[thinkindie]

I think it all depends on your personal driver: personally I rather see a product I built in whatever way used by ever growing number of people because they find it useful. It means that the time I spent working on that helped other people solving a problem (hopefully).

That’s why a was always keen on cutting some corners when and where necessary in order to think about the user first and the code beauty second.

Of course I appreciate well structured and maintainable code but you can always strike a balance, even with LLMs assisted coding sessions.

[AyanamiKaine]

It seems to be a big fight between the I am interested in the end result and I am interested in the process.

Some people think the same regarding art, they dont see art in the process only in the end result.

I believe no one is right, but also no one is wrong.

[luipugs]

There is no art without process though. The art is the process. Is an automatic piano more beautiful than a world class pianist? Of course not.

I am not strictly equating this to coding though. Like the GP sometimes I am driven more by the product than by being able to make it by hand. But that does not mean vibe coding, I still make sure the code is up to my standards.

[phoghed]

Maybe for the person who automated the piano it is

[dare944]

Well, a large swath of both sides are wrong in that they insist theirs is the only valid perspective.

[tripleee]

Employees are rewarded by the process

Employers/owners are rewarded by the end result

It's obvious why employees using an LLM would get burnt out

[hdjrudni]

I don't even want to put 'my' code or apps out into the wild anymore. I've built a a few things I think are useful and I'm using myself but I'm afraid it'll just get called slop or my only users will be bots. What's the point. So I don't get the joy out of sharing it nor the joy of the achievement. But I've widdled down what I thought was an endless backlog of features to nearly zero, I guess that's something.

[Schlagbohrer]

Github's weekly Top Trending repos list is depressing. Slop on top of slop, many doing the exact same thing as each other with so much low-quality content it's challenging to read through and compare similar repos.

[encyclopedism]

If it's code built by an LLM it's almost inherently uninteresting in that 'anyone' can also generate the same slop. Beyond the initial novelty the 'achievement' really doesn't stretch that far.

Your slop, my slop, their slop it's all 'slop' and no one can really care about slop. The novelty is wearing thin fast

[deaux]

Of course not, this makes no sense. It's the opposite, most of LLM generated apps are indeed uninteresting, yet it's not inherent at all. Most photos, most drawings, most human-written articles are uninteresting and have been so since forever. Nothing about that is inherent. And in the exact same manner, no, others can't generate the same thing. They physically can, but that has never been a barrier.

If I make uninteresting art, it's not because I physically lack the ability to use my hands in a manner that would create interesting art. It's because I can't come up with the ideas, and lack the taste, to produce interesting art.

[encyclopedism]

I think you missed my point I'm not denying the code does not produce a function of effect. The code however is uninteresting because almost anyone can also generate it.

I'm interested in the source code to Quake but not in the source code to an LLM generated Quake equivalent, I love to hear about the Fast Inverse Square Root formula in Quake that Id software wrote but I'm unmoved by the generated LLM version.

[DanielHB]

You don't understand what the OP said, your brain can get a intrinsic reward from seeing users use your LLM work. But LLM remove all the little intrinsic rewards from coding elegant systems to get to the point where you see users using your work.

It is all about the destination now where it used to be about the journey and the destination.

[iso1631]

I wrote some software nearly 20 years ago, haven't touched it for over a decade.

The code was terrible, but I don't care, it did the job, and people still use it despite a whole team of people who have tried to replace it with "elegant" code in frameworks which have come and gone.

The reason people still use it is that it solves their needs, not the programmer's needs.

The goal was to make the user's life better, not to make a work of art

[customguy]

All you're saying is that for you only the destination ever mattered. But it's very apparent that is not true for a lot of people.

And "solving needs" is kinda vague. We drank from lead cups for a long time, because perfect knowledge of material and biology was secondary to just having a cup. And no single sip from any lead cup killed or maybe even much harmed any person, but it all added and adds up.

Of course the comparison with lead is kinda over the top, but it's just to illustrate the principle. If your software crashes the computer 1 out of 1000 runs, and it otherwise crucial and unique, people will still use it, and the longer and the more people use it, the more human lifetime it "destroys". If it would take you 1 year to find the source of the crash, it may not be worth it, if it would take you 30 minutes, it might be. You just won't get recompensated for it, you'd have to get satisfaction from it via something like craftsmanship.

Your users don't know either way, so it's your job to know. Saying it's not, everybody just has to be content with the transaction, is a bit like saying a doctor doesn't have to do medicine according to what they know is likely best, but according to what their patient thinks they need.

[iso1631]

And it is true for a lot of people. It's also true for the people paying my salary.

If you're making a plane, crashing 1 in 1000 times is terrible, if you're making some administrative thing which if it crashes costs 5 minutes work then it's likely fine

But you're still implying that the fancy software crafted by hand is better.

I have handmade crafted products and I have assembly line products. Not only are the latter cheaper and more consistent, they're often better. I don't want my beer to come in a handcrafted artisan glass while I'm watching the football, I want it in a pint glass of a known size and quality.

[customguy]

> If you're making a plane, crashing 1 in 1000 times is terrible, if you're making some administrative thing which if it crashes costs 5 minutes work then it's likely fine

Yes, and if it doesn't crash it's better than fine. Objectively.

> I have handmade crafted products and I have assembly line products. Not only are the latter cheaper and more consistent, they're often better.

Completely ignoring the care and work that (ideally) goes into making and running the machines at assembly lines, and the cleaning that takes place every day, or sometimes several times a day, all the strict regulations. You cannot compare 99% of software engineering with food production in modern countries. Similar for furniture, it can hurt or even kill, and it would do at a much higher rate if it was made like most software is.

There's gross factory food, and super nice street food, there's healthy factory food and super gross street food. That has nothing to do with anything. All else being the same, you want the person who prepares your food or runs the factory to pay attention and not be sloppy, or you end up with food poisoning, glass shards, and other fun stuff. You just take allll of that for granted, instead of imagining how awesome computing could be if the people involved in it took it similarly seriously instead of just applauding their own laziness.

[iso1631]

You're making an assumption that

1) spending more time handcrafting the code makes it less likely to crash

2) That the cost of the crash is more than the cost of the artisinal crafting

[thinkindie]

It’s not just the destination - there are infinite shades of caring too much about every single line of code (spaces! Tabs! Inline open curly braces! Next line) and caring about the final result without attention to what is running under the hood.

[thinkindie]

I know exactly what he means - and as I said it all depends on personal drivers/motivation etc etc. take doctors: some starts the profession to make money other to care about people. Both categories can live under the same roof in a hospital.

[zelphirkalt]

Going with the doctor analogy: One type tries to be genuinely helpful, the other type suggests unnecessary operations, since it costs more.

[pegasus]

Isn't steering the agent the new journey? Why shouldn't that provide "little intrinsic rewards"?

[throw1234567891]

I think you don't understand that they understand. For them it's the destination that matters. Their journey is different.

[bluefirebrand]

They are admitting pretty directly that even they don't value their own journey only their destination