samir, actually the xkcd top hat guyI will never understand why we looked at modern programming, saw that there is a good bit, which is programming, and a bad bit, which is code review… and decided to automate the good bit at the expense of having to do a lot more of the bad bit.
(I posted this on a private chat and someone asked me to make it public, so if you’ve read it before, hi!)
Those of you who like code review: I recommend shifting left, pairing with your colleagues (especially non-programmers such as product designers or testers), and writing lots more test cases. I think you’ll enjoy it a lot.
A couple of people wrote to me to say that they are annoyed that we built robots to make “art” (scare quotes) when we should be making robots to do laundry.
And aside from the fact that unless you do take your laundry to the river to wash it, you already have a robot that does 90% of the work (and I can respect wanting automation for the other 10%)…
We don’t have robots (chatbots) that make art or write code either! They do an average job of some things, poor at others, and you can’t rely on them at all. If this is “AI”, I want it nowhere near my laundry.
Our 2020s tech industry loves to automate the easy part and hand-wave away the part that matters. The chatbots can’t do anything; they can only do the pointless parts, the boilerplate, the busywork. This is not the work. Humans still have to do this and the chatbots make it harder because they have to sift through bullshit to do so.
Keep Sam Altman the fuck away from my chores. He’ll just break all my dishes and dye my t-shirts blue.
🏳️🌈 Bri 🌞🚴🌱✨@samir LLMs would absolutely throw a bright red sock into every other load of laundry.
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE@samir "And aside from the fact that unless you do take your laundry to the river to wash it, you already have a robot that does 90% of the work (and I can respect wanting automation for the other 10%)…"
I guess the ironing might only be 10% but it still would be nice to get rid of having to do it ...
@samir (We have tried ironing services in the past, but they always go bust or otherwise stop operating after a while.)
Mute Dog Brewing@TimWardCam @samir I solved this problem by not caring if my clothes are ironed or not.
@TimWardCam @samir that's what hoodies and flannels are for ;)
@Mutedog @TimWardCam Agreed, I iron a shirt when I have to go to a wedding; otherwise I am good.
Daniel@TimWardCam @Mutedog @samir https://verybritishproblemstshirts.com/product/shorts-weather-t-shirt/ my wife bought me this T-shirt. I wear it at work when it's snowing outside
@samir @TimWardCam @dan I like how a castigation of AI turned into a discussion about clothing choices.
@Mutedog @TimWardCam @dan It’s all related. Don’t automate your boilerplate, discard it. Down with ironing!
Matt Barlow> Our 2020s tech industry loves to automate the easy part and hand-wave away the part that matters
Which itself is pretty much just what Brooks warned about in No Silver Bullet back in the 80s.
We’re pouring hundreds of billions into something that in the absolute best case scenario (for boosters) would only address accidental complexity, and expecting somehow essential complexity will disappear too
gaytabase
Swift (will be at EMF)
Ted M. Young
Dragan Stepanović@samir Hey Samir, I love what you're saying :)
@d_stepanovic We’ll see if anyone listens though. 😛
Barney Dellar (he/him)@samir @d_stepanovic You might be preaching to the choir… I’ve taught people how to pair and how to mob, and I’ve introduced it on teams I’ve been in, and that’s worked. Just telling people, though? I haven’t seen that work very often.
It worked on me, though! I heard about mobbing at a conference, and decided to try it with my team.
It worked on me, though! I heard about mobbing at a conference, and decided to try it with my team.
@BarneyDellar @d_stepanovic In a few more years, once the child is shelf-stable, I would love to start training again. I miss it.
Sen@dysfun We do it badly because it is bad, and contrary to popular belief, humans will not suddenly become good at doing something they hate if you pay them well and/or threaten their livelihoods.
Badly-read literary snob@samir oh, but you see, you don’t do the bad bit either…
@RosaCtrl People keep telling me they read the output! Are they shocked face not being truthful!?
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦@samir had the same though, 5 years ago. Sigh. The answer is: capitalism, I guess.
Fish Id Wardrobe ⁂@samir well, who is "we"?
@fishidwardrobe The zeitgeist.
@samir valid. i just feel as if the people making this decision are not the people who can code well…
@fishidwardrobe I have met few people who can code well, but some of them seem enamoured by the bullshit machine. I can’t figure out why.
🇵🇸 Álvaro González@samir @fishidwardrobe It's pretty much like narcotics or cults: some brains seem more naturally susceptible.
eobet@samir I will never understand why we looked at art and doing laundry... and decided to automate the art leaving us having to do a lot more more laundry.
@eobet TBF, laundry is 95% automated, unless you’re going to the river to wash your clothes. But I get your point.
Paul_stilgarExcept that the code review is also given to the automate that programmed the shit ( and yes vibing code it is for you. )
And good luck for the maintenance of programs.
mhoye@samir Respectfully I think that's ... maybe the inverse?
We automated the bad bit, which is "generating the text", in a way that obviates the important part, of creating a community of comprehension around the problem we're solving.
@mhoye I don’t think you can separate these two things.
And I prefer my sharing through pair or ensemble programming, not asynchronous reading, which always misses the important part (e.g. “why are we doing this, anyway?”)
Jeff GriggI think that's more true of emails, status reports, and PowerPoint presentations than of software that must actually do the work of running the company. Far more obviously dangerous in the latter.
In the former, the management and sales spaces were filled with ill-thought-out nonsense already.
Paul Edwin@samir If code review is the bad bit, you're doing it wrong. That's how you learn and share.
@paul_edwin I prefer to learn and share through pair or ensemble programming.
Strfnurfn@paul_edwin @samir It's the bad bit when your colleague is putting up hundreds of lines at a time and it's all... OK looking? But who has time to comb through all that, and you don't even know what parts were human decisions and what was regurgitated by the bullshit machine.
Alex Celeste, Princess Consort of Burnout@paul_edwin the purpose here seems to be to avoid learning or sharing at the review stage though
that's not what folks are doing, they're cutting that entire step and moving towards incomprehension
Cavyherd
No soy Mario@samir the other thing that escapes the bean counters is that code is faster to write then to fully understand. Hence all the bugs all the time and projects devolving into balls of mud. Every line is a liability. And we created a machine that excels in generating plausible lines with absolutely no understanding of what it does.
Also, LLMs are designed to fool us. That's their core essential feature. That's what they're designed to be best at.
So they not only increase the volume (both frequency and size) of code reviews, they make the process much more difficult and error-prone, as they're *designed* at their core to produce plausible-looking code that will fool code reviewers.
Margret Kuarell@samir like every job ai shit is involved in. It takes away the fun and creates even more of the non-fun work.
Óscar Morales Vivó@samir Instead of getting a robot that does the laundry and washes dishes so I can spend my time being creative, I get a thing that fakes creativity so I can spend my time doing laundry and washing dishes.
This is the most disappointing dystopia possible.
@MyLittleMetroid It very much is. (But I have a robot that does my laundry and another that washes my dishes, except my fancy frying pan, and it’s reasonably likely you do too.)
@samir Ok we're very much past the "walk down to the river and spend half a day" era of laundry but it still is a process that requires significant human supervision.
@MyLittleMetroid It is true, I could go for more automation!
What I really want is a bathroom-cleaning robot. I hate cleaning the bathroom.