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Comment by Sean-Der | Hacker News Reader

I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents.

I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?

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I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools.

I think the more apt comparison would be a carpenter to a mass produced factory. If you've read any of Yegge's recent ramblings than factories of factories seem to be what the AI focused peeps like to produce.

Here is another thing I find frustrating, but I don't know the right way to express it. A lot of this AI tooling/coding seems self-indulgent? 'I built a better software factory!'. The tools are very powerful, but I don't see the results yet. The frustration outweighs results.

I am underwater dealing with it. I am getting outlandish PRs against Pion. So I spend my time triaging and feel burned out. The 'AI future' I was expecting would be people swooping in and clearing up the backlog in high quality ways.

Instead I get people trying to add new APIs when it can already be done with existing APIs and then arguing about it with me.

Because the factories of factories is mostly bullshit. OpenAI blogged about how it was complicated for them to build a project using AI alone and the specs in the repo, how easy it was for models to get lost, not do what was expected of them and the burden it was on the team.

I don't think we will never get there but we're definitely not there yet. Models still require a lot of handholding to get things done.

Please don't forget you are under no obligation to triage all the awful things.

You are well within your rights to require submitters reach a certain standard before you will review their request.

Your time is finite and precious. Your project benefits from your enthusiasm and knowledge. It does not benefit from you acting as human reviewer of a tsunami of low quality content.

You are allowed to be ruthlessly protective of your time to the benefit of your project.

This begs an importent question: how? How do you filter without putting up barriers that high quality contributors will not want to climb?

I ask both as a maintainer who has been overwhelmed and as someone who declines to participate in communities where the bar is set too high for casual drive-by contributions.

Make it a rule that any PR that changes over ... 100 LoC? 150? <some number you're comfortable with> needs to be broken down into smaller, more atomic ones.

If that can't be done, e.g. because it's a very large refactor that can only be published as a unit, get them to walk you through each design and architectural choice.

I don't think a high quality contributor will take issue with that.

I only maintain my own codebases, so my deepest commiserations my fellow.

I’d imagine I’d just want to turn repo’s private or gate who has access, that’s my default response.

> I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools.

I suspect there's some survivorship bias at play here. You don't hear what the tradesmen who shied away from using powertools thought because they ceased to find work as tradesmen.

In the same way, future software makers will all be raving about their favorite LLM.

He also made the most beautiful hand crafted woodwork I’ve seen.

I dunno, I feel my comparison is more apt. AI tries to anything & everything. A powered drill just drills, and saves your arm/wrist from a manual drill.

A better analogy for an individual might be a cnc lathe. You can make anything you want perfectly but if you enjoyed wood turning then you may not get the same satisfaction from the process of running a cnc.

Carpenters and powertools sounds more like handwriting or typewriting vs using a computer to write.

AI feels like something else entirely. You're not even doing the writing or the thinking, you're telling someone else to do it and they "do" it.

It's more like a carpenter walking into a factory and saying to someone I want to build xyz and it builds it immediately.

I think there’s still value in hand made furniture with little to no power tool involvement. There’s certainly value in creating furniture yourself in this way. It doesn’t give answer the question about the people who loved that job , the many old school carpenters who had to adapt or give up.

I wonder if hand coding will become mostly a hobby and maybe a niche market. I’m not saying I like it, that’s tbd, but I wonder about it.

Powertools are new language features. AI is more of an Ikea factory. No self respecting carpenter wish to work there, but some have to

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