[skippyfish]

I can't decide how I feel about this article. On one hand, it's great. It's great that the author wanted to get something done, and thanks to the marvels of modern tech, they could do it with very little effort.

But on the other hand... gosh, this was about the simplest software engineering challenge imaginable (toggle some I/O pins) and the simplest design task imaginable (make a featureless rectangular box). And the author - a technologist! - isn't just saying "I wanted to try out some new tech". They're saying "this was too hard, I needed help from an LLM" ("would absolutely not be able to meet this challenge", "hit another wall").

And that... I mean, I just don't know what to make of this. Were we always like this? Are LLMs making us like this? Is it good? Is it bad?... and don't give me the calculator analogy...

[lee_ars]

To be fair, I did the research, the BOM, the systemd service and timers, the packaging, most of the installer, and the deployment pipeline myself. It's just the python and the Fusion modeling I needed LLM help with. Coding beyond bash scripting is just not something I'm good at, and at 48, I've kind of accepted that it's not ever going to be no matter how hard I try.

[Retr0id]

Edit: retracted, but left up for context

The article itself appears to have had help from an LLM, too.

[jherskovic]

Go look at the editorial policy from Ars. Lee just writes like that; it's his style, it always has been.

[lee_ars]

nope. i was using em-dashes and semicolons before they were cool.

[Retr0id]

I believe you (and sorry, I do think I was wrong), but for the record I wasn't judging based on punctuation.

[lee_ars]

Look at it this way: LLMs are trained, among other things, on quality professional prose. I've been writing for Ars for almost 14 years at this point.

I don't sound like LLMs. LLMs sound like _me,_ lol.

[adamisom]

fwiw the article doesn't sound LLM to me whatsoever, so opinions def vary!

[system2]

The line between programmers/SWE people and non-programmers got blurred thanks to LLMs.

[krabizzwainch]

I have been stuck mentally on this article since it came out. Like, learning enough python to send the time to the display would still have made this a weekend project (I even went and found an adafruit 7 segment pi hat site and read their sample code). The effort is the interesting part to me, I want to read janky code that paints some kind a picture of someone learning. I don't care about finished, "polished" projects. I don't care that AI can know every single possible error that'll pop up and prevent it from happening, I want the clock to break and for the maker to say ohhhh yeah oops thats dumb.

I have had an eInk pi weather display in my living room for like 4 years now, pulling data from openweatherapi every half hour. It's my second favorite project (I made an eReader once... if you like waiting 5 seconds for a page to turn, do I have a product for you!) and I use it every single day. Sometimes it doesn't update when I didn't account for a possibility I didn't know about, and thats okay.

I get that this is someone writing for money and I have no experience in that realm, and I'm sure conde nast prefers faster writing for something less in depth... but I almost feel I should spend my monthly $3 elsewhere.

[lee_ars]

> I get that this is someone writing for money and I have no experience in that realm, and I'm sure conde nast prefers faster writing for something less in depth...

FWIW, Conde has no input on my work. Conde is the machine that provides HR and legal and payroll. Ars is a more or less self-contained world and since I got kicked into management a few years back, my output is my own. I wrote this up because this is how the project unfolded; no one assigned it to me or said I needed to write a July story to make a quota. It was fun. I did the write-up because it felt like an Ars-y thing to write up.

Definitely heard re: wanting to stumble through things and see the warts, but I have to disagree on the "learning enough python to make this work would still have been a weekend project." That's simply not true—if it were, I would have done it.

But it's not like the project didn't require effort. I put in considerable time on the parts that weren't python coding and CAD. Planning out and setting up the systemd service and timers, packaging up the service to ensure the thing was running under a properly isolated service account context, writing the installer, setting up the deployment pipeline—I didn't want to do the usual lazy thing I see so often and just take a barely functional mess of conflicting dependencies and shove them into a docker container and say "Here, this works on my computer, your problem now."

But like I said elsewhere in the thread, at 48 I'm old enough and ossified enough that I've come to accept that coding is simply not a skill I've got in me, and cranking out even something relatively simple like this project is going to be impossible for me without help. I've tried, too—I've bootstrapped myself through code academies, tried DIY courses, thrown myself into code-adjacent weekend projects, and otherwise tried to get to some level of mastery past "hello world," and I just kinda....suck. I bounced off of coding 30 years ago in college, I've bounced off it professionally for anything more than simple bash scripting, and I've bounced off of it in hobbies. I don't know if it's that my english major brain just doesn't do well in chopping problems down into small enough chunks or what—but I know after a lifetime that it's something I'm never going to be able to do.

That and bowling. Never scored over 100 in a game in my life, and likely at this point never will. Some things are just beyond my reach.

[krabizzwainch]

I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me. You were right to call out my criticism of Conde, and hearing more about what their involvement is with Ars does clear that up. My comment about "writing for money" was a poorly worded way for me to say that the writing itself is your career, and specifically writing about current tech. Current tech, unfortunately for my tastes and opinions, does involve a lot of AI now.

As to the rest of your points about not wanting to or not having the time to learn it, I understand. I went through many a tutorial before things started clicking with me. In fact, the only way I made python click for me was combining the abstract code WITH something physical like a screen or lights or buttons. I feel attached to the things I spent the time on because of the blood sweat and tears it took to make them work.

I also think reading the repo sent me into a rage because it looks like all the other claude written code, specifically the worst code I've had to implement from someone who did the whole "works on my computer, your problem now".

[lee_ars]

Definitely heard re: the python code, yeah—it seems fine to my limited ability to review, and the functionality is there, and at least organizationally the structure makes sense to me, but I can't speak to its sophistication or whether or not it's how a skilled human might approach the same set of tasks.

I imagine it's somewhat the same boiling rage I feel when I watch youtube videos with obviously AI-written scripts, or read obviously AI-created written content in any area. I can't code, but do write and edit professionally, and the lackadaisical approach many people take with the form and presentation of their written words can be pretty damn offensive. (The responses I hear when I raise these objections are more or less the same ones I raise re: coding, though — "Well, I can't write, and the LLM says what I want to say way better than I could ever say it!" and so on.)

So it goes, I guess, heh.