3 ms·

I can't decide how I feel about this article. On one hand, it's great. It's great that the author wanted to get something done, and thanks to the marvels of mod

I can't decide how I feel about this article. On one hand, it's great. It's great that the author wanted to get something done, and thanks to the marvels of modern tech, they could do it with very little effort. But on the other hand... gosh, this was about the simplest software engineering challenge imaginable (toggle some I/O pins) and the simplest design task imaginable (make a featureless rectangular box). And the author - a technologist! - isn't just saying "I wanted to try out some new tech". They're saying "this was too hard, I needed help from an LLM" ("would absolutely not be able to meet this challenge", "hit another wall"). And that... I mean, I just don't know what to make of this. Were we always like this? Are LLMs making us like this? Is it good? Is it bad?... and don't give me the calculator analogy...

lee_ars 2mo ago
To be fair, I did the research, the BOM, the systemd service and timers, the packaging, most of the installer, and the deployment pipeline myself. It's just the python and the Fusion modeling I needed LLM help with. Coding beyond bash scripting is just not something I'm good at, and at 48, I've kind of accepted that it's not ever going to be no matter how hard I try.
Retr0id 2mo ago
Edit: retracted, but left up for context The article itself appears to have had help from an LLM, too.
- jherskovic 2mo ago
  Go look at the editorial policy from Ars. Lee just writes like that; it's his style, it always has been.
- lee_ars 2mo ago
  nope. i was using em-dashes and semicolons before they were cool.
  - Retr0id 2mo ago
    I believe you (and sorry, I do think I was wrong), but for the record I wasn't judging based on punctuation.
    - lee_ars 2mo ago
      Look at it this way: LLMs are trained, among other things, on quality professional prose. I've been writing for Ars for almost 14 years at this point. I don't sound like LLMs. LLMs sound like _me,_ lol.
      - adamisom 2mo ago
        fwiw the article doesn't sound LLM to me whatsoever, so opinions def vary!
system2 2mo ago
The line between programmers/SWE people and non-programmers got blurred thanks to LLMs.
krabizzwainch 2mo ago
I have been stuck mentally on this article since it came out. Like, learning enough python to send the time to the display would still have made this a weekend project (I even went and found an adafruit 7 segment pi hat site and read their sample code). The effort is the interesting part to me, I want to read janky code that paints some kind a picture of someone learning. I don't care about finished, "polished" projects. I don't care that AI can know every single possible error that'll pop up and prevent it from happening, I want the clock to break and for the maker to say ohhhh yeah oops thats dumb. I have had an eInk pi weather display in my living room for like 4 years now, pulling data from openweatherapi every half hour. It's my second favorite project (I made an eReader once... if you like waiting 5 seconds for a page to turn, do I have a product for you!) and I use it every single day. Sometimes it doesn't update when I didn't account for a possibility I didn't know about, and thats okay. I get that this is someone writing for money and I have no experience in that realm, and I'm sure conde nast prefers faster writing for something less in depth... but I almost feel I should spend my monthly $3 elsewhere.
- lee_ars 2mo ago
  > I get that this is someone writing for money and I have no experience in that realm, and I'm sure conde nast prefers faster writing for something less in depth... FWIW, Conde has no input on my work. Conde is the machine that provides HR and legal and payroll. Ars is a more or less self-contained world and since I got kicked into management a few years back, my output is my own. I wrote this up because this is how the project unfolded; no one assigned it to me or said I needed to write a July story to make a quota. It was fun. I did the write-up because it felt like an Ars-y thing to write up. Definitely heard re: wanting to stumble through things and see the warts, but I have to disagree on the "learning enough python to make this work would still have been a weekend project." That's simply not true—if it were, I would have done it. But it's not like the project didn't require effort. I put in considerable time on the parts that weren't python coding and CAD. Planning out and setting up the systemd service and timers, packaging up the service to ensure the thing was running under a properly isolated service account context, writing the installer, setting up the deployment pipeline—I didn't want to do the usual lazy thing I see so often and just take a barely functional mess of conflicting dependencies and shove them into a docker container and say "Here, this works on my computer, your problem now." But like I said elsewhere in the thread, at 48 I'm old enough and ossified enough that I've come to accept that coding is simply not a skill I've got in me, and cranking out even something relatively simple like this project is going to be impossible for me without help. I've tried, too—I've bootstrapped myself through code academies, tried DIY courses, thrown myself into code-adjacent weekend projects, and otherwise tried to get to some level of mastery past "hello world," and I just kinda....suck. I bounced off of coding 30 years ago in college, I've bounced off it professionally for anything more than simple bash scripting, and I've bounced off of it in hobbies. I don't know if it's that my english major brain just doesn't do well in chopping problems down into small enough chunks or what—but I know after a lifetime that it's something I'm never going to be able to do. That and bowling. Never scored over 100 in a game in my life, and likely at this point never will. Some things are just beyond my reach.

lee_ars 2mo ago

To be fair, I did the research, the BOM, the systemd service and timers, the packaging, most of the installer, and the deployment pipeline myself. It's just the python and the Fusion modeling I needed LLM help with. Coding beyond bash scripting is just not something I'm good at, and at 48, I've kind of accepted that it's not ever going to be no matter how hard I try.

Retr0id 2mo ago

Edit: retracted, but left up for context The article itself appears to have had help from an LLM, too.

jherskovic 2mo ago
Go look at the editorial policy from Ars. Lee just writes like that; it's his style, it always has been.
lee_ars 2mo ago
nope. i was using em-dashes and semicolons before they were cool.
- Retr0id 2mo ago
  I believe you (and sorry, I do think I was wrong), but for the record I wasn't judging based on punctuation.
  - lee_ars 2mo ago
    Look at it this way: LLMs are trained, among other things, on quality professional prose. I've been writing for Ars for almost 14 years at this point. I don't sound like LLMs. LLMs sound like _me,_ lol.
    - adamisom 2mo ago
      fwiw the article doesn't sound LLM to me whatsoever, so opinions def vary!

system2 2mo ago

The line between programmers/SWE people and non-programmers got blurred thanks to LLMs.

krabizzwainch 2mo ago

I have been stuck mentally on this article since it came out. Like, learning enough python to send the time to the display would still have made this a weekend project (I even went and found an adafruit 7 segment pi hat site and read their sample code). The effort is the interesting part to me, I want to read janky code that paints some kind a picture of someone learning. I don't care about finished, "polished" projects. I don't care that AI can know every single possible error that'll pop up and prevent it from happening, I want the clock to break and for the maker to say ohhhh yeah oops thats dumb. I have had an eInk pi weather display in my living room for like 4 years now, pulling data from openweatherapi every half hour. It's my second favorite project (I made an eReader once... if you like waiting 5 seconds for a page to turn, do I have a product for you!) and I use it every single day. Sometimes it doesn't update when I didn't account for a possibility I didn't know about, and thats okay. I get that this is someone writing for money and I have no experience in that realm, and I'm sure conde nast prefers faster writing for something less in depth... but I almost feel I should spend my monthly $3 elsewhere.

lee_ars 2mo ago
> I get that this is someone writing for money and I have no experience in that realm, and I'm sure conde nast prefers faster writing for something less in depth... FWIW, Conde has no input on my work. Conde is the machine that provides HR and legal and payroll. Ars is a more or less self-contained world and since I got kicked into management a few years back, my output is my own. I wrote this up because this is how the project unfolded; no one assigned it to me or said I needed to write a July story to make a quota. It was fun. I did the write-up because it felt like an Ars-y thing to write up. Definitely heard re: wanting to stumble through things and see the warts, but I have to disagree on the "learning enough python to make this work would still have been a weekend project." That's simply not true—if it were, I would have done it. But it's not like the project didn't require effort. I put in considerable time on the parts that weren't python coding and CAD. Planning out and setting up the systemd service and timers, packaging up the service to ensure the thing was running under a properly isolated service account context, writing the installer, setting up the deployment pipeline—I didn't want to do the usual lazy thing I see so often and just take a barely functional mess of conflicting dependencies and shove them into a docker container and say "Here, this works on my computer, your problem now." But like I said elsewhere in the thread, at 48 I'm old enough and ossified enough that I've come to accept that coding is simply not a skill I've got in me, and cranking out even something relatively simple like this project is going to be impossible for me without help. I've tried, too—I've bootstrapped myself through code academies, tried DIY courses, thrown myself into code-adjacent weekend projects, and otherwise tried to get to some level of mastery past "hello world," and I just kinda....suck. I bounced off of coding 30 years ago in college, I've bounced off it professionally for anything more than simple bash scripting, and I've bounced off of it in hobbies. I don't know if it's that my english major brain just doesn't do well in chopping problems down into small enough chunks or what—but I know after a lifetime that it's something I'm never going to be able to do. That and bowling. Never scored over 100 in a game in my life, and likely at this point never will. Some things are just beyond my reach.