Mastodawn

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

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Hans Hübner 1d ago

@plexus In the end, software engineering is about creating solutions to problems other people have. The solutions are not a byproduct, but the primary purpose. To the majority of users, the inner workings and the creation process of software is opaque. The qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings.

This means that for most people in the software industry, adapting to the new tooling that makes the creation process more efficient is 1/

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Hans Hübner 1d ago

@plexus not a matter of choice, or resent. The market for "human crafted" software will be small, much smaller than the market for software that is cheap and does what users "want".

It is clear that the hidden costs of LLM generated software are huge, but these costs are not going to be realised at the point of creation.

This mechanism is the same for many aspects of capitalism. Opting out of one thing won't fix the system, but is a gesture. Just. 2/2

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Svante 1d ago

@hanshuebner @plexus

You are stating a lot of assumptions:

- That the qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings.

- That LLMs make the creation process more efficient.

- That LLM-generated software is cheap and does what users “want.”

- That fixing one thing is not worthwhile while other things are not fixed.

But:

- Inner quality does matter a lot. E. g. JIRA receives a lot of complaints because it is not well designed internally.

…

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Svante 1d ago

@hanshuebner @plexus

…
- LLMs generate straw-fire software. It seems to burn at first, but it's not even hot enough to start a real fire.

- This seems cheap in a very short-term view, and it might satisfy short-term “wants”, but it's not sustainable.

- We need to start fixing somewhere. Two holes in a bucket are not a dilemma, but two tasks.

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Heckin' Chonker

@Ardubal @hanshuebner @plexus There is a middle ground between vibe coding and artisinal coding where the llm assists you and the results are still high quality, with a clear increase in productivity.

I have complicated feelings around the class of people who own the LLMs and little faith they will act in the best interest for society. Also water and energy use.

I'm also being forced to either adopt LLMs at work or be unemployed. Existing under capitalism is complex.