. They may be trying to make a point. But the way they are doing it is off putting.

rjh29 2mo ago
The prose and art is obvious AI slop. If the author somehow thinks that can deceive an intelligent reader then they've lost me already.

ramon156 2mo ago

Only positive thing I can say about LLM assisted projects is how fast you can get from zero to something (but not quite hero). For example, I want to learn more about algorithms for a rubiks cube project. I already read through the speedcubers wiki, and the algorithms you can apply irl (note I am not fast by hand, hence the project). At some point I need to get hands-on with algorithms. I can copy-paste existing algorithms into my project, but it's much more fun to ask GLM 5.2 what it would do, and why. I can reason, ask questions, then throw away the entire chat; having learned something during that session. Doing the same thing by hand would get me blocked at least three times, and would've taken me almost two weeks. This took two days.

relativeadv 2mo ago

Oh boy, my useless art degree is coming in handy here! This is precisely like the authorship debates that occurred when Warhol hit the scene, or Damien Hirst and many others. It goes further back than that. Duchamp and his urinal, renaissance painters and their workshops. On and on, artists making work for other artists and people debating whether the signee is the one who really created it. "Authorship" is the term for this debate. If you choose to side with the modern art establishment, this has been a settled debate for decades. Managing signs, systems, instructions, and context is itself a creative act. If you choose to side with the atelier movement (as one example) it would be a resounding "no". This does not count.

Pigo 2mo ago

I've been trying to rebuild my back deck this summer. I've wasted so much material, cut myself several times, and I was stung by a paper wasp, it has not been going well so far.

jjice 2mo ago
But hopefully you'll feel very accomplished once it's finished and you can enjoy the fruits of your labor!

dosman33 2mo ago

AI is the industrial revolution finally arriving at the land of information and software development, full stop. Read Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope if you want to understand whats happening and see a roadmap of whats ahead. What happened during the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, and financial revolution is already happening to software development. IR brings cheap material goods to everyone in your civilization, not just the elite. Before, only the king and his court could afford to have skilled tradesmen hand-crafting clocks and pocket watches. After the IR, now everyone has a cheap wrist watch available to them for pennies. It doesn't mean everyone has the best stuff, but it raises the quantity of whats practically available to everyone at the base level and it does this cheaply. The timex wrist watch works fine and is only $15. Not everyone has a Rolex, and there will always be a market for artisanally crafted items that predate the IR. A lot of people don't care how the Timex works, they just need to get back to work from lunch on time. There will always be a market for those that desire (and have the money) to have a wrist watch that works the way they want it to work. In the future, artisanally crafted code will matter to some people who understand code. Most people just need a program to do the thing. Humans will still be able to outperform AI when it comes to making clever, compact, and beautiful code. Go to any local pottery show if you want to see the future. Everyone already has IR manufactured cups, plates, and silverware at home. Yet people still go out and buy hand-crafted versions of these items because they have more character in various dimensions they care about. On the downside, everything will become slop. But it increases the slop available to everyone, while smaller numbers of those who care will still buy artisinally crafted code. But there's another downside too that Quigley talks about: the arrival of the railroad at your previously isolated village. Suddenly now you have food, medicine and people arriving at a far greater pace. Your towns demographic suddenly starts to shift as your townspeople start to live longer as knowledge can instantly penetrate from the outside world. People can leave much easier too which facilitates brain drain. The railroad brings the industrial revolution to your door. The countries that survived the best were the ones that created these revolutions and then exported them. If the railroad did not originate from your country then the railroad arrived at your doorstep quite literally before you were ready for it. I don't fully understand what this means for AI, but I'm certain this is part of the reason the US is trying to lead the charge. You absolutely do not want the railroad arriving at your doorstep: you want to be the one pushing the railroad out to your neighbors. The only guarantee is change whether you want it or not. If you want some control over that change then you had better be driving the change rather than just reacting to it.

Willish42 2mo ago

I think another aspect is the deep understanding one gains from building the thing, and the idea of the thing being entirely the creator's and translated into "reality" through some kind of physical or mental labor. An author of fiction prose would have their vision in their mind or some other ideas of what the prose "should" be, and then created it with their own word choice, and tools. Similar for visual art. This applies even if parts of the creative vision were improvised while the creation was happening, but it started in the creator's mind and if faced with the final product, they could remember the small details and understand the work that went into it. I think if I'm honest about when I look at LLM output for code, it feels close to a code review of code written by another person, where I spend a decent amount of cognitive effort figuring out those similar small details in reverse, without knowledge or memory of the specific motivations. And furthermore, if I were to read every single line of code, word in a written work, and pixel or brush stroke in visual art of some kind, it would feel like an artificial understanding, rather than something I can fully sign my name to as a thing I understood the ins and outs of while creating it. I fully get that some people don't care about this, and see themselves more as "designers", but I think those are the same sorts of people who if given a choice, would rather "build" by leading a team of people and claiming credit for "building" as part of their leadership, rather than by doing it themselves by hand and getting a sense of fulfillment from that effort. Also, "agentic" workflows feel a bit like giving up even the leading / designing aspects. With Claude specifically, I'm often impressed (albeit other times often frustrated too) by the small design choices it made while building the code that I hadn't explicitly asked for but end up preferring once I see the output. This to me indicates I didn't really build it