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Comment by pclowes | Hacker News Reader

I do hand tool woodworking as a hobby. Aside from rough dimensioning, all the final cuts, planing, mortising, carving, dove tails etc are done by hand. Sometimes using tools over 100yrs old, not out of some fetish for the past, they are just better and cheaper than hand tools today.

It takes forever but I want to work the wood and develop actual skill. I don't want to just push wood through a series of saws, sanders, jigs and other machines. It has also made me much better at building “we need this now” type things (decks, cabinets etc) with power tools in general. I am much more precise, sensitive, and detail oriented.

I hope and feel there is something similar with coding and LLMs. A way to repurpose that hard earned sensitivity and recover some of the zen aspects as well. I am still figuring that out, part of it has been tiring but honestly a lot of it has made programming more fun too.

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For me, woodworking has never been about the "craft". It's been about holding that finished product in my hand. That's why I gave up manual woodworking and shifted to ordering finished pieces from IKEA. The speed with which I can now receive furniture delivered to my door far outpaces anything I could have ever done myself.

Some people say this isn't actually woodworking — that it's just ordering stuff online — but they don't see the hours I put into selecting colors and choosing modular pieces that fit together perfectly for my space.

The future of woodworking is here, and most woodworkers aren't ready.

Same, I'm a painter, and these days I just order prints online. For me it's was always about seeing a beautiful painting before my eyes.

Some people say this isn't actually painting, but they don't see the hours and impeccable taste of mine involved in browsing the works of Canaletto and Botticelli.

The way some people wield LLM, etc is like using a chainsaw to cut a dovetail because it is faster.

You're definitely going to get people using LLMs running on 8x $50K GPUs in a datacenter to do the job of a bash script.

I already see people using an agent to write a git commit

What’s wrong with that? The agent session had all the business context, knows what changed, and how we verified it. It takes 5s to turn that into a PR desc vs 10-100x that by hand

Because it's not perfect and it still fabricates things from time to time.

I have coworkers who do this and it sucks to be on the receiving end of. It means I now need to read every commit message with skepticism.

It's an example of using AI to save energy for yourself while simultaneously increasing the energy expenditure of your coworkers.

100 x 5s is nearly 10 minutes. If it takes 10 minutes to write a PR there may be a "skill issue". The bottom end of this 1-2 minutes makes more sense.

How much productivity do we really need? Even at senior dev payscale 2 minutes is like a dollar. The tokens and calls involved in having a 5s commit could close in on 10¢, depending on your contract, the model etc. and that's today's costs. Do remember that my salary is on top of the rates for the LLM, so if the 5s response takes 5s for me to prompt, that's 15s (10 for me 5 for the LLM) that the boss is paying for.

This starts to feel like a billionaire eating ramen noodles just so he can reach his second billion dollars.

Where I work our contract limits API calls, so doing this could result in not being able to use the model when I need it later for something more sophisticated (planning, debugging etc.) than using tooling I'm paid to already know.

Im not even talking about the description but “commit this to git with the description x” type prompts

I figured there must be a mix of dovetails and chainsawing: beautiful:

https://dovetailcabintools.com/videos

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