[dimator]

I read somewhere (in the myriad blog posts dealing with this Cambrian LLM explosion) that software developers could be put into two camps: those that just want the thing to exist, and those that want to build and understand the thing (in addition to wanting it to exist).

those in the first camp are having a great time.

those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are wary and suspicious.

it is somewhat paradoxical, we've watched/read sci-fi/cyberpunk for years and dreamed of this kind of world. after all, when did you see any members of the Enterprise writing code? they just asked the computer to "write a subroutine" and that was that. what a world!

but here we are, with the craft in danger, not entirely impressed by the idea of "just ask and walk away".

i, too, fear for my loss of critical thinking, raw skills, and design sense, as do i think about being one of the few (in 2, 3, 5, 10 years) that didn't abdicate their cognition, their craft, to the tech overlords.

but i wonder if it will matter anyway. i wonder if "source code" will be a deep abstraction that nobody thinks about anyway, similar to how 99% of us don't care/need to care what the machine code we're eventually emitting does or looks like.

in any case, i'll keep my thinking for now.

[latexr]

> I read somewhere (…) that software developers could be put into two camps (…)

Surely you read it more than once, because that has become a talking point. It’s a false dichotomy that, you’ll notice, is most often used by the people who put themselves in the first camp to steer the conversation. By framing it as “there are two camps, it’s just different, none of them is better”, it lends legitimacy to their position.

You don't have to pick one camp over the other. Good, high quality craft makes good products.

> after all, when did you see any members of the Enterprise writing code?

When did you see anyone in any media taking a dump, or sleeping, or doing any of the boring bits? Rarely, because if it’s not relevant to the story they don’t show it, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

I’m more of a DS9 fan, and I remember them having computer problems all the time. O’Brien, despite being highly competent and the chief of engineering with a team, was constantly overworked.

And their computers were infinitely superior to the LLMs we have now. When they gave you an answer, you could be confident it was correct. And if they didn’t know, they’d tell you!

[viccis]

I'm in the second camp.

Part of it's that the whole point of going into this industry is that I love coding and have been doing it since I was 8. Part of it is that I'm a control freak and it makes me uncomfortable to have to trust AI generated code. Sure, I already trust interpreters and compilers, but those are much more deterministic, and they don't generally do anything I have to be wary of. Part of it is that anytime I've used Claude to write stuff (using Opus 4.7 via an API key), I've had to handhold it when doing simple things (telling it repeatedly that a given column doesn't exist in Snowflake's task history table and eventually just giving up and taking it out by hand) and had to remove tons of completely pointless Python code it generates. The big difference is that the people in the first camp don't seem to care enough to check. Someone at my company used Claude to write 20k lines of code this past Friday. No way he read and scrutinized all of that in one day.

The other big thing I've noticed is that a lot of the people using it extensively seem to just be spitting out API endpoint after endpoint. Just doing endless CRUD with some light business logic. Yeah, it's not too hard to automate that with AI without any major issues. Hell, back when Ruby on Rails was hot, it was so fast to write those kinds of things with it that I could spin up things as fast as AI is doing now. Full websites or APIs in an hour or two because its syntactic sugar and scaffolding did what AI does with the FastAPI codebases I see these days. You could go from an ER diagram to a working app in minutes sometimes. I don't care that much if that kind of work is automated.

[geir_isene]

I was in the second camp until last summer, having been hand-writing code since 1979.

[viccis]

Yeah I mean that's the point at which cognitive decline and retirement kind of change the calculus.

[ptnpzwqd]

I think a notable difference is that the AI that is portrayed in most sci-fi (that I have read/watched anyway) tend to be "logical machines" that act deterministically based on the data available to them.

What we got are "statistical machines" that tend to do the right thing under the right conditions, but can go completely off the rail every now and then.

The former are more akin to a generalization of computers as we typically think of it, whereas the latter is something else. Maybe that something else is closer to human behavior in some ways, but also so very different - unlike humans, where you get to know people, build relationships, know who to trust in what ways, and so forth, you can never really trust an LLM with any critical tasks without close supervision.

[danparsonson]

I feel like using an LLM to do serious work is a bit like us using our brains language centre for the same job - like a very elaborate collection of stock phrases. I'm impressed that it works at all but it doesn't really feel like the right tool for the job. I think the robot of the future will have some more logical cortex doing the thinking, with an LLM in front of it handling the communication.

[cyclopeanutopia]

People who watch/read cyberpunk and dream about living in such a world are way beyond stupid. :(

[theshrike79]

I kinda like the woodworking analogy of this.

I, in theory, can plane a piece of wood with a hand planer. But I'll never do it again, we did it at school in ye olden times before the millennium and it was boring then as it is boring now.

I know people who get satisfaction from it, they take one sliver off with the hand planer, feel the wood with their hand and figure out the perfect angle for the next tiny sliver of wood to come out off, repeating the process over and over again.

I, personally, will just feed the damn plank to a mechanical planer with the exact specs of the resulting board set up. I just want the board smooth so I can get to the next step of the process. I'm not doubting the "wood-slop" the machine produces, I can see and measure if it's good enough or not. I don't need to be involved in the process.

We're both making a table, mine will be done faster. It might not be hand-crafted to perfection, but it will hold the stuff I intend to put on it just fine. If I find out it sucks later on, I can make a new one that's slightly better or fix the existing one. My goal was a functional product, not a piece of handcrafted art.

[dimator]

Your analogy is not really apples to apples though, is it?

More close is: if there was a table making machine, you just push a button and something like a table comes out, would you still be a woodworker? You haven't planed, nor measured, nor cut, nor jointed, you've only pressed on "make me a table"

[theshrike79]

And I wouldn't claim I was a woodworker. But I might be a "furniture designer", if I can adjust the parameters of what kind of table it plops out.

[yuye]

I don't think the analogy works. You're focusing on the "how", not the "what". Using a mechanical planer, you still need to dial in numbers yourself. You design your own table, the more modern tools just make it easier to realize your vision.

Another example: I enjoy writing with a good pen. But whether I write by pen or on a keyboard, it's still me writing it.

However, AI does basically all the real work, only leaving you to guide it. Make a table? AI gives you one with 2 legs. More legs? Guess I can live with 5 legs.

And you wouldn't be making that table, AI is. You cannot have pride in something that you never made yourself. It's the same as 3D-printing something from Thingiverse and claiming you made it.

People who create AI blog posts are not writing. Those that prompt their way to a piece of software are not doing software engineering. The ones that generate AI images are not being artists.

[theshrike79]

Yea, it's not a perfect analogy =) I've been trying to figure out the perfect one, but the one that hits most would need to be done as a comic strip format - and I can't draw for shit and refuse to use AI for it. Maybe one day.

It all depends on the view you take on the thing. What real problem are you solving? If the problem is "I need a table for X", both ways solve it. How the problem is solved is secondary.

I don't need pride in "making it myself", what I get pride in is "I solved this problem". Printing something out of Thingiverse still solves the problem, as does buying something ready-made. For me, personally, the means doesn't matter - I get zero dopamine in doing something the hard way, quite the opposite.

As for the writing, there are actual studies that writing by hand activates different parts of your brain than typing.

[yuye]

>I don't need pride in "making it myself", what I get pride in is "I solved this problem"

Except you didn't solve the problem. Yes, the problem was solved, but not by you.

When I was in high school, the school library had a "Where's Waldo" book. Someone has taken a red marker and marked with big red arrows where Waldo was on every page.

The problem was solved, but I found no pleasure in it.

>Printing something out of Thingiverse still solves the problem, as does buying something ready-made.

That's a good point. If my motorcycle has a broken spark plug, I won't create my own. I'll go to the store and buy a new one. I've solved the problem.

I could also take it to the mechanic and get it replaced there. Much like the Where's Waldo book, the problem has been solved for me.

>As for the writing, there are actual studies that writing by hand activates different parts of your brain than typing.

Doesn't matter, the final product is still your own work.

[geir_isene]

On this; I think we may just have to let go of pride & kudos and their connection to our identity.