Comment by TrackerFF
6 hours ago
Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it.
Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself.
I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand group B. In vice versa.
I'm a musician, so I love everything about creating music. From the theory, to the mastery of the instrument, the tens of thousands of hours I've poured into it...finally being able to play something I never thought I'd be able to, just by sheer willpower and practice. Coming up with melodies that feel something to me, or I can relate to something.
On the other hand, I know people that want to jump straight to the end result. They have some melody or idea in their head, and they just want to generate some song that revolves around that idea.
I don't really look down on those people, even though the snobs might argue that they're not "real musicians". I don't understand them, but that's not really something I have to understand either.
So I think there are a lot of devs these days, that have been honing their skills and love for the craft for years, that don't understand why people just want things to be generated, with no effort.
> Some people love programming
> Other people see all that as an means to an end
I think it's worth pointing out that most people are both these things at different times.
There's things I care about and want a deep understanding of but there's plenty of tasks I want to just "go away". If I had an junior coder - I'd be delegating these. Instead I use AI when I can.
There's also tasks where I want a jump start. I prefer fixing/improving code over writing from scratch so often a bad AI attempt is still valuable to me.
Some people like to play a musical instrument, others to compose music. Those who play range from classicists, who have limited ability to improvise or interpret, to popular or jazz, or composition, where creativity and subtle expression is the life blood of the work.
Programming is similar to music. (A great many software innovators in the 70s and 80s had musical roots). But AI prunes away all the creativity and stylistic expression from the composition and the performance when designing and building software, reducing the enterprise to mere specification -- as if the libretto of the opera were merely an outline, and even that was based on Cliff Notes.
The case for using AI to code is driven strictly by economics and speed. Stylistically and creatively, AI is a no-brainer.
The first time you write the code to accomplish something you get your highs.
IMHO there's no joy in doing the same thing multiple times. DRY doesn't help with that, you end up doing a lot of menial work to adapt or integrate previous code.
Most of the for-profit coding is very boring.
I’m in group A and B. I do programming for the sake for it at home. I read tons of technical books for the love of it. At work, though, I do whatever the company wants or whatever they allow me… I just do it for the money.
Some writers like to write. Some like to have written.
I've always distilled this down to people who like the "craft" and those who like the "result".
Of course, everything is on a scale so it's not either/or.
But, like you, how I get there matters to me, not just the destination.
Outside the context of music, a project could be super successful but if the journey was littered with unnecessary stress due to preventable reasons, it will still leave a bad taste in my mouth.
> I've always distilled this down to people who like the "craft" and those who like the "result".
I find it very unlikely anyone who only likes the results will ever pick up the craft in the first place
It takes a very specific sort of person to push through learning a craft they dislike (or don't care about) just because they want a result badly enough
I hate IT, will pick literally anything else to work at, but the money is an issue.
I think a closer analogy is:
- A singer might learn to play guitar to sing along to it. Guitar is a means to an end; it is simply a tool to them.
- A guitarist learns to play guitar due to love of the instrument.
I think I am somewhere between the two groups you mention
I don't really get any joy from the act of coding, but I also take a lot of pride in doing a good job.
Cutting corners and producing sloppy work is anathema to me, even when I don't really enjoy the work itself
Any work worth doing is worth doing a good job on, even if I don't enjoy the work itself
Sounds a bit like the different subjects of "applied math" vs "math"
Some like proving and deriving, for others it's a tool to solve other problems
> On the other hand, I know people that want to jump straight to the end result. They have some melody or idea in their head, and they just want to generate some song that revolves around that idea. I don't really look down on those people, even though the snobs might argue that they're not "real musicians". I don't understand them, but that's not really something I have to understand either.
So if someone generates their music with AI to get their idea to music you don’t look down on it?
Personally I do, if you don’t have the means to get to the end you shouldn’t get to the end and that goes double in a professional setting. If you are just generating for your own enjoyment go off I guess but if you are publishing or working for someone that’ll publish (aka a professional setting) you should be the means to the end, not AI.
Where do you draw that line though?
If you're talking about a person using an LLM, or some other ML system, to help generate their music then the LLM is really just a tool for that person.
I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast, its my tool to get the job done. Should I not be allowed to do that professionally if I'm not actually the one achieving that speed or carrying capacity?
Personally my concerns with LLMs are more related to the unintended consequences and all the unknowns in play given that we don't really know how they work and aren't spending much effort solving interoperability. If they only ever end up being a tool, that seems a lot more in line with previous technological advancements.
> I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast, its my tool to get the job done.
Right, but if you use a chess engine to win a chess championship or if you use a motor to win a cycling championship, you would be disqualified because getting the job done is not the point of the exercise.
Art is (or should be) about establishing dialogues abd connections between humans. To me, auto-generated art it's like choosing between seeing a phone picture of someone's baby and a stock photo picture of a random one - the second one might "get the job done" much better, but if there's no personal connection then what's the point?
> I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast
If you drive a car 80mph you don't get to claim you are a good runner
Similarly if you use an LLM to generate 10k lines of code, you don't get to claim you are a good programmer
Regardless of the outcome being the "same"
2 replies →
Why?
What has always held true so far: <new tool x> abstracts challenging parts of a task away. The only people you will outcompete are those, who now add little over <new tool x>.
But: If in the future people are just using <new tool x> to create a product that a lot of people can easily produce with <new tool x>, then, before long, that's not enough to stand out anymore. The floor has risen and the only way to stand out will always be to use <new tool x> in a way that other people don't.
People who can't spin pottery shouldn't be allowed to have bowls, especially mass produced by machine ones.
I understand your point, but I think it is ultimately rooted in a romantic view of the world, rather than the practical truth we live in. We all live a life completely inundated with things we have no expertise in, available to us at almost trivial cost. In fact it is so prevalent that just about everyone takes it for granted.
Sure, but they also shouldn't claim they're potters because they went to Pottery Barn.
Sounds like Communist Albania where everybody had to be able to repair the car and take it apart and put it back together to own one
> So if someone generates their music with AI to get their idea to music you don’t look down on it?
It depends entirely on how they're using it. AI is a tool, and it can be used to help produce some wonderful things.
- I don't look down on a photographer because they use a tool to take a beautiful picture (that would have taken a painter longer to paint)
- I don't look down on someone using digital art tools to blur/blend/manipulate their work in interesting ways
- I don't look down on musicians that feed their output through a board to change the way it sounds
AI (and lots of other tools) can be used to replace the creative process, which is not great. But it can also be used to enhance the creative process, which _is_ great.
If they used an algorithm to come up with a cool melody and then did something with it, why look down on it?
Look at popular music for the last 400 years. How is that any different than simply copying the previous generations stuff and putting your own spin on it?
If you heard a CD in 1986 then in 2015 you wrote a song subconsciously inspired by that tune, should I look down on you?
I mean, I'm not a huge fan of electronic music because the vast majority of it sounds the same to me, but I don't argue that they are not "real musicians".
I do think that some genres of music will age better than others, but that's a totally different topic.
Your company doesn’t care about how you got to the end, they just care about did you get there and meet all of the functional and non functional requirements.
My entire management chain - manager, director and CTO - are all technical and my CTO was a senior dev at BigTech less then two years ago. But when I have a conversation with any of them, they mostly care about whether the project I’m working on/leading is done on time/within budget/meets requirements.
As long as those three goals are met, money appears in my account.
One of the most renown producers in hip hop - Dr. Dre - made a career in reusing old melodies. Are (were) his protégés - Easy-E, Tupac, Snoop, Eminem, 50 cent, Kendrick Lamar, etc - not real musicians?
[dead]
i mean how far are you willing to take that argument? every decade has just been a new abstraction, imagine people flipping switches or in raw assembly talking about how they don't "understand" you now with your no effort. or even those who don't "understand" why you use your autocomplete and fancy IDE, preferring a simple text editor.
i say this as someone who cut my teeth on this stuff growing up and seeing the evolution, it's both. and at some point it's honestly elitism and gatekeeping. i sort of cringe when it's called a "craft" because it's not like woodworking or something. the process is both full of joy but so is the end result, and the nature of our industry is that the process is ALWAYS changing.
you accumulate a depth of knowledge and watch as it washes away in a few years. that kind of change, and the big kind of change that AI brings scares people so they start clinging to it like it's some kind of centuries old trade lol.
It is not just gatekeeping. It is a stubborn refusal to see that one could be programming something much more sophisticated if they could use these iteration loops efficiently.
Many of these folks would do well to walk over to the intersection of Market, Bush, and Battery Streets in San Francisco and gaze up at the Mechanics Monument.
> It is a stubborn refusal to see that one could be programming something much more sophisticated if they could use these iteration loops efficiently
Programming something more sophisticated with AI? AI is pretty much useless if you're doing anything somewhat novel. What it excels at is vomiting code that has already been written a million times so you can build yet another Electron cross-platform app.