Comment by aspenmartin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aspenmartin | Hacker News Reader

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I understand this sentiment but, it is a lot of fun for me. Because I want to make a real thing to do something, and I didn't get into programming for the love of it, I got into it as a means to an end.

It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's the fun part"

You are doing different things and exercising different skillsets when you use agents. People enjoy different aspects of programming, of building. My job is easier, I'm not sad about that I am very grateful.

Do you resent folks like us that do find it fun? Do you consider us "lesser" because we use coding agents? ("the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning.") <- I don't really care if you consider this "true" painting or not, I wanted a painting and now I have a painting. Call me whatever you want!

> It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's the fun part"

The compiler reliably and deterministically produces code that does exactly what you specified in the source code. In most cases, the code it produces is also as fast/faster than hand written assembly. The same can't be said for LLMs, for the simple reason that English (and other natural languages) is not a programming language. You can't compile English (and shouldn't want to, as Dijkstra correctly pointed out) because it's ambiguous. All you can do is "commission" another

> Do you resent folks like us that do find it fun?

For enjoying it on your own time? No. But for hyping up the technology well beyond it's actual merits, antagonizing people who point out it's shortcomings, and subjecting the rest of us to worse code? Yeah, I hold that against the LLM fans.

That a coding agent or LLM is a different technology than a compiler and that the delta in industry standard workflow looks different isn’t quite my point though: things change. Norms change. That’s the real crux of my argument.

> But for hyping up the technology well beyond it's actual merits, antagonizing people who point out it's shortcomings, and subjecting the rest of us to worse code? Yeah, I hold that against the LLM fans.

Is that what I’m doing? I understand your frustration. But I hope you understand that this is a straw man: I can straw man the antagonists and AI-hostile folks but the point is the factions and tribes are complex and unreasonable opinions abound. My stance is that people can dismiss coding agents at their peril, but it’s not really a problem: taking the gcc analogy, in the early compiler days there was a period where compilers were weak enough that assembly by hand was reasonable. Now it would be just highly inefficient and underperformant to do that. But all the folks that lamented compilers didn’t crumble away, they eventually adapted. I see that analogy as being applicable here, it may be hard to see the insanity of coding agents because we’re not time travelers from 2020 or even 2022 or 3. But this used to be an absurd idea and is now very serious and highly adopted. But still quite weak!! Still we’re missing key reliability and functionality and capabilities. But if we got this far this fast, and if you realize that coding agent training is not limited in the same way that e.g. vanilla LLM training is by being a verifiable domain, we seem to be careening forward. But by nature of their current weakness, absolutely it is reasonable not to use them and absolutely it is reasonable to point out all of their flaws.

Lots of unreasonable people out there, my argument is simply: be reasonable.

> Norms change. That’s the real crux of my argument.

Novelty isn't necessarily better as a replacement of what exists. Example: blockchain as fancy database, NFTs, Internet Explorer, Silverlight, etc.

No it’s certainly not, and if you do want to lump coding agents into blockchain and NFTs that’s of course your choice but those things did not spur trillions of dollars of infra buildout and reshape entire geopolitical landscapes and have billions of active users. If you want to say: coding agents are not truly a net positive right now, that’s I think a perfectly reasonable opinion to hold (though I disagree personally). If you want to say coding agents are about as vapid as NFTs that to me is a bit less defensible

As others has already been pointed out, not all new technologies that are proposed are improvements. You say you understand this, but the clear subtext of the analogy to compilers is that LLM driven development are a obvious improvement and if we don't adopt them we'll find ourselves in the same position as assembly programmers who refused to learn compiled languages.

> Is that what I’m doing?

Initially I'd have been reluctant to say yes, but this very comment is laced with assertions that we'd better all start adopting LLMs for coding or we're going to get left behind [0]

> taking the gcc analogy, in the early compiler days there was a period where compilers were weak enough that assembly by hand was reasonable. Now it would be just highly inefficient and underperformant to do that

No matter how good LLMs get at translating english into programs, they will still be limited by the fact that their input (natural language) isn't a programming language. This doesn't mean it can't get way better, but it's always going to have some of the same downsides of collaborating with another programmer.

[0] This is another red flag I would hope programmers would have learned to recognize. Good technology doesn't need to try to threaten people into adopting it.

My intention was to say: you won't get left behind you will just get left slightly behind the curve until things reach a point where you feel you have no choice but to join the dark side. Like gcc/assembly: sure maybe there were some hardcore assembly holdouts but any day they could and probably did jump on the bandwagon. This is also speculation, I agree, but my point is: not using LLMs/coding agents today is very very reasonable, and the limitations that people often bring up are also very reasonable and believable.

> No matter how good LLMs get at translating english into programs, they will still be limited by the fact that their input (natural language) isn't a programming language.

Right but engineers routinely convert natural language + business context into formal programs, arguably an enormously important part of creating a software product. What's any different here? Like a programmer, the creation process is two-way. The agent iteratively retrieves additional information, asks questions, checks their approach, etc etc.

> [0] This is another red flag I would hope programmers would have learned to recognize. Good technology doesn't need to try to threaten people into adopting it.

I think I was either not clear or you misread my comment: you're not going to get left behind any more than you want to. Jump in when you feel good about where the technology is and use it where you feel it should be used. Again: if you don't see value in your own personal situation with coding agents, that is objectively a reasonable stance to hold today.

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