Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

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Ah, another "Now that we have AI, people can do [thing people could do for decades]" article. If there was something you wanted a computer to do, that it did not yet do, you programmed it. And if you didn't know how, you learned. BASIC was always there.

But the industry as a whole moved away from the idea that end users are to program computers sometime in the 80s or 90s (the glorious point and click future was not evenly distributed). So now the only tools for writing software out there are either outdated, or require considerable ceremony to get started with (even npm install). So what, we're gonna paper over the gap with acres of datacenter stealing our energy and fresh water to play token numberwang? Fuck me!

This article, and generative AI in general, is appealing to the people on Golgafrinchian Ark Fleet Ship B (aka "the managerial class") because it helps them convince themselves that they can now do all the things the folks on Golgafrinchian Ark Ship A can do (so who needs them, anyway) without having to learn anything. Now you can program without having to program! You're an Idea Person, and that's what's really important; so just idea-person into ChatGPT and all the rest will be taken care of for you. I think these folks are in for a rude awakening.

Member of Golgafrinchian Ark Fleet Ship C here.

I like to make stuff, hack on projects. I code, I woodwork, I solder, I build. I love AI in the same way I love a router and dovetail jig in the workshop.

My son and I were playing minecraft, and we wanted to build a massive egg, just for fun. (My son is 5).

We try, we fail, we try again. We start learning about spheres and how to draw circles, this is peak project-based-learning. But we still can't build an egg that looks good, and now it's becoming less fun and there's no drive to keep trying.

So I spin up claude after hours and in ~30 mins I have an parametric egg-generator in 3d space, mapped to voxels. There is no universe in which my child would be interested in the many years of training to get to the point of building this himself. I also don't have 20 hours free to learn and implement my own 3d voxel rendering systems, just to build an egg in minecraft as a silly teaching exercise.

That weekend we try to use this tool, and we see it's really hard to just see an egg model and build it, so 15 minutes later it can now show us a sliced layer-by-layer view.

The weekend, my son built a massive fucking egg in Minecraft and he's been talking about circles and radiuses and eggs and coding software ever since. He was SO excited to see that we could take a running program, something "real" in the world, and then directly change it. (And now he's trying to learn about code and graphics and stuff. Again, he's 5 - this is the passing interest of curiosity in a child, he's not studying 50-hour courses to learn low level skills)

Are you saying that's not a massive win for everyone involved?

I feel like you've never actually tried to make tool with Claude Code or similar because BASIC is not it - that's viewing the past with rose coloured glasses. However I understand your central thesis that we could have actually put effort into making something that average folk could use to effectively leverage computers in a way that requires 'code'. But you know we have tried - we have Scratch - we have all of the node graph spaghetti in Unreal Engine and others - I am a programmer but I finally sat down and went through the process of making a working finished tool in a language I'm unfamliar with and using Claude Code and it went really well. And if folks like Ben Krasnow of Applied Science channel are using AI coding tools that they would formally take them 3 to 5 x longer to struggle through unfamiliarity then practically it's working - although I also take a nod to your 'at what cost'. But the idea that we could have been living in some Utopian BASIC derived alternate uinverse seems a little bit optimistic to me. I like AI coding (if I don't have to think of the costs)

I'm not saying BASIC is it. But it was good enough in its day—my father used it to write engine simulations. It was the first language to attack the problem "getting computing nonprofessionals to write their own programs for their own needs" and it achieved that very well by the standards of the 01960s-01980s. But the fact that every computer shipped with a language that allowed users to get started with programming right away, was a noble thing we should have sought to preserve even in the present day. Scratch is for kids, and node spaghetti presents the usual no-code issues. HolyC comes close, but you know, Terry Davis. An acquired taste.

I was kinda hoping that language would be Python, but even that requires ceremony these days.

From what I can tell, some professionals seem to perceive it as a way to not write the easy stuff and only deal with the harder, more specific stuff that llms don't get (because they are incapable of new ideas). I don't know all the facts, but it seems as though this "home cooked software" boom will be really dull because of llm limitations. It always seems like I am actually learning something when copying code from books, maybe that is one reason why the 80s was interesting in terms of software, but what do I know, I wasn't alive.

In my experience, the people using AI to make programs are still programmers. As in, they were trained in programming pre-AI. Managers are using AI to output manager stuff - documents, spreadsheets, etc. Similarly, marketers are using AI to write ad copy, not the marketing manager.

This may change as tools become better known or adopted. But for know the same people who did the job before are now using AI in that job.

FWIW, in my IRL experience, all the work output of those using AI for whatever task has been of poorer quality than without.

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