Comment by mettamage
11 hours ago
> We're busy building real software
My response is perhaps a bit raw, but so is the quote above.
Stop with the gate keeping. I've studied CS to understand coding, not to have some sort of pride to build "real software". Knowledge is a tool, nothing more, nothing less.
There are enough developers whose whole job it is to edit one button per week and not much more. And yes, there are also enough developers that actually apply their CS skills.
> but 99% of software engineers aren't working on toys in the first place
Go outside of your bubble. It's way more nuanced than that.
> I guess people who aren't software engineers don't realise that merely making a trivially basic website is not what software engineering is.
Moving goal posts. Always has been.
It's not that I fully disagree with you either. And I'm excited about your accomplishments. But just the way it reads... man...
I guess it hits me because I used to be disheartened by comments like this. It just feels so snarky as if I am never good enough.
The vibe is just "BUH BUH BUH and that's it." That's how it comes across.
And I've come to mature enough to realize I shouldn't feel disheartened. I've followed enough classes at VUSEC with all their rowhammer variations and x86-64 assignments to have felt a taste of what deep tech can be. And the thing is, it's just another skill. It doesn't matter if someone works on a web app or a deep game programming problem.
What matters (to me at least) that you feel the flow of it and you're going somewhere touching an audience. Maybe his particular calculator app has a better UX for some people. If that's the case, then his app is a win. If your game touches people, then that's a win. If you feel alive because you're doing complex stuff, then that's a win (in the style of "A Mathematician's Apology"). If you're doing complex stuff and you feel it's rough and you're reaching no one with it, it's neutral at best in my book (positive: you're building a skill, negative: no one is touched, not even you).
Who cares what the underlying technology is. What's important is usability.
> Moving goal posts.
Feel free to point out where I moved goal posts. To say that I moved goal posts would imply that at one point I stated that creating a trivial website was software engineering. If you're comparing my statement to what some other person said, who made arguments I did not make, then we cannot have any kind of constructive dialogue. At that point you are not talking to me, but talking to an imaginary projection of me meant to make yourself feel better about your argument.
> Stop with the gate keeping.
I'm not gatekeeping anything. You can disagree with my descriptive terms if you want, but the core point I'm trying to get across is: what people are doing with Claude can not replace what I do. I would know, I've tried extensively. Development is a lot of hard work and I would love it if my job were easier! I use LLMs almost every day, mostly for trivial tasks like reformatting text or writing advanced regex because I can't be bothered to remember the syntax and it's faster than looking it up. I also routinely pose SOTA models problems I'm working on to have them try to solve them, and I am routinely disappointed by how bad the output is.
So, in a thread where people were asserting that critics are merely critics because they're afraid of being replaced I pointed out that this is not factually correct, that no, we're not actually afraid of being replaced, because those of us who do "real" engineering (feel free to suggest a different term to substitute for "real" if the terminology is what bothers you) know that we cannot be replaced. People without experience start thinking they can replace us, that the exhilarating taste of coding they got from an LLM is the full extent to the depth of the software engineering world, but in fact it is not even close.
I do think that LLMs fill a useful gap, for projects where the time investment would be too large to learn to code and too unimportant to justify paying anyone to program, but which are simple enough that a non-engineer can have an LLM build something neat for themselves. There is nothing wrong with toys. Toys are a great thing to have in the world, and it's nice that more people can make them[1]. But there is a difference between a toy and what I do, and LLMs cannot do the thing I do. If you're taking "toy" in a derogatory manner, feel free to come up with another term.
[1] To some extent. While accessibility is generally a great thing, I have some misgivings. Software is dangerous. The web is arguably already too accessible, with frameworks enabling people who have no idea what they're doing to make professional-looking websites. These badly-made websites then go on to have massive security breaches that affect millions of users. I wish there was a way to make basic website development accessible, whether through frameworks or LLMs, in a way that did not give people using them the misplaced self-confidence to take on things way above their skill level at the cost of other people's security.