Freedom of speech exists to protect politically useful tools. That means the nazis and the Klan so long as they remain such. When they are no longer useful, the protection will pass to another useful tool.
Define crazy. Because you sound crazy to me. The point of view depends on where you sit. Some other people maybe want to put you in prison, for your „craziness“. Care for what you wish.
The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine.
Instead of satisfaction of solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity, you babysit a text extruder and slog through mistakes in its generated output.
Arguably this may make software cheaper to make and accessible to non-programmers, but for people who liked their job it's like being demoted from a restaurant chef to a microwave button pusher.
> The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine.
Many tech/software people were completely unsympathetic if not downright arrogant when their products displaced people in other professions who felt the same way.
The lesson here is that ultimately, change comes for everyone.
This also perfectly describes the career change from software engineer to engineering manager.
Instead of solving things yourself, you need to learn how to describe them in a way others can solve them. Otherwise you will just be fighting the instinct to just do it yourself.
At least as a software manager you get the satisfaction of helping another human being develop in their own career. I doubt making Claude Code less prone to certain kinds of fuckups is quite as rewarding.
Meh. Since when "typing" implies "solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity". The "solving" and the "creativity" happen in your head while "typing" is a manual labor. I can contemplate multiple problems at the same time but I can only type one thing at a time. Writing code is like 10% of my programming job. I take an LLM to do the typing for me any day. I still solve challenging problems. Because my secret skill isn't typing, you see. Yeah, call it "dismissive".
You must truly have no love for your craft if you see "manually" writing code as _just_ typing. That's like calling writing a novel just dragging ink over paper.
Yeah, sure. We both know it’s not black and white. Like all of you write rocket ship software. You’re all funny. Heads too far up your asses. What fucking craft are you talking about “implement this html and css exactly like described in the ticket”, or “write this deployment pipeline for that client for the 50th time”, or “implement authentication for the 15th time this year”. Really fucking novel stuff. Craft my ass.
Not going to bother responding to most of that as it does not warrant a response, but I would point out that the word craft does not imply novelty or uniqueness.
In many cases the really key idea that transforms the overall system design comes from working closely on the specific implementation details. Maybe you don't redesign the system this time, but you saw how you might do it, and you get ideas about how to do it the next time. The craft involves a back-and-forth between different levels of abstraction, and cutting that link does feel like we're sacrificing something.
Yeah, you do it every day for money, right? And someone is paying you for that? Dude, people designed ships, aircrafts, the shuttle with a ruler and a pencil, today people use CAD and CFD because it’s cheaper and better but people still know how to use the ruler and pencil! At least those who want to know, know. But not everything has to be designed with the ruler and the pencil. Be the guy who presses buttons, and knows how to use the ruler and the pencil!
It’s different, because in our field we’re often learning or doing new things, as opposed to merely rehashing the exact same thing we’ve done before.
I find it very difficult to learn a new thing by reading it, vs by doing it.
And indeed, most mathematicians, who do get paid to do math, work a lot with pencil and paper. If math is secondary to your job, you likely will not, but if it’s your primary job, you likely spend a lot of time working ideas out in the more primitive fashion.
> I find it very difficult to learn a new thing by reading it, vs by doing it.
The whole point of the discussion about LLMs in our field is exactly what you say. Yes, we do often find ourselves doing new things. They are exciting the first and the second time we do them. Later they become a chore.
When you’re doing something that requires a lot of typing for the 17th time… why! Like, how many times are you going to write that golang http server scaffold. Or, how many times are you going to create that new terraform project with those same modules. I hear people say “oh yeah, write a generator”. To which my answer is: do you have a budget for it, or do I need to invest my own time.
It’s possible to guard the model so that it acts according to your expectations. Just invest the time in that tooling. It’s as exciting as any other problem. You learn the domain by writing software guardrails, your effort results in a software analysis of the business domain problem. It’s a much more valuable and rewarding work than writing some code.
Nah, they want to think beyond the superficial prompting level. A lot of real programmers feel exactly the same.
It is hard to notice this sometimes on HN because this site is rife with the very idea-man-VC-pilled-finance-bro-pseudo-hackers that over the past 15-20 years have turned the tech industry from one of optimism for a brighter future to one that most normal people now distrust and hate.
Exactly. I work on line of business stuff, not curing world hunger or reinventing the train. One of the few sources of joy in the job is the brain teaser/puzzle of understanding clever bits of code and writing it too. Now you can just shit out massive volumes of basic code that does the job, which is all you really need for a standard corporate software product, and it can do it multiple times faster than I can so I have no choice but to use it. Well at least my shares are looking good.
Well, it's your words against his. You're not much of an expert by your own account in other comments. It's irrelevant if it's from a correct geological period, it's a rock hard seashell. Go and read up the definition of "fossil".
All of those things matter. One needs to be able to judge the solution in order to make a judgement if it is fine, or not. Why yes, and why no. No matter who you export the typing process to. LLMs are just tools speeding up the typing process.
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