[xandrius]

There is fun in what you use something for and doing the something.

I think there is a big divide between people who just love making different tools from scratch by hand and the rest who love being able to instantly whip up a new tool in minutes AND THEN use it to create something fun.

I literally would never ever in my existence be interested in making a compiler if I had nothing to use it for. If I ever wanted to make a cool program which uses that compiler then whether the compiler came into being thanks to a wizard, my enjoyment wouldn't change a single bit.

[tombert]

Yeah no argument here.

In typical tombert fashion, when making an NES game I ended up getting much more obsessed with the tooling around the project than the core project, so when I got it to generate a Forth compiler, I fell down a rabbit hole of learning how compilers work and then feeling cheated out of the actual work.

That said, I'm not a complete luddite here; I wanted a proper comment system on my blog recently, and I don't care enough about web stuff to actually build it myself. I could have used an off the shelf thing but those usually come with a bunch of bullshit involving accounts and the like, so instead I got Codex to build one for me and deploy it and it works fine.

[nz]

I know what will blow your socks off: package managers. They are kind of like magical wizards that can make fully operational software appear on your machine. Want a scheme compiler? Just `nix-shell -p racket`. Want common lisp? `nix-shell -p sbcl`. It works like a charm every time.

[xandrius]

Sure but I can now create a subset of those packages which fit 100% my use case.

Also I don't know what you're arguing for, I was just saying that spending most of the time making tools without doing anything with them is not the only way for a developer to feel satisfied.

[nz]

I am just pointing out that `program that can make other well specified and understood programs appear on my machine` is not exactly novel. In fact, not only has the entire open source ecosystem been relying on such programs, but they in fact _inspired_ the various app-stores in the 2000s (package management was one of the killer features of linux for a long time).

Yet, people keep holding this up as a particularly novel aspect of LLMs, and it makes them sound like they have never seen or used a package manager, or a container, or a VM. For some bizarre reason, in spite of being augmented with a machine that knows everything about marketing, sales, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, etc, programmers are consistently failing to market their new favorite tool. This is embarrassing, and it does not inspire confidence in that class of people that control so much of the economy[0].

What they _should_ be excited about is: I/you/we can now use this "zooming"[1] package manager to make software appear on my machine (or inside my program), and I can now fearlessly[2] fork these "packages", without incurring as much technical debt, and without having to convince the maintainer to upstream my changes.

This is of course, for now, a bit of an exaggeration. But it is certainly true that the "software supply chain", is the _opposite_ of elegant (for example, making a webapp is needlessly difficult for a beginner), and LLMs can help you navigate and understand different parts of that supply chain more quickly.

[0]: Why is most LLM marketing based on fear and shame and exaggeration? You would think that we would use these pocket-geniuses to actually do _ethical_ marketing, because the cost of that should be going down as a result.

[1]: It works at all scales of abstraction.

[2]: You can even violate licenses and patents without any fear now. The _real_ killer feature of LLMs (not for me, but for the industry at large), is that they let the tech-oligarchy capture a larger share of the economic surplus, without breaking the law[3]. In fact, this is how the software industry has always operated. Remember, software's job is to eat the world (to paraphrase Andreesen). But even more so, this is how unregulated _markets_ have always operated! Everyone needs to always defend and grow the share of surplus that they control, in order to survive. This means that the "meta" of the unregulated-market-game is to make yourself into as much of a bottleneck as humanly possible. In graph-theory, this corresponds to maximizing your _betweenness centrality_. In economics and law, they call a 100% betweenness centrality, a monopoly. In fact, one SV oligarch (Thiel), has said: "the goal is monopoly"!

[3]: As usual, the wealthiest will be impossible to sue for infringement, whereas now, the entire open source ecosystem is tainted, unless you are using software that has not been updated since 2023. In some sense, patent trolling is back, it just has extra steps now. I will let you (plural) infer the implications of this.

[lolsowrong]

I agree there’s a big divide. I think I’m also team “let people do things they enjoy.”

I like using computers to solve problems. I’m more interested in the problem being solved than the journey most of the time, though I’ve also been on some lovely journeys. Sometimes that means I write a tool all by myself. Sometimes it means I download an existing open source tool. And sometimes it means I delegate the creation to an AI model.