Eniko FoxI do not need to hear from people who can't code or at the very minimum seem to actually hate it how I can supposedly code more efficiently
This is a post about large language models
I also do not need to hear from people who can't understand the cognitive load difference between writing code yourself and trying to understand code someone, or *something*, else wrote. Especially when the something else will be able to slip in little bugs that are easy to overlook and which no human coder, not even the most junior, would ever put in there
This is a post about that Ptacek article some people think has some good points for some baffling reason (it doesn't)
If you wanna automatically produce shit code and spend your time babysitting the lying machine then that's a you problem. I'm sure you'll make a consultant who bills out at $150/hour very happy some day. But your character flaws have nothing to do with me so keep that shit to yourself
Also, and I can't believe I'm going to actually deconstruct his arguments further, fucking linters and unit tests? Really?? Putting aside your AI is writing said unit tests so you have no idea what it's testing for, these are tools designed for catching the occasional human flub. They were *not* designed to hold back a tidal wave of sewage such as the one produced by LLMs
Like idk how to tell you this but you can easily introduce bugs that the linter and unit tests won't catch
Shocking, I know
Me sending a thousand AI-driven Mac trucks onto the road: it's fine actually if they do something stupid the guardrails will stop them
*watches a truck slam clean through a guardrail and plummet into a ravine leaving a large mushroom cloud*
Ah. Well. Nevertheless
Anyway, time to go do something more productive than angrily posting about some dipshit being incredibly wrong on the internet
Honestly I think there's a disconnect between LLM proponents when it comes to code and the rest of us. They see code as a purely mechanical thing, and so ripe for automation. To them claims of artistry and craft are something to roll your eyes at, arrogance from senior engineers who think too highly of themselves
Meanwhile said senior engineers have the decades of experience to know how much of programming relies on artistry and craft, how much of it is fundamentally a creative endeavor
Gabriele Svelto [moved]@eniko I hadn't read the article until seeing your thread, but now I have. The first few paragraphs left me puzzled until I hit this line and then it all clicked:
> I work mostly in Go
Ah yes, that's why he needs to write repetitive code that requires extensive unit-testing. That's also why the kind of code generated by an LLM works (maybe). Good luck fixing a bug in that code five years from now.
@gabrielesvelto i don't remember enough about Go to know why this makes sense so if you'd like to spell it out i'd love to read it
@eniko Go was designed to let you clobber together network-facing services rather simply. They made a lot of choices that reduce the friction toward this goal while retaining some type structure. However once you start pushing at the edges a lot of this simplicity is a massive footgun that lets you make stupid mistakes and doesn't really provide a structural way to avoid them. Go is a language where it's easy to write code that mostly works under most conditions, but is all but robust.
@eniko there's this article/rant from five years ago that goes hard comparing Go and Rust basic abstractions and shows just how bad Go is when you start crossing platform boundaries or just have to deal with errors. It's a bit long but a very good read on the topic: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride
@gabrielesvelto "My honeymoon with the Go language is *extremely* over."
strong start XD
Chuck@gabrielesvelto @eniko This is really a priceless rant. Not so much because Go sucks but because it so clearly illustrates how "programming" is orthogonal to "operating systems"which are orthogonal to "system architecture".