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Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

Even if you’re using the tools, you should not be. A good engineer cares about his craft, not just being maximally efficient. You will regret this

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There is a concept in tools, particularly knives, chisels, and other cutting tools used for work called “functional sharpness”. Basically it’s the concept of sharpening a tool to be “good enough” to do the job it needs to do and no more, rather than making the tool how sharp it can possibly be. The cost of time between functionally sharp vs “as sharp as possible” is not worth the effort and costs the user time that has no practical payoff.

What I think AI will very soon get to is being able to generate code to that “functional sharpness” level, while human engineers are caught striving for that as “sharp as possible” level because they care for their craft. The cost difference is just not worth it to the organizations and the trade off will be AI generated code that will be “good enough”. Sure a talented dev could do better, but that juice just won’t be worth the squeeze. To me, embracing the tools and becoming an prompting expert is the way to go, rather than some Luddite-like rejection of the technology because of some offended artistic notions.

I can relate. This sort of trade off exists today in almost all commercial code. Sharp enough to do the job, but not sharper.

A solo programmer can afford to be an artisan, but commercial code is rarely artisanal. It's full of trade-offs and compromises.

Commercial code is always about business costs -- maintenance cost, buy-vs-build cost, refactoring cost, business continuity costs, etc. You're always working under constraints like time, headcount, available expertise, maintainability, and coordination bottlenecks.

Craftsmanship in commercial code is rare. Sometimes you get geniuses like John Carmack who writes inspired stuff in code that ships. But most of the time, it's just a bunch of normal people trying to solve a problem under a ton of constraints.

> it's just a bunch of normal people trying to solve a problem under a ton of constraints.

What makes you think that doesn’t involve craftsmanship?

I read the point to be that was the kind of coding that was the current equivalent of functional sharpness.

I am a Luddite, happily. They were right

>> To me, embracing the tools and becoming an prompting expert is the way to go, rather than some Luddite-like rejection of the technology because of some offended artistic notions

Your first part may be right, however using the term Luddite as a pejorative without understanding what they meant or stood for (given the social context) is a sign of ignorance.

I am aware of the history and used the term intentionally. Historically, one of the chief complaints from those English workers (along with their compensation concerns…but there are always compensation concerns when human labor is changed in any way) was how the automated machines would lower the quality of the textiles.

The commenter I was responding to was specifically speaking to code quality concerns generated by AI automation. While the modern usage of “Luddite” tends to generalize towards rejection of any new technology. When I mentioned “Luddite-like rejection of the technology because of some offended artistic notions” it was specific to the Luddite complain that the automation of would lower quality.

That might be a specific detail in the history that you may have missed, forgotten, or perhaps simply ignored—but it’s an important detail with a direct parallel in this conversation.

> A good engineer cares about his craft, not just being maximally efficient.

How about a good engineer who wants to feed their family?

My opinion, and it's just that, is the corporations are betting on the robots advancing fast enough where it won't be an issue there aren't new 'good engineers' to follow the current batch. Probably to their detriment but by the time that happens humans will be tasked to only perform the work the robots simply can't physically do so their agency in the matter will no longer matter, you either install 13.6 screws/min or you are replaced with someone (or something) who can.

Happy days...

He is not a real engineer, not a real human even

I don’t worry about his job, good riddance

I am sure there were a lot of proud telegraph operators back in the day who refused to adapt to radio because it made it too easy for “lower skilled” people to communicate over long distances. I imagine some were critical of their fellow telegraph operators who embraced the new tech. My guess is that these proud folk at some point started wondering why no one was sending them messages anymore and why their income dried up.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you are in the telegram business and not the communications business.

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