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The parent comment’s take resonates with me and your response is exactly, what I assume, frustrates us both. I’ve been at companies that were founded on sales
by skhameneh 1mo ago
The parent comment’s take resonates with me and your response is exactly, what I assume, frustrates us both.
I’ve been at companies that were founded on sales of physical goods that literally had vendors pick them for vended goods because they found the software made purchasing more convenient - as in they literally had customers tell them they bought their physical goods because of their software. They didn’t need the software. The software wasn’t critical to acquiring goods. They could have purchased goods elsewhere of similar quality and often potentially lower cost. The customers cared about the software, the software (that was not part of their core business) drove the core business.
Edit: I originally had a lot more typed about how craft matters and not being strictly about perfection. It wasn’t necessary to drive the point, so I removed it. People do buy craft and many pay a hefty premium for better craft (in all aspects, both producer COGS and customer needs/desires).
- laichzeit0 1mo agoLook I get it. I completely emphasise with the feeling. My undergrad is Computer Science, I often dreamed about writing my own compiler and spent years learning low level performance optimization, loved design patterns, re-factoring code to be more elegant, all that stuff. I just feel like after years in industry and how I’m steering something like Fable now that all of this is irrelevant and the writing is crystal clear on the wall: Writing software by hand is in its death throes. There is no future for it besides some very niche areas. When last have you actually looked at what your high level language is actually being compiled and optimised to? We’re moving up the abstraction ladder with software. To your point: People care about the actual output, the interface, whether it does what they want it to do, but in no way do they care about the internals and how it’s built. That’s an implementation detail. And that’s where all the fun of the craft actually sits. This is not unique to software engineering though, go take a look at the maths and mathematics subreddits. There are guys doing PhDs in maths who are too afraid to run their dissertation topics through the latest models because it might just solve the problem they’ve spent the last few years working on in a few hours. They absolutely hate that problems are being blown away where people have spent years trying to figure out. It feels like the same psychological pain software engineers are going through.
- pydry 1mo agoI don't think you do get it. Caring about craft and wanting to write things like compilers are two very distinct things. One is liking a mental challenge - like a crossword puzzle. The other is having pride in the quality of your work. An LLM is not a compiler. It is the leakiest abstraction of all time. I never experienced a compiler making a mistake, I think, ever. Every LLM I use makes a critical mistake somewhere between 50% and 95% of the time. If vibe coding truly is the future of coding then it really doesn't matter what you do. Keep up or don't keep up it doesn't matter. Your career is dead either way because your boss will replace you with a prompt. Might as well give up now.
- DiscourseFan 1mo agoOr, you know, become the guy who knows how to write really good prompts
- pydry 1mo agoan AI can be just as good a prompt monkey as you are
- DiscourseFan 1mo agoBut can it be the prompt monkey’s prompt monkey?
- prime_ursid 1mo agoThe trajectory is that the LLM providers have been making prompting increasingly dead-simple for the past 2 years. Any edge a group of individuals may have in knowing how to use LLMs gets absorbed into the LLM product.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]