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Comment by canthonytucci | Hacker News Reader

All details are not created equal.

Some details are boring.

My AI dream (that I’m living happily) is getting to focus on the details that I find interesting and ignoring all the boilerplate details that modern software requires.

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Boilerplate details mean we've failed as an industry. Why haven't we already got the computer to automate all the boring bits without AI?

why can't AI be that solution?

why use a nuclear bomb to drive a nail?

To further onto this, humans could technically simulate Turing machines themselves but they don't.

Efficiency and finding the right abstractions and tradeoffs is literally identical with making new capacities and capabilities. If all of your systems were truly "run by AI", we wouldn't have systems. Systems are systems because the AI uses well developed tools and protocols that humans have put together. It's a stable capacity.

I feel that this is because people have been reinventing the wheel a lot in IT.

A lot of innovation that finally lands in programming languages has been done decades earlier, but now it's mostly awkwardly bolted on existing languages and frameworks.

I really enjoy working with Gleam which is a rather boilerplate heavy language. However most of the work is managed by a really well built LSP. If you're writing a strongly type language it's easy to programmatically manage all of the boilerplate. You could you an LLM but why bother when it's a so formulaic.

Yeah, like imports in Java too. Any IDE lets you type List<ctrl-space> and it imports java.util.List - or java.awt.List if you select that one instead!

That's not what's really being discussed here though. Since it's already automated, you don't need to automate it with AI.

You said what I was thinking. AI can do the things I always found mind numbing and tedious, but because I did it already early in my career, I know when to intervene because the agent is not doing it correctly. I think that is the OP's point.

I think about LLMs in software today as attempting to provide a similar role as compilers in terms of translating high-level thoughts into low-level details.

The only problem is that I actually trust compilers.

How quickly would you drop a non-deterministic compiler for the source code of a project?

I detest this compiler analogy so much: llms are non deterministic by nature, compilers should not and are not

I'm not saying that LLMs are like compilers.

I'm saying that LLMs are like really bad compilers hehe.

So what? Jobs aren't supposed to be fun. Lots of people depend on those boring details.

Some of us just wouldn't work if it wasn't fun. I'd let myself starve in the streets. (I have some experience with starvation from an eating disorder phase in my twenties, it's only unbearable if you have to work).

Easy to say when you're not at risk of starving.

I like how you ignored the second part of my post. I specifically included it because I knew someone would respond like this to the first part. I think it's actually feasible when you have no other options - it's my retirement plan anyway.

I hope we can save “jobs aren’t supposed to be fun” for stuff like undertaker and grief counselor.

My feeling is making things should be mentally stimulating, and as many tedious parts that can be automated should be, so we can spend precious human thought on thinking instead of recitation.

I don’t know what you mean by the last part. Do you mean programmers depend on busy work to eat or the users depend on the human touch on the boring details?

For me there is nothing less fun than using AI to generate code

Then I have to do the boring bullshit work of reviewing it and making sure it's correct? Fuck that

Writing code is way more fun than reviewing other people's code

Saying jobs aren't supposed to be fun is akin to saying life should be dreadful. Work tends to be around half of your waking hours, usually your best and least tired half too. If anything we should be striving to make all kinds of work more enjoyable.

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