Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

I think every engineering manager has either worked for or interviewed with a company that believes this stuff.

Software dev is still at the craftsman[0] level. It might move out of that, eventually. But not yet, and probably not in the next 20 years or so. We haven't solved some intrinsic problems around defining a problem completely, precisely and succinctly without having to write code[1]. And getting five engineers to write a single piece of software is exactly as complex as it was when Fred Brooks wrote about it, I think the only improvement we've had since then is Git.

[0] craftsperson? that doesn't feel like the right gender-neutral expression. I guess "artisanal" but that looks rude. Suggestions?

[1] The "I got ChatGPT to write this application without writing a single line of code" phenomenon is interesting, but it seems like an alternate skill path - you can write code, or you can write prompts. The complexity is the same, and the amount of effort is within an order of magnitude. I'm not sure, though - I haven't managed to get ChatGPT to solve a single technical problem successfully yet.

Chat always writes me something that includes

           perfecttly_suited_package_that_doesnt_exist(my_inputs)

It's great isn't it.

Npm packages that don't exist and yet always have the same parameters as your data.

eventually it will create and publish it for you, they say... not only the package definition, but the implementation also.

I don't know exactly why, but I doubt it will.

Ironically, that's one of the common practices in programming - writing calls to nonexistent functions that you implement later.

Getting a bit philosophical, I believe that the problem of 'defining a problem completely' is where the practical application of 'how then should we live?' gets self-referential. Startups spend inordinate amounts of time and money trying to figure out their customers' problems, drilling down, pivoting, etc. It's the challenge of silicon valley.

And the more one increases the search space the more primary that question of defining the problem becomes. Whether the execution is handled by chatGPT or a human coder, it looks to me like defining the problem we want to solve is the majority of our current frontier.

I think that's two different, but related problems.

"what should we build?" is a different problem from "what do you think we should be building?" - the first is a customer discovery problem (what do our customers think they need?), the second is a communication problem (what does our manager want us to build?).

The related bit is that humans are bad at communicating and we need to spend a lot of effort deciphering ambiguous human waffle into precise program code.

craftsperson or artisan both work, but no one cares if you use craftsman

“craftsman” is fine, don’t worry about it

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