Grief and the AI split

This is the defining divide of AI, period. Whether you're a craft lover of art, writing, music, code, hell, business processes and the idea of "doing work." There are those who love the craft, and those who want the result of the craft. AI is a faster path to that end result (whether you're happy with that result is another matter). From that POV, it could lead to us speed-running our civilization into another era; abundant prosperity, or full on collapse. Bro...

Lots of mentions of the term mourning... As they say in my country, don't sell the skin until you kill the bear.

All I'm seeing around me is people dropping best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code!

This is going to blow up.

Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that version will still require crafters.

If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero. Everyone who's been around startup culture knows the running jokes about those 'I have a great idea, I just need someone to code it' guys. Now you're one, and you'll find how much ideas are worth.

Strong agree. Needs another pass or two at editing though, some painful LLM-os sticking out there :'(

I love developing clever algorithms and writing elegant code. It's a hobby of mine and it makes me happy.

I love shipping tangible products because it makes others happy and makes me money.

Do what you love for work and you'll never love anything again.

Do what you love for a hobby and keep it pure.

Don't let either be your identity, you only diminish yourself and grow old in the doing.

There's no divide.

Brilliant engineers, among the best software craftsmen out there are using AI daily and speeding up their processes.

The author of Redis, antirez, stated a month ago he spent 2 weeks on Redis tinkering with LLMs...and it was just design phase, not a single line of code was authored. The ability to interrogate LLMs and have them criticize his ideas and edge cases sped up his process by month.

He also used LLMs successfully to find multiple issues in Redis that would've took him longer to do without.

I myself spend with AI way more time tinkering and gathering information than authoring code.

Am I a craft lover or a result chaser?

But sure, let's keep everything in the divide conservative vs liberal, black and white, craftsman vs vibe coder...give me a break..

People who say directing an AI is just "moving up another level of abstraction" are missing the point that it's a completely different kind of work. Everything from machine code to Haskell is a predictable deductive logical system, whereas AIs are not.

I'm just not buying this framing. At all.

I'm not sure what it is I'm supposed to be mourning. I'm using my skills and continuing in my craft the way I have for several decades and the way I will continue to for several more. I eschew the LLMs not because they are threatening to me, but because they are unsound products built & promoted by people who are fundamentally sociopathic.

If I am to mourn, I can mourn the unveiling of deep ethical lapses across the entire tech industry. They were clearly there already, we just didn't realize that if you were to put any random assemblage of techies into a room, a decent handful of them are sadly unethical people lacking a moral compass. We know that now. They love LLMs, because they love power and they dislike having to forgo perceived "utility" by recognizing the importance of caring for others in a community.

While they do their utmost to demolish craft & artistry & tradition, I will be doing my utmost to preserve & defend all of those things. I am no stranger to boycotts, and I certainly don't suffer from FOMO. And I'm thankful I know a whole lot of people who feel much as I do.

Really the distinction is between those that can see the bigger picture, and those that only see what is in front of them. Of course the immediate gratification of LLMs appeal to the latter, whereas the former is all too aware of the systemic downside of such automated content generation.

Every little minor dispute can be split into some arbitrary dichotomy which is vaguely defensible. Not interesting.

Twelve years ago I would have the bright idea of why not make a little, just a tiny little (what I would call now) preprocessor for Java which does the same thing in less characters and is clearer. Everyone would love it. Of course no one loved it. Well, I never implemented it. Because I got some sense: you can’t just make tiny little preprocessors, a little code generation here and there, just code-generate this and tweak after the fact. Right? It’s not principled.

You can cook up a dichotomy. Good for you. I think the approach is just space age technology meets Stone Age mindset. It’s Flintstone Engineering. It’s barely even serious.

I am not offended that you took my craft. I am offended that you smear paint on the wall with three hundred parallel walls and painters and pick the best one. Or whatever Rube Setup is the thing that will take over the world as of thirty minutes ago.

Make something rock solid like formal verification with LLM assist (or LLM with formal verification assist?). Something that a “human” can understand (at this point maybe only the CEO is left). Something that is understandable, deterministic.

I might be out of a job. But I will not be offended. And I will respect it.

It’s sad not because of AI itself but because of the companies behind AI: we are now paying for every single line of code we produce. That sucks

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Yow, submitter sure isn't shy with their bias. Maybe defang the title?

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