[jmward01]

Wow. To me the point of code has always been the crazy ideas and playing around. I love to create just for me and every once in a while for others is ok too. If you only think of code as 'a tool to build useful things' and everything else as wasted then sure, this is the philosophy for you. However, creating a bunch of random not going to follow up on it but I explored and played moments seems like a plus and not a negative to me.

[mrkeen]

OP paid a machine to have those moments instead of him.

[onel]

Yeah that's a good point. With these side projects, the pleasure is in the tinkering, and just playing around with an idea

[hparadiz]

As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow?

Ya'll need to stop with this cope. It's not a good look.

[JoshTriplett]

> As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow?

Many of the people who are complaining about AI vibecoding today also didn't blindly copy/paste from StackOverflow in the past.

[hparadiz]

I'm sure they were blindly accepting the Assembly coming out of the compiler.

[VorpalWay]

I don't really see this as analogous. Yes, you do choose an abstraction level to operate at, I rarely think in terms of transistors, or even gates (which by your logic an assembly programmer should do).

But I often do think across adjacent abstraction levels, because abstractions are (varying levels of) leaky. Modern compilers are after many decades good enough and modern computers fast enough that it is rare that I need to dig into the assembly (but I happens, compiler explorer is in my bookmark bar in Firefox).

Other abstractions are far leakier, it is far more common that I look in wireshark to debug network issues, the application level view is often not enough.

One of the leakiest abstractions currently is LLMs. Maybe in a decade or three they will be good enough, but they aren't yet, that's for sure. At least for the hard realtime systems level programming I do. For code generation they often make enough mistakes that the time spent after review and fixes comes out in the wash, even for simple tools. Their use for bug finding, RAG and similar is however promising.

[hparadiz]

My lived experience over the past few months is proving you wrong. I started with your position and have since been able to see how good the tools are when properly used. I've also noticed a huge gap in ability among engineers and I think the gap is widening. My theory is that some folks have the premium tools and some don't and the ones that don't are sort of in this weird limbo where they are sort of stubbornly annoyed at the idea of having to pay for these things so they lash out. Understandable but ultimately self defeating. You can in-fact force the LLM to use any pattern you want. I encountered this recently with a hand made framework I wanted to upgrade. It did stuff I didn't like. But well guess what? I provided it new constraints and it started to do what I want. Be as opinionated as you want. That's the whole point. It's basically your intern.

[lelanthran]

> I'm sure they were blindly accepting the Assembly coming out of the compiler.

The fact that you consider deterministic output from a compiler the same as probabilistic output from a LLM makes me think you don't know how either of those things work, even at a very superficial level.

[AlotOfReading]

Compilers are orders of magnitude more reliable than LLMs. There's a reason the saying is "it's not a compiler error".

I have a standing challenge to my co-workers that valid compiler errors will be rewarded like a birthday party, with the baked goods, alcohol, or sweets of their choice. It's only been redeemed once, and I've found less than a dozen unreported compiler bugs myself.

[skydhash]

Where do you think those bugs reports for gcc and others come from? Some people do look at the assembly coming out of the compilers.

Currently the openbsd mailing list for port is currently going through a clang update and one of the main point is looking at all the packages that failed to build. I even took a long look at the usb stack and the audio subsystem of OpenBSD because of an issue I was having with my DAC.

[hparadiz]

I literally do packaging for a living and you are misunderstanding my point. Most people just take a binary and run it. There's no analysis of the assembly code. You might profile it and bench it after the fact but no one is sitting there looking at the assembly line by line unless there's a very very good reason and frankly LLMs are better at that type of investigative work. I know because I've been investigating some curious 1 in 100,000 segfaults recently and guess what? It took an LLM to build a tool to let us even hit that bug because it was basically impossible to do by hand and no one in the before times would have sat down to write the tool cause we would not have time so we would have just accepted that 1 in 100,000 requests are segfaulting. At least now I can actually fix the problem.

[ZyanWu]

> out of the compiler

You mean a source that's been tested on billions of PCs over 45+ years?

As opposed to a LLM which outputs code that barely works on my machine™?

[witx]

If you think that's a good analogy you're in the wronf industry ....

[throwatdem12311]

Once you reach a certain skill level you really didn’t ever visit SO anymore. I basically just live in Postgres, Redis, Ruby and Rails documentation. Still do.

[hparadiz]

SO was just an example. If you try to tell me you've never copied/pasted code before I know you are lying.

[VorpalWay]

I don't think I was ever able to straight copy and paste from SO, everything needs adaptation, and code can often be simplified. And you need to understand your code. SO was useful, but nothing could be used copy pasted.

Maybe this is not the case if you are doing a dozen throwaway websites, but for anything serious that is an absolute requirement. I work in hard realtime safety critical code, think things like brake controllers, medical devices, auto pilots, etc. In my case industrial control systems. You need to have full control and documentation for your development process.

[ygjb]

I agree with the notion it's an age thing, but not because I am old, but because the tools are different. When I was learning to program as a kid I blindly 'copied and pasted' from computer magazine. I typed everything in, not understanding what I was doing, and made mistakes. Then came the tedious problem of figuring why the code didn't work. What was the syntax error? Why was it wrong? Why did the computer crash when I poked the wrong memory address?

I learned to debug and built comprehension by typing it in, and built it as a practice. Later in life and career I learned the value of transcription rather than copying and pasting because it at the very least forced me to read and write what I was copying, and built the base and familiarity I needed to learn from what I was copying.

That extends to how I use AI today. I use AI tooling to explore the concept of what I am building, use spec based designs to build solid outlines, and scope individual coding sessions, so that even when I use AI to build it, I have read, edited, and managed the design, and when I run into parts that I don't consider boilerplate I treat it the same way, transcribe what was attempted to understand why it was failing, and make sure I understand what the AI is doing that I haven't done before.

[hparadiz]

Most code we write is boiler plate nonsense. Writing out React components manually doesn't make me better at writing C. Like it literally is a waste of my time. I could be focusing on "real problems" like the way light diffuses in my simulated atmosphere in my 3D engine. But no I gotta sit there and manually wire up the onclick event for some button or whatever because it doesn't pass the HN sniff test from some pedantic random. Yea trying to fix one of my old job's webpack build for 3 weeks sure did build character. My boss hated how long it took. I hated how long it took. And thank fuck I NEVER have to do it again.

[throwatdem12311]

The amount of times that copy pasted code will work verbatim is basically 0. Better to type it out manually so you can tweak it as needed and you understand it better.

[lelanthran]

> SO was just an example. If you try to tell me you've never copied/pasted code before I know you are lying.

I've never done that; many experienced devs I know have never done that. We barely used it, in fact! The few times I asked a question, the answer was not "Here's a piece of code".

Look, this comment of yours, coupled with a previous comment from you in this thread (demonstrating you don't know the difference between probabilistic and deterministic output) makes it painfully clear you don't do development; or at least you didn't until you were handed a magic "write me a program" tool...

[michaelchisari]

Anyone worth their salt looked down on copy/paste from Stackoverflow, let alone blindly doing so.

Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?

[yoyohello13]

> Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?

r/programminghumor mostly. It was always tongue in cheek, but people took it too seriously.

However, the number of times I’ve gone over to help a colleague and realized they were trying to copy/paste code from SO, without even reading the context of the thread is baffling. Like, why did you expect it to work in the first place? I really try to be humble and not make assumptions about people competencies but it’s really hard to have those experiences and not think the average programmer is just an idiot. It’s no wonder AI is helping people when this was the baseline.

[hparadiz]

Setting aside code examples from the internets for a moment.

I have seen entire multi million dollar operations running off the most horrible PHP spaghetti nonsense.

The base line is far below any floor you are thinking of.

[yoyohello13]

Oh, I'm aware. You should see the legacy PHP intranet at my org.

[ses1984]

Some things are easier to verify than they are to solve, right?

So if you see an answer on stack overflow, read it, comprehend it, and you can pretty easily mentally verify the correctness to a sufficient degree of confidence…

I guess I’m not worth my salt.

[lelanthran]

> Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?

Copium from folk who were never developers before, but who now want the badge anyway. Too bad the same badge can be given out to a bright 12 year old who doesn't know the difference between a variable and a type.

I suppose I'd have to admit to not being a "developer" anymore, because developers in the age of AI won't know how to write code. Perhaps I can still hold on to the label "programmer" for a little while longer.

[hparadiz]

With that Github and personal portfolio I wouldn't be making such sweeping statements.

[lelanthran]

> With that Github and personal portfolio I wouldn't be making such sweeping statements.

Where's yours?

After all, my CV (online like everything else) shows almost 30 years in the field, 7 of which as a research scientist, 6 of which was spent writing software for munitions, many of which were spent as an EMV developer, a stint at a FAANG...

All you've done is state the things that very junior devs state, with just as much confidence.

[kerkeslager]

I started coding before Stack Overflow existed, and those were the days when coding was most fun for me. Learning HyperCard Basic from the manual that came with the computer was so full of joyful moments.

Stack Overflow had it's heyday, but by the time AI came around I already wasn't using it. Stack Overflow for a long time has been inundated with the kind of people who think everything is the XY problem[1], and arrogantly assume they know what your problem is better than you do. Stack Overflow was all-but-useless for at least 5 years before AI broke into the public eye.

[1] https://xyproblem.info/

[Alupis]

I don't think those two things are comparable, really.

With SO copy/paste, you still were undertaking the mental exercise (and reward) of thinking through hard problems, researching solutions, and assembling it yourself.

With AI, you literally outsource most or all of that. The way some people "vibe code", they barely are engaged with any of that process, if at all.

I think about it like I do video games: it's a lot of fun to play them, and while it can be interesting to watch someone else play, it's just not the same.

[dgellow]

What did the author learn through their experience? They learned how to get AI to generate those projects, but that's pretty much it.

With such a list of side projects you would learn just SO MUCH by doing it yourself, which IMHO is the whole point of playing around and what makes the experience satisfying. Here they get the artifacts, but nothing else.

[DJBunnies]

Playing with legos is fine if you can afford them.

[techblueberry]

It’s not binary, it’s a plus until it’s not. I agree with the author that the problem is “what happens if code is free” can change the incentives so much you forget why you were there in the first place.

You’re very reasonable response may be “well, why don’t you just do more of what you want to do and less of what you don’t want to do” but that’s not how incentives work.

You could talk about revealed preferences, and how obviously if this person did these things maybe that’s obviously what he wanted to do. And great, feel good about that.

There’s an uncomfortable reality for most of us normies (maybe not popular with the libertarian HN crowd) that an increase in freedom can make it much more difficult to find meaning and purpose. Friction can be good actually.

I do theorize that this is one of the mechanisms by which productivity could be tanked by AI.

[skydhash]

That reminds me of a "We get Letters" by Michael W. Lucas[0](FreeBSD Journal)

The most important point was:

  It’s uncomfortable. The discomfort is the point.

  Pain is the greatest teacher, but nobody willingly 
  attends her classes.

Learning what's important is only truly possible after loosing it (or not having it in the first place). Having anything granted to us does not prepare for when it's taken away and it's also blinds us on what other possible paths there is.

[0]: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based...