Comment by TheCraiggers
6 days ago
> "For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields."
You've already lost me, because I view programming as an art form. I would no more use AI to generate code than I would use it to paint my canvas.
I think the rest of the article is informative. It made me want to try some things. But it's written from the perspective of a CEO thinking all his developers are just salt miners; miners go into the cave and code comes out.
I think that's actually what my hangup is. It's the old adage of programmers simply "copying and pasting from stack overflow" but taken to the extreme. It's the reduction of my art into mindless labor.
People don't pay programmers to produce great art. No one sees that "art" and no one cares. They pay programmers to get shit done.
A functional code that is easy to maintain is art (but you have to be an experienced programmer to see it). A shoddy project isn’t, but the whole company feels the pain.
Wrong.
I do pay my general contractor for the unseen quality that goes into the structure of my home. Programs should be built the same way.
Woodworking is also an art form. But most people just need furniture, fixtures, and structures. Nobody would take seriously the idea that new construction all be done with sashimono joinery in order to preserve the art form, but somehow we're meant to take seriously the idea of hand-dovetailed CRUD apps.
> Woodworking is also an art form. But most people just need furniture, fixtures, and structures. Nobody would take seriously the idea that new construction all be done with sashimono joinery in order to preserve the art form, but somehow we're meant to take seriously the idea of hand-dovetailed CRUD apps.
How many furniture makers did you talk to forming this opinion? The metaphor does not line up with either my software of furniture experience. I work with production furniture shops that choose not to use CNCs to avoid the soul being sucked out of the work. This is not a rare stance to take and this is not "japanese joinery" woodworking. This is real work, balancing the means of production with optimal quality. There is all sorts of arguments on whether cncs or using a domino or whatever is "real" woodworking, but the idea that this choice of quality does not exist in woodworking and so we shouldn't have it in software is not my experience.
You don't need to talk to furniture makers to know that mass produced furniture has replaced cabinetmakery almost completely. Most of us are sitting on the evidence.
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I don't think that analogy matches very well. Most software is bespoke, the domain requirements, usage aspects, and architectural trade-offs are subtly, or often non-subtly, different each time, and take different trajectories over time. It's not like you're producing the same software 10,000 times, like a piece of furniture. And AI isn't able to produce the exact same thing reproducibly anyway. A better argument would be that AI is actually approaching the craftsmanship/artisanal capabilities.
Most line of business apps and business logic are only bespoke and custom insofar as field names and relations and what APIs they trigger on which events.
Just because software is “bespoke” doesn’t mean it’s complicated or special.
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I'm not sure why you're equivocating "all code" with "CRUD apps". If that were the case I'd be with you. But it isn't. Glue code between APIs is indeed pointless garbage that can be automated, but that's not what I, nor many other engineers, are writing day-to-day.
That's cause there's an element of mindless labour to it. It's easier to spot that so it gets more focus.
If you find that theres an element of mindless labor to coding then you're probably doing it wrong.
Get a key logger and track the repeated keys you hit. Arrow keys, hjkl or w/em just the keys that take you to the place you need to be.
While your at it you can tell me about your favorite click.
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I'm sure salt miners needed to make peace with their toil and also focused on tools and techniques to be more productive; how to remove the salt most elegantly in nice clean blocks, minimize waste, reduce burden on their physical bodies.
But to their bosses their output was salt.
I'm sorry but unless you're working in open source for the pure love of the tech/craft, the output of software engineering is PROBLEM SOLVING.
That's why "build vs. buy" exists - sometimes it's better to buy a solution than buy one. That's why a valid solution to a problem sometimes is to convince a customer that their ask is wrong or unreasonable, and something simpler or easier would get them 99% of what they need with 1% of the effort.
That's our job.
Sure, for a large portion of our industry, the goal is to hoover up as much user data as cheaply as possible. Being responsible with that data isn't part of that "PROBLEM SOLVING."