Comment by canthonytucci
1 day ago
All details are not created equal.
Some details are boring.
My AI dream (that I’m living happily) is getting to focus on the details that I find interesting and ignoring all the boilerplate details that modern software requires.
Boilerplate details mean we've failed as an industry. Why haven't we already got the computer to automate all the boring bits without AI?
I feel that this is because people have been reinventing the wheel a lot in IT.
A lot of innovation that finally lands in programming languages has been done decades earlier, but now it's mostly awkwardly bolted on existing languages and frameworks.
I really enjoy working with Gleam which is a rather boilerplate heavy language. However most of the work is managed by a really well built LSP. If you're writing a strongly type language it's easy to programmatically manage all of the boilerplate. You could you an LLM but why bother when it's a so formulaic.
Yeah, like imports in Java too. Any IDE lets you type List<ctrl-space> and it imports java.util.List - or java.awt.List if you select that one instead!
That's not what's really being discussed here though. Since it's already automated, you don't need to automate it with AI.
why can't AI be that solution?
why use a nuclear bomb to drive a nail?
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You said what I was thinking. AI can do the things I always found mind numbing and tedious, but because I did it already early in my career, I know when to intervene because the agent is not doing it correctly. I think that is the OP's point.
I think about LLMs in software today as attempting to provide a similar role as compilers in terms of translating high-level thoughts into low-level details.
The only problem is that I actually trust compilers.
How quickly would you drop a non-deterministic compiler for the source code of a project?
I detest this compiler analogy so much: llms are non deterministic by nature, compilers should not and are not
So what? Jobs aren't supposed to be fun. Lots of people depend on those boring details.
I hope we can save “jobs aren’t supposed to be fun” for stuff like undertaker and grief counselor.
My feeling is making things should be mentally stimulating, and as many tedious parts that can be automated should be, so we can spend precious human thought on thinking instead of recitation.
I don’t know what you mean by the last part. Do you mean programmers depend on busy work to eat or the users depend on the human touch on the boring details?
For me there is nothing less fun than using AI to generate code
Then I have to do the boring bullshit work of reviewing it and making sure it's correct? Fuck that
Writing code is way more fun than reviewing other people's code
Saying jobs aren't supposed to be fun is akin to saying life should be dreadful. Work tends to be around half of your waking hours, usually your best and least tired half too. If anything we should be striving to make all kinds of work more enjoyable.
Some of us just wouldn't work if it wasn't fun. I'd let myself starve in the streets. (I have some experience with starvation from an eating disorder phase in my twenties, it's only unbearable if you have to work).
Easy to say when you're not at risk of starving.
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