slotos
Baldur BjarnasonAll the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with
(Also supports what many have been saying about software quality being a crisis that precedes LLMs, but that’s another story)
Niels Abildgaard@baldur Yes! And not just the code, but also what it implies about their API design, general application architecture, etc.
Martijn Frazer@baldur the software crisis is definitely what enabled vibe coding, I feel.
When making software was an artisan process, it was hard for corporations to scale it and treat programmers like cogs in a machine.
So they've been trying more and more to fit software development into a neat mold, essentially dumbing down the process, to the point where making an app has become "just slap together some libraries and hey presto".
That has 100% laid the foundation for LLM-generated code, I feel.
@Tijn Yup. I agree
Howard Chu @ Symas@raffaella @Tijn @baldur anyone *can* code, given the right training. But not everyone *wants* to code. And the people who do it, only because they want a paycheck, and not because they want to code, were the start of this decline.
Elle@hyc @raffaella @Tijn @baldur anyone _can_ code, whether they choose to do so for passion or for money, because it's a skill. Also a job is a job, no need to frame coding as something "super special that only special people should do".
On the other hand, governments cutting funds for arts, humanities and social sciences and telling that "the future is code" - that's what put many people in the position where they're doing jobs far removed from their innate curiosities. And grifters, well, they can be found in every lucrative field.
On the other hand, governments cutting funds for arts, humanities and social sciences and telling that "the future is code" - that's what put many people in the position where they're doing jobs far removed from their innate curiosities. And grifters, well, they can be found in every lucrative field.
@hostia @hyc @raffaella @baldur > Also a job is a job, no need to frame coding as something "super special that only special people should do".
I agree coding shouldn't be regarded as some kind of special job only special people can or should be doing.
But that being said, I hope everyone cares about the job they're doing, and try to understand how and why they're doing it the way they are, regardless of what the actual job is!
skua
Cassandrich@dalias @baldur Yeah this is fair imho!
What I was mainly trying to convey was a sense of caring about what is you're building as a developer.
That's the thing that's lacking imho from corporate coding practices. The workers don't have to care about the software, they don't have to understand the whole thing, they just need to solve the ticket and move on.
This mindset fundamentally undermines the quality of any software project. And also perfectly lays the foundation for LLM-generated code.
Tamtam@Tamtam @Tijn @baldur The reasons for caring are different. I care for both reasons in my work, but I think it's somewhat elitist to demand that, in order to work in this field, someone has to view it as an artisnal craft.
Someone can reasonably view it as purely a job, but still respect that it's a job where people's safety is on the line if they fuck it up.
The reason I bring this up is that too often, when we just focus on the artisnal aspect, the pro-AI and AI-curious crowd sneer at it as they would if we were expecting everyone to buy handmade furniture or hand-sewn clothing - fields where there is certainly a reason to respect the artisnal element, but where nobody's safety is on the line when you don't, and where most business-minded people aren't going to respect it.
@dalias @Tijn @baldur I do get your point. And yet, there seem a few things are very debatable here:
1. To try and divorce the work of an artisan or artist from the care and devotion it took to make it, gives a way the impoverished USamerican materialist. It makes no sense to anyone else.
2.if you can't find the space to put effort and love into making something meaningful and beautiful, may it be a work of art or the relationship to your kid, something is fundamentally wrong in your life, something AI can certainly not fix and you should do something about it .. And if it's systemic, well, start a revolution then, I guess.
I'm kind of just debating for the sake of it. I have heard of this argument but its definitively a non starter with me. It's a symptom of something much more deeply wrong with the US culture in my eyes. And I know about stress and not having time. but sorry . The value is in the devotion. In the creativity.That's where the beauty is being born. No shortcut to that.
This reminds me of how scary the US culture was to me, when I visited.
1. To try and divorce the work of an artisan or artist from the care and devotion it took to make it, gives a way the impoverished USamerican materialist. It makes no sense to anyone else.
2.if you can't find the space to put effort and love into making something meaningful and beautiful, may it be a work of art or the relationship to your kid, something is fundamentally wrong in your life, something AI can certainly not fix and you should do something about it .. And if it's systemic, well, start a revolution then, I guess.
I'm kind of just debating for the sake of it. I have heard of this argument but its definitively a non starter with me. It's a symptom of something much more deeply wrong with the US culture in my eyes. And I know about stress and not having time. but sorry . The value is in the devotion. In the creativity.That's where the beauty is being born. No shortcut to that.
This reminds me of how scary the US culture was to me, when I visited.
@Tamtam @Tijn @baldur I don't entirely disagree with you, but I also don't think rejecting the collapse of civilization to slop can be something we predicate on getting people whose minds are stuck in USian materialism to change their worldviews. Not because they don't need to change, but because that kind of change takes time and we are exploding the amount of harm our systems are doing right now with "AI".
@dalias @Tijn @baldur And the scary thing is not the culture. It is the fact that "culture" is something that's roped of and bought and sold. And not part of everyday life. And the huge void that that leaves. That feeling of total emptiness is a shock to the system. And it gripped me right when I stepped of the plane. Not that that is not happening in Europe. But the US is just so much furhter down the road.
McNeely@McNeely @Tamtam @Tijn @baldur Not every software project is, but basically any public-end-user-facing software deployed commercially is, because it's dealing with private data pertaining to the user that could endanger the user if it gets in the wrong hands.
This *shouldn't be* how it is. None of this software should be phoning home, outsourcing operation to cloud services, etc. But that's the way it is now, and as long as it's like that, it needs to be regulated as load-bearing, safety-critical software.
Pier Hegeman@dalias @Tijn @baldur I think this framing is a sort of victim blaming. It is not the individual developers who must love and care about the craft. It is the organizations who must mandate, validate, and ultimately incentivize quality. When all funding for architecture, design, QA and maintenance are cut and everything is left to the developer it is an organizational failure, not an individual one. I don’t need my plumber to love their craft, I just need them to follow code and pass inspection. I do agree that this was a problem long before LLMs came along.
@pier @Tijn @baldur I think you're saying exactly what I was trying to say. As someone doing a job you don't have an obligation to love and care for the craft. But the organization you're working for has an obligation to make sure you pay all due attention to safety of the things you produce and to design the process accounting for the possibility that you might fail to do so. Not to incentivize you to cut corners or look the other way when you do.
@dalias @Tijn @baldur Yeah I was meaning to reply further up the chain; I find threading in Ice Cube a bit goofy. I agree with everything you said. I’d even take that further though and suggest that major software platforms that impact significant portions of society should be way more heavily regulated, along the lines of utilities or banks. Relying on an organization to enforce quality when all of their incentives push towards “move fast and break things” is going to be a losing play.
Arthfach 🐻@Tijn @baldur I’d actually disagree. Treating engineering as artisanal activity is what led to rot in every instance I witnessed it.
It’s once you remove engineering from development that building software devolves into “slap libraries together and call it steampunk”.
And corporates love that. Something about being able to bullshit your way every direction makes managers so damn happy. Not having engineers ask hard questions is a cherry on top.
@slotos @baldur I agree perhaps artisanal was a bad word to use.
As I've tried to explain in another reply to this, the main thing I'm trying to convey is a sense of care that I'd like to see from the developer.
It's that care that slows things down, which is why corporate coding practices don't focus on it at all. "Just make sure it passes the tests" is what we get instead.
As I see it, LLM-generated code is just the next logical step down a line that was misguided in the first place.
Nullstring 🏴☠️@0x00string @baldur Not particularly clear, no. I think that in general smaller companies and projects are more likely to care about their product than giant corporations. But you have to look into it on a case-by-case basis really, it's hard to draw quick conclusions.
Angie
Dan W@Tijn @baldur @angiebaby
Other industries are trying to replace skilled information workers with bots too.
I’m an automotive parts interpreter that specialises in crash repairs, the amount of BS generated estimates that come across my desk that are completely wrong is astonishing!
And when you provide the correct estimate to the repairer, they are in denial. “The computer said I need these parts, *you* must be wrong”.
Then they call back a week later for me to order and supply the correct parts.
We also refuse credit returns on parts orders that haven’t been vetted by us.
Rycochet@baldur Remember when Elon declared he was going to use lines of code produced on printouts as something he wanted to judge Twitter employees on when deciding who should and shouldn't be fired? It's that mindset made into a machine.
Stage name Jay Peach
Peter@baldur I ended up in a couple of places like that and never lasted long, because I was told, to my face and quite seriously, that a) my standards were too high and b) that I care too much about my values. They meant it as a negative, which I will never, ever understand. (all of them advertised themselves as "values-based" organizations. fuck startups. 😂)
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
JennyFluff 
💾
GunChleoc
bituur esztreym@rysiek @peter_sc @baldur
i&i miss the Tao of programming attitude, sometimes.. #prplXprpgnd
edit: was thinking of Tao te Chip too of course:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070314235504/http://internet.ls-la.net/comppoems/tao-te-chip.html
Briala@baldur I've been a programmer since I was in high school. The rather large employer I had been at for many years and was let go from 2 months ago was not only leaning into the whole "AI" shit but actively separating software engineering and software coding.
I could see general coding quality was dropping. And their very processes was preferencing dumb code monkeys who didn't want to understand the design.
David Culley@static You're better off not being there anymore.
I was in a similar situation, only that I resigned myself, by my own choice.
@davidculley Yah. I was looking for an exit, TBH. I was kinda expecting redundancy of just me and maybe a few colleagues early April, but they did all of us at the end of January. I _am_ on the recovery from burnout. It takes time.
@baldur Like I always said, closed-source code is closed because they have something to hide. Mostly, how atrociously bad it is.
degenerating degenerate@baldur Is it possible your opinion about their internal code quality just isn't the constraint that you think it is? After all it's only the scaffolding around the LLM that does the actual work.
Interesting article on them from a couple of weeks ago telling their basing on $21bn of Google's TPUs (which run Gemini for Google) going forward rather than GPUs.
John Maxwell
Wydamn@hopeless No investments, but resorts to emotional responses and ad hominem.
Also your article also says nothing in regards to code quality but I suspect that's not why you posted it.
Please meditate on this, and don't ask claude or grok or whatever to do your meditation for you.
@wydamn I'm sorry, are you referring to the now blocked person who wanted to call me a "shill", twice?
That's an "emotional response", right? And an "ad hominem" too.
So why are you wagging your finger at me and not the guy trying to bully me?
The article is shows you don't need power-hungry GPUs to run inference, and that if Anthropic didn't have staff to go to the bank for them, they still wouldn't cry all the way to the bank over what a guy on Mastodon says about their code quality...
@hopeless But you were shilling though, and you still are.
When you post a forbes propaganda article about money people making money and how that is a good thing and ignores the technical argument: that is shilling.
You say you are not invested, but if somebody "wagging their finger" at you makes you feel bad, then guess what: You Are Invested.
@wydamn I see... well, let me share a metric I like to use when deciding who to block... "is this person ever going to say anything worth listening to?".
If the answer seems to be "no", then on to the block list they go. You're very welcome to use the same logic on me, I won't be able to tell the difference since you'll already be blocked.
Major Denis Bloodnok
SkjeggtrollI mean, we've seen similar issues with code quality from certain types of outsourcing setups where companies send out under-thought and over-written tickets to an outsourcing mill and gets back knee-jerk code that appears as if it's been written at haste while wearing blinkers in a snow-storm, and without any traces of "second-layer thought." (_Not_ the fault of the individual programmers who are often very bright, mind. It's a system failure.)
pettter@skjeggtroll I'm seeing a lot of "system failures" at this point. Perhaps it would be a good idea to consider, or even actively work towards, a systemic change? @baldur
Theriac
Orb 2069
Moses Izumi@baldur
Sometimes I wonder if the practice of shipping every GUI-era computer with a development environment (getting the "rubes" invested in programming) would've prevented the current situation.
Sometimes I wonder if the practice of shipping every GUI-era computer with a development environment (getting the "rubes" invested in programming) would've prevented the current situation.
... Personally, I think IDEs are part of the problem - nobody needed Visual Studio to write BASIC code for their C64, mainly because the programming language is claw hammer straightforward. Learn a dozen keywords and 3 concepts(variables, loops, ifs) , and you're off!