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Comment by ookblah

2 months ago

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.

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ookblah

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bredren  2 months ago

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.

  • 7589447636  2 months ago

    > 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.

    • frankc  2 months ago

      This is just wrong. I don't know how else to say it as this point. If you are doing something novel, you need to be a lot more specific in what you tell it to do, but it can still put it together 5x faster than you can do manually. It's like saying you can't do something novel with junior developers. On their own? Not really. Guided by someone experienced who can do the systems design and has the domain knowledge to be the product manager? Yes, you definitely can. And it's not different with advanced LLMs. It's even better than having junior developer's working for you because they don't get tired or bored. They won't slack on writing docs or tests. I have written novel systems by having LLMs do the grunt work, and they have better docs and tests than I have ever done before because it's willing to do the things I don't find as interesting without complaint.