HN user

dimator

1,342 karma
Posts3
Comments386
View on HN

i mean, if zig is doing its best (inadvertently) at shooing off slop jockeys, then i already have more confidence that:

1. the language and stdlib are written by people who know what they're doing 2. packages in the ecosystem, at the barest level, are written by those who didn't leave after a few compile errors they couldn't reason about

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"

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.

you couldn't have missed GP's point any more if you tried. ignoring the ad-hominems about SWE greed:

these tools have been trained on decades of people "obsessing over every last detail". what GP is arguing is that we're detaching from that: you prompt, you get something that works, it doesn't matter how it got there. we're now entering the world where the majority of code will be vibed. So whatever our foredevelopers came up with, that will be the the final chapter of craftsman-produced, understood, code. whatever the previous generation actually learned about software engineering, that's at an end too, because why bother learning when i can prompt.

there's no stopping this transition, obviously. the next generation of tools will be trained on the current generation of tools' generated code. we're passed the "termination shock" of sofwtare understanding.

Yuck. I don't know if it's just me, but something feels completely off about the GH issue tracker. I don't know if it's the spacing, the formatting, or what, but each time it feels like it's actively trying to shoo me away.

It's whatever the visual language equivalent of "low signal" is.

Veritassium is in a league of its own. Just take a look at their last year's videos. The production value is just second to none.

They have enough of a following now that they can dedicate 55 minutes to something and not worry about the algorithm, which usually dictates much shorter form factors

This is my experience. For rote generation, it's great, saves me from typing out the same boilerplate unit test bootstrap, or refactoring something that exists, etc.

Any time I try to get a novel insight, it flails wildly, and nothing of value comes out. And yes, I am prompting incrementally and building up slowly.

But, what about the graduating senior who, yeah started because they love the craft, but also need a way to pay the bills for a few decades of their life?

Apple M5 chip 9 months ago

Gp is saying their primary expertise is advertising. It's hard to watch any apple announcement and not notice how utterly hyperbolic they are at touting their own achievements.

Ya sure, you can say that every company must do that, but apple are exceptional at it. Once you start noticing the unlabeled performance charts, the missing baselines, the comparing with ages old models, the disingenuous "86x" metrics, the whole show becomes cringe worthy.