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From an ego perspective, the artisan craft of programming basically being dead at this point makes me sad, having spent so much of my life getting good at it (o
by lisplist 7d ago
From an ego perspective, the artisan craft of programming basically being dead at this point makes me sad, having spent so much of my life getting good at it (or at least trying to).
From technological enthusiast perspective - if you can't find an endless stream of uses for this technology, I really don't know what to tell you anymore. I gave credence to AI naysayers for a while, but at this point I feel like its akin to denying gravity exists.
Who are we to gatekeep software development? So many people have gained the ability to interact with computers in ways they never dreamed of before! For me, I've never felt so engaged in software development, even if I'm no longer writing it line by line.
Like you say, there are a lot of negative externalities to this technology, but its something we're going to have to solve rather than dismissing it outright. The industrial revolution caused all sorts of problems! But you can't argue we're worse off because of it.
- Pannoniae 7d agoI don't think it's dead if you have a market which values high-quality, artisanal products. Sure, artisanal code in itself isn't something inherently sellable but if you pride your program on being a quality product then it's still valuable for others:) AI is basically the new JavaScript in a way.It won't create the next Linux or the next SQLite by itself.
- hombre_fatal 7d agoThat's separate from LLM usage though. By this point, if you care about a quality product, you should learn how to leverage LLMs for that like running automated audits for correctness and performance opportunities. There isn't a market for "yeah there's a memory leak but I wrote it by hand."
- Pannoniae 7d agoFair enough, but as things stand now, the usual LLM-assisted piece of software is usually also partly or wholly LLM-designed too. Not just implemented on a function level or a file level. And LLM design is usually called "slop" because it's nothing spectacular unless you bring fresh ideas to it from a human perspective. Hand-written memory leaks don't have a market but hand-designed software with hand-designed UX and a hand-designed vision does :)
- hombre_fatal 7d agoI'm generally impressed with the code that Fable/Opus is writing for me these days; I would be proud to have had the same foresight had I implemented the solution myself. And Fable's architectural design is pretty much always well-reasoned and a good place to start. There's this idea that the best way to use LLMs is to be in the backseat constantly yelling out corrections, but that hasn't been true in my experience for quite some time, though I only use a few sota models. I think something being slop this late in the game is mainly a reflection of the person using it. I can't really blame AI anymore when pretty much any lever you'd recommend to de-slop it is one prompt away. I agree with your last bit, and that is the only thing left now that AI solved the technical part.
- brabel 7d agoYep! We run security reviews on our pull requests now and are shocked at how it stops a lot of vulnerabilities being shipped. We've had a couple of high score CVEs from the before-LLM times, and when the AI reviews the code that introduced the CVEs, it easily picks them up. We had 2 humans reviewing every PR, and both missed the issues. It's far too easy to miss security issues when you manually review them, but LLMs are exceptionally good at finding them. Unfortunately for me, I admit, I just can't get myself to push code anymore without an LLM checking my work (or writing much of it when I'm at work, I try to write code by hand in my own time to make sure I don't rust away, but at work there's no way to justify doing it the "slow" way anymore).
- GeoAtreides 7d ago>if you can't find an endless stream of uses for this technology, it's the endless stream of employment that's getting harder/impossible to find...