Comment by barnabee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barnabee | Hacker News Reader

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I like designing data, algorithms, and systems. I like picking the right tools for the job. I like making architectural and user interface (CLI, configuration format, GUI, whatever) decisions.

Actually typing code is pretty dull. To the extent that I rarely do it full time (basically only when prototyping or making very simple scripts etc.), even though I love making things.

So for me, personally, LLMs are great. I'm making more software (and hardware) than ever, mostly just to scratch an itch.

Those people that really love it should be fine. Hobbies aren't supposed to make you money anyway.

I don't have much interest in maintaining the existence of software development/engineering (or anything else) as a profession if it turns out it's not necessary. Not that I think that's really what's happening. Software engineering will continue as a profession. Many developers have been doing barely useful glue work (often as a result of bad/overcomplicated abstractions and tooling in the first place, IMO) and perhaps that won't be needed, but plenty more engineers will continue to design and build things just more effectively and with better tools.

The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability, aesthetic trends, and function design still dominate the purchasing decisions of the general public.

Being tapped into fickle human preference and changing utility landscape will be necessary for a long time still. It may get faster and easier to build, but tastemakers and craftsmen still have heavy sway over markets than can mass-produce vanilla products.

> The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability

Luckily if you want stability or quality they are nowhere to be found.

I would generally put “stability” and “quality” as attributes of mass production far more than that of handmade things. Yes, an expert can make a quality product by hand, but MOST handmade things are far more likely to be shoddy. The whole point of mass production was that suddenly you could make a million identical perfect products.

True, but motivations for mass production also are motivations for making things worse off overall.

Agree with this. I think LLMs allow more time to bring these things to the fore and more leverage to do them cost efficiently.

I think reducing what LLMs do to « typing » is misleading. If it was just typing, you could simply use speech-to-text. But LLMs do far more than that, they shape the code itself. And I think we lose something when we delegate that work to LLMs

Agreed. Also, it takes time to understand a domain properly- so the innate slowness of coding helps with letting things “simmer” in the back of the mind.

The art is to decide when shaping the code yourself is worth your time. Not only financially but also experience gain and job satisfaction.

It’s not that they replace the act of typing, so much as figuring out how to express the specific algorithm or data structure in a given programming language, typing that, debugging it, etc.

Once I can describe something well, that’s most of the interesting part (to me) done.

We do lose something, but really I still see it as an extension of autocomplete.

I had some pieces of code I wrote I was quite proud of: well documented, clear code yet clever designs and algorithm.

But really what always mattered most to me was designing the solution. Then the coding part, even though I take some pride in the code I write, was most a mean to an end. Especially once I start having to add things like data validation and API layers, plotting analysis results and so many other things that are time consuming but easy and imho not very rewarding

To me its just a natural evolution of the search engine.

And now looking back its an obvious outcome. The search engine of the time was the best way to find websites. But those websites grew in quantity and volume over time with information.. that information as we know is/was a vital input for LLMs.

with an LLM, you can have an ill formed idea, and let the LLM mold it into a shape to your liking, without having the investment required to learn how to do molding first.

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