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Comment by ux-app | Hacker News Reader

>Coding involve care and inspiration

give it a rest mate. Most coding is garbage generic gluing of boilerplate and API calls.

Aligning buttons and agonizing over 18px vs 20px padding is a monumental waste of human capital. 99.999% of coding is basically an interface to a DB (fetch some data, display it, maybe do some basic arithmetic and then save the data).

A machine will do all that drudgery better and quicker. We're not there yet, but the writing is on the wall.

>and should not necessarily be reinventing the wheel again and again

you must be new to the job.

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You are definitely right that most code is banal and glue, and that is indeed why the models, or this one at least, seems to be best suited to regurgitate it and change the names of your variables.

I guess I still don't see your main point though. There are plenty of tested and compliant style frameworks out there that have figured this stuff out, and they will do it better than whatever Stackoverflow example the AI gives you. If you dont have time to really think about and learn deep or even basic web design, such that you don't spend so much time on your padding, there are a wealth of frameworks and products and tools and templates that solve that problem with intentionality and some basic assurances. From the highest level of squarespace to free coding courses, there is an entire spectrum to meet you halfway.

It just sounds to me like maybe you are burnt out, or maybe you don't like coding stuff as much as others. Which is fine! And if this stuff helps you do your drudgery, that's fine too. But I would just say that you could work even smarter than this (presumably you are using it ).

I would wager using the right dumb tools will in the long run save you more time and enthusiasm than all this, and you will make better stuff, even its "boring" or bad to you. It's a wager I could see losing, at least with the time part, but I'd still make it.

I fully agree that something like this will help keep the bullshit glue we make for our bosses pumping, but is that really something to be so excited for as people are?

>I guess I still don't see your main point though.

. . .

>You are definitely right that most code is banal and glue

looks like you did see my main point.

Just sounds to me like you need a long vacation :)

I'm getting tired of intelligent people dumping on one of the most incredible advances our field has ever seen.

I was cynical of everything - smartphone incrementalism, slow pace of biology developments, social media. It didn't look like the hope and promise of the 1950's and 60's jet packs and robots would ever pan out. You'll probably find historical comments I've made on HN criticizing Ray Kurzweil and his like for their "bullshit Singularity" (as I used to call it). I firmly believed we had plateaued as a society.

With everything going on in AI/ML, I feel wrong about my assessment and finally have hope for the future. This is the automation of automation. Second order.

Please imagine what this means in the fullness of time. You might think HTML / CSS generation is a toy - it is. But what's coming will wash away everything you know. And it'll happen fast. People are plugging themselves into this tech and starting to dig away at existing problems and markets. It'll happen more quickly than with tech and the internet because there are more of us now.

> these demos have really quickly become so boring.

I'm about to put CNN/NBC/etc. out of business, and I'm just getting started: https://fakeyou.com/news

I can think of an AI/ML way to destroy almost every incumbent business out there. You should be applying yourself to that right now.

These are just the cards I'm willing to show now.

> It just sounds to me like maybe you are burnt out, or maybe you don't like coding stuff as much as others.

Maybe they don't like churning butter. The point isn't to write code, it's to create and solve problems.

This is the biggest opportunity of our lifetimes staring us in the face. Don't sleep on this.

The “GPT is going to wash away everything” discourse sounded familiar here on HN and of course, I had read it multiple times on your posts bordering on spam.

I don’t know if your tech is going to wash away anything, and I do wish you good luck, but CNN has been digging their own grave for the best part of a decade and you claiming the credit for taking them down is some of the worst hubris I’ve read on HN.

As for the applications of LLM I’ll take François Chollet’s view that they may be more limited than many people are claiming.

> You'll probably find historical comments I've made on HN criticizing Ray Kurzweil and his like for their "bullshit Singularity" (as I used to call it).

> I feel wrong about my assessment and finally have hope for the future

Maybe it should make you scared for the future. Read https://musingsandroughdrafts.com/2023/02/17/my-current-summ...

> These are just the cards I'm willing to show now.

When you're showing me one flush card, the other one is a rag and you're trying to get me to fold. If you had the flush, you could show me both cards and get me to fold for sure.

This follows the form, hype, and presentation of so many crypto pitches I've heard.

Crypto didn't do anything.

AI can give anyone the power to make music, art, film, and media without the time, talent, and institutional capital investments.

AI can automate people's jobs and reduce cost structures to accomplishing work and business objectives.

That's the difference, and the evaluation criteria is easily decided by the free market. Did it do a good job? Will it get hired again to repeat similar work? Are more customers adopting it? That's all you need to judge its success or relevancy.

Until AI can give us a just society where people are fed, clothed, medically treated and housed globally, I'm not tripping over myself calling it the future.

It's just more of the same, just faster and bigger. Sure, that's something, but it doesn't give me much hope by anything it has proven so far.

I enjoy your optimism and excitement, but as Joseph Weizenbaum puts it, this is most certainly the proverbial solution looking for a problem.

Hi ChatGPT

It's cool how stuff like this can be made so trivially now. It has the potential to be quiet useful, even though it is very simple to copy. What you have here is essentially the same as what is in the article, that was created by someone with no programming experience.

Steps to reproduce: 1. Generate a face 2. Pass face to animator API 3. Feed text to voice api

To paraphrase Lacan: as a revolutionary, you are demanding a new master. You will get one.

> give it a rest mate. Most coding is garbage generic gluing of boilerplate and API calls.

I think that says a lot more about the code you perceive than it does about what coding happens in the world.

for every programmer working on cutting edge creative/systems/math heavy code there are 1000 gluing APIs and tapping out glorified CRUD apps.

let's not pretend it's otherwise.

I think we should generate less CRUD, competing standards, endless new languages, frameworks, databases, Linux distros, and so on. I don't see why we should automate this. We could get far greater gains in productivity by less duplicated effort.

And thus, onde more standard is born.

And once again, we prove it: there is an XKCD for everything (although I have to admit this one was easy).

https://xkcd.com/927/

This sounds like every developer I've met who has never had a job at a company last longer than 6 months.

Most code is glue.

However, that doesn't mean it isn't interesting for data modelling.

I'm very excited to have most of the generic parts automated away

But you don't have that. At best you have a model for generating text that looks a lot like a blog post.

While I don't disagree with you largely. What a really nasty way to say it no? It's true a lot of what happens is boilerplate API calls and copy pasting of solved problems. AI is making that happen a lot faster, however the parent comment also has some good points. If you work for a large company most of your day is spent understanding domain specific problems then executing on that. It would be nice to see something more exciting because this is the Nth version of "AI made a thing" I have seen.

>If you work for a large company most of your day is spent understanding domain specific problems then executing on that.

... which involves fetching some data, displaying it, maybe doing some basic arithmetic and then shuffling it off to a DB?

drudgery.

bring the machines on so we don;t have to deal with this nonsense any more.

i'm curious what you think is worthy of humans to do?

often in life i find myself reminding myself that everything is just something to do.

serious question, what do you then distinguish as enlightened pursuits vs not, for lack of a better word.

edit to add: i painted my family's garage in my teens, manually. and i'm thirties now and when i go to my family home i see the painted garage. it never leaves me, the value.

>i'm curious what you think is worthy of humans to do?

whatever it is, it ain't making websites.

>what do you then distinguish as enlightened pursuits

painting your garage is getting pretty close to it I think.

You're getting pushback but I have to agree.

I'm disappointed with how unsophisticated modern web development is. Our tools and processes are extremely fragile and error prone, and frequently produce bug ridden junk. So much so that we feel the need to rewrite entire apps every n years if it hasn't already died under it's own weight by then.

The output we produce is 99% predestined by the tooling/framework we are placed in front of. And then we claim to be craftsmen.

To that extent nothing is worthy of humans to do. Nothing we do is truly unique. It only seems unique because we have a poor understanding of it. Might as well not exist or eat or poop because that’s not worthy

I do get the sentiment I will say. Like when I first got a job as a SWE all I did was CRUD apps and they are all fairly similar. Then I worked on wordpress for a while and it felt even worse. For about 6 years now I've personally moved away and work on some more exciting stuff. A lot of that though is still just DB read-write and display at the end of the day, and that's fine imo. I am very skeptical about AI however if I take the most positive spin and it automates away the boring? That could be good?

>> i'm curious what you think is worthy of humans to do?

Garden, tend land, and do arts.

After reading the replies, i'm understanding that drudgery has to do with lack of agency.

Can't websites be art too? A mindless CRUD app is framed as such if BigCo tells us to do it for the billionth time.

But if it's our agency that compels us, even tho it's still just glue and CRUD, our pov makes it different for us, and we still have a potential to express ourselves in some way, some tiny way.

So it's not that websites as a thing is somehow un-enlightened. Lowly for the robots.

No, it seems there's Art in anything, art is an expressed point of view. I do agree that human value comes down to Art.

Ah, yes, lets return the fulfilling life of subsistence farming ;)

> i'm curious what you think is worthy of humans to do?

It depends on what you value. If you value efficiency, automation, thinking deeply about new problems, then gen AI will likely free you from what you consider tedium. However, that’s not to say that those are the only valuable characteristics. Painting your family home is a noble, rewarding thing. If you enjoy the work, then it’s worthy.

This is fun for me, not drudgery. Painting the garage sounds like a hellish nightmare. Maybe they could automate that someday, so I can be free to move pixels around.

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