6 ms·

I just see it as tool. Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better

I just see it as tool. Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense. I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back. Construction went from using a tap-and-die to make your own screws, now CnC machines, 3d printers, power drills, etc.... LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project. I really don't get the hate. Was I proud to write my own linked-list library and red-black tree system in the late 80s. Sure. And yet I was much happier when it was just a built in part of the language. I'm really happy I can draw something in a drawing program and not have to sketch it on graph paper like I did in the 80s and manually convert the image to hex codes Each step removed one more piece of friction. I'm not trying to tell you what to like. If you like certain activities be my guest. I like to cook sometimes even though ordering out would be easier. All I'm saying is I don't get the hate that something got easier. We have 1000s of examples fo things getting easier horses -> cars, wagon -> trucks, ships -> planes, oil paints -> photos, math -> spreadsheets, etc... So LLM made yet another thing easier. If you didn't complain about those other things getting easier, why are you complaining now? --- I find it interesting there's a post about inverse kinetics which is could be argued is "how to automate animation" or "how get rid of animators" or "how to make lots of animation less tedious" It's celebrated. Yet LLMs doing the similar things for coding is derided.

spacedcowboy 4d ago
I'm with you. I've done some pretty special things over the years I was employed, none of which had any input from LLMs. Now I'm retired and I have a tool at my fingertips that I can instruct, manage, and (sometimes eventually) get what I want. It's not massively dissimilar to managing a group of engineers... The inspiration, the ideas, the workflow, the vision, the end product - all mine. The grunt work that takes all the time - hand it off to the LLM, and make sure it bloody works at the end. With that approach, I built a compiler for my own language - it runs on {Mac, Linux, Windows} and any of those can produce code for {Mac, Linux, Windows, WASM, iOS, Android, Zynq, m68k, 6502} - the last 3 being more useful to me than most people I expect. I have a signed binary running on my phone, which was developed on a Linux box and never saw anything from an Apple Xcode installation... That compiler was how I (and Claude) wrote a WASM client to a server back end, all of which use the exact same classes and data formats, making integration trivial. I'm working on a cross-platform UI framework now, with a Cocoa-like UI description, that you drag lines between your code and the various UI platforms you want to support {Desktop, tablet, phone}, with mobile variants offering portrait and landscape. Write your actual program logic once, and visually connect UI into it, on a target-by-target basis. Support any platform with one codebase. I wouldn't have considered taking on a program of this complexity without the LLM. It'd just have been a pipe-dream. They're tools. Wonderful tools, but still tools.
- wartywhoa23 4d ago
  Filling your retirement with all those rainbows and unicorns nobody but you care is fine, but what do those who are not retired yet do?
  - danielbln 4d ago
    The same. Think in systems, interfaces, integrations, the problem at hand. Zoom out, leave the grunt work and yak shaving to the machine, and keep your eyes on the price. If you only get satisfaction when you hand set functions in a particular way, then the only thing to say is that time is moving on.
whstl 4d ago
I think the IK comment is interesting. Tedious animation is something that animators I worked with also hated doing, and they were always after tools to accelerate their workflow, so they could focus on the high-level decisions. I've also used and built lots of refactoring tools. I've been fanatic about them for decades. Using LLMs for that isn't that different, maybe it was a bit less deterministic before, but lately... holy shit, they've become good at it. But the "animation is dead" discussion would still bother me if I was an animator.
bluefirebrand 4d ago
> LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project. > I really don't get the hate I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?" It's not just you, your attitude is very common, what else am I supposed to do except hate it? Just shrug my shoulders and smile, like "hey I just wasted 25 years of my life on pursuit of mastery of a skill that now has zero value to anyone?" I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it.
- EQYV 4d ago
  > I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?" Perhaps this comment spells the end of my account but I can’t not say this. What you can create for your employer is and always was the ONLY reason they valued you. And why would you ever expect anything different? You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value. By the way, I do not think your time has been wasted! Your knowledge and experience are extremely useful to avoid entire categories of problems that a naive LLM-only approach would produce in spades. THAT, I believe, is what our craft truly is.
  - bluefirebrand 4d ago
    > You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value. Yes obviously. But consider: In the past my employer and I were aligned. We agreed that in order for me to create more value for them I also had to enrich myself by learning new stuff so I could use that learning to better provide value to them Now that is no longer the case. Now my employer and I are no longer aligned. The equation is now stacked heavily in favor of employers, at the expense of people like me not getting what I want out of the arrangement other than a paycheck Yeah, fine. Most people only work for a paycheck. I'm not really worse off than anyone else in that regard. I'm still mad that I arranged my life so I did have a better arrangement for myself and now I do not thanks to the greediest assholes on the planet
jodrellblank 4d ago
If we strip away all the layers of onion, we are not left with a Platonic ideal onion, we're left with nothing. Removing every chore, task, craft, friction from life does not leave an ideal perfect life, it leaves nothing. Some people are feeling closer to that nothing than others. A human who liked caring for horses, feeding them, brushing them, comforting them during thunderstorms, blanketing them in cold weather, riding them through the fields, tolerated mucking out the stables, is not just biding their time until someone invents the city bus so they can free up all of that timewasting labour and sit in a box turning a wheel left and right for the rest of their days, and then the self-driving taxi, so they can finally "be free". You can say that they can still care for horses today, but if mansions don't need stables and horses, if deliveries don't use horses, then it's no longer a tangled up job, life, part of a community, way of earning money, way to get some respect, feel useful, it's just standing in a field stroking an animal.
- socalgal2 3d ago
  The difference is that person who loved tending to horses had no delusions they were mot out of a job and their horse tending would just be a hobby with few exceptions. They didn’t complain trucks sucked and couldn’t do the job of hauling people and goods better than horses. They saw the progress and had to come to terms what it. That’s a far cry from how many on HN are dealing with LLMs
- whstl 4d ago
  That's beautiful, and true.
- weakfish 4d ago
  I love this articulation.
- properbrew 4d ago
  I can see the analogy, but fundementally that human liked caring for animals, they didn't like transporting the goods as effectively as possible, if they did then sitting in a box optimising delivery time would make them feel useful and respected. The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would make them feel even more fulfilled.
sashank_1509 4d ago
This is a terrible example. Cars qualitatively opened up something that humans could never do before. Same with the computer. What about LLMs? LLMs just replace what you were already doing, but don’t qualitatively open up all that much in the frontier. A million lines of LLM slop? Arguably LLMs close the frontier, rely too much on it and your ability to think hard and long ends up getting crushed.
- michaelrpeskin 4d ago
  I don't think it's as much as opening up what we _could_ do, it's opening up time so that more can be done. Slop is too generic of a complaint. Do LLMs write code exactly how I would? No. Is my way right? Probably not. But what LLMs are great at are pre-emptively thinking about edge cases that I forget when writing the code. I'm surprised as how many fewer weird bugs come back to me now after a release. Should I have thought of them? Yes probably, but I don't and they do. So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself). But more importantly is that it allows me to take on projects that I never would have. Some of them are personal projects, some of them are work projects. I often didn't even consider a project because the time it would take _me_ to do it would not be worth the value. But now that _I_ don't have to do it, I can do more things. At the end of the workday last week, I kicked off a project that I've wanted to do for the last 5 years but could never justify writing it. The LLM crunched for 36 hours, I checked in on it this morning and it's ready for me to deploy next week when I get in the office. Something that would have taken me probably 9 months of focused effort. It would never have been worth 9 months of engineering time, but it sure is worth the 36 hours of background work while I was doing something else productive. I guess it's not a quantum leap in the frontier of what _can_ be done, but it is a leap in what _will_ be done because the cost/benefit parameters change.
  - johnnyanmac 4d ago
    >So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself). "correct" code is not "good" code. We see this quite a bit with the analogue of AI-generated text. Having all your grammar and spelling correct does not make for a more compelling read. like, a correct, tested class doesn't necessarily stand up to integrating into a million line legacy code. Executives don't understand this, but this is the value being shedded as they try their 4th or 5th wave of attempts to take the programmer out of programming.
ThrowawayR2 4d ago
Let's plug AI into the parent's post and see where that takes us. > "Used to be you had to reason things out using your brain. Then we got LLMs, then AI. Complaining that using your own brain was better seems like nonsense. I'm old enough to have had to use my intelligence and my education to figure out solutions and if the engineering challenge was too hard, I had to really work at it. I don't want to go back." That is where "LLM is no different from a calculator, bro" argument falls down hard; it's one thing to lose your arithmetic skills but it's quite another to lose your reasoning and learning skills. We are already seeing students who use LLMs to do their schoolwork failing to get properly educated (and they themselves acknowledge it), so this isn't some kind of made up hyperbole. The only thing that separates humans from animals is their reasoning and their intelligence. If some people want to give that up to climb down the evolutionary ladder, well, have fun with that.
- whstl 3d ago
  I've seen a few people already descending into pure AI madness, not able (wanting?) to do their work anymore, and just repeating everything the AI says, going to it for every single decision on the job. A few of those were fired. Another two are just producing slop and are being kept because nobody cared about their work in the first place. It's not just generating text, but using the agent to make every single decision.

spacedcowboy 4d ago

I'm with you. I've done some pretty special things over the years I was employed, none of which had any input from LLMs. Now I'm retired and I have a tool at my fingertips that I can instruct, manage, and (sometimes eventually) get what I want. It's not massively dissimilar to managing a group of engineers... The inspiration, the ideas, the workflow, the vision, the end product - all mine. The grunt work that takes all the time - hand it off to the LLM, and make sure it bloody works at the end. With that approach, I built a compiler for my own language - it runs on {Mac, Linux, Windows} and any of those can produce code for {Mac, Linux, Windows, WASM, iOS, Android, Zynq, m68k, 6502} - the last 3 being more useful to me than most people I expect. I have a signed binary running on my phone, which was developed on a Linux box and never saw anything from an Apple Xcode installation... That compiler was how I (and Claude) wrote a WASM client to a server back end, all of which use the exact same classes and data formats, making integration trivial. I'm working on a cross-platform UI framework now, with a Cocoa-like UI description, that you drag lines between your code and the various UI platforms you want to support {Desktop, tablet, phone}, with mobile variants offering portrait and landscape. Write your actual program logic once, and visually connect UI into it, on a target-by-target basis. Support any platform with one codebase. I wouldn't have considered taking on a program of this complexity without the LLM. It'd just have been a pipe-dream. They're tools. Wonderful tools, but still tools.

wartywhoa23 4d ago
Filling your retirement with all those rainbows and unicorns nobody but you care is fine, but what do those who are not retired yet do?
- danielbln 4d ago
  The same. Think in systems, interfaces, integrations, the problem at hand. Zoom out, leave the grunt work and yak shaving to the machine, and keep your eyes on the price. If you only get satisfaction when you hand set functions in a particular way, then the only thing to say is that time is moving on.

whstl 4d ago

I think the IK comment is interesting. Tedious animation is something that animators I worked with also hated doing, and they were always after tools to accelerate their workflow, so they could focus on the high-level decisions. I've also used and built lots of refactoring tools. I've been fanatic about them for decades. Using LLMs for that isn't that different, maybe it was a bit less deterministic before, but lately... holy shit, they've become good at it. But the "animation is dead" discussion would still bother me if I was an animator.

bluefirebrand 4d ago

> LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project. > I really don't get the hate I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?" It's not just you, your attitude is very common, what else am I supposed to do except hate it? Just shrug my shoulders and smile, like "hey I just wasted 25 years of my life on pursuit of mastery of a skill that now has zero value to anyone?" I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it.

EQYV 4d ago
> I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?" Perhaps this comment spells the end of my account but I can’t not say this. What you can create for your employer is and always was the ONLY reason they valued you. And why would you ever expect anything different? You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value. By the way, I do not think your time has been wasted! Your knowledge and experience are extremely useful to avoid entire categories of problems that a naive LLM-only approach would produce in spades. THAT, I believe, is what our craft truly is.
- bluefirebrand 4d ago
  > You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value. Yes obviously. But consider: In the past my employer and I were aligned. We agreed that in order for me to create more value for them I also had to enrich myself by learning new stuff so I could use that learning to better provide value to them Now that is no longer the case. Now my employer and I are no longer aligned. The equation is now stacked heavily in favor of employers, at the expense of people like me not getting what I want out of the arrangement other than a paycheck Yeah, fine. Most people only work for a paycheck. I'm not really worse off than anyone else in that regard. I'm still mad that I arranged my life so I did have a better arrangement for myself and now I do not thanks to the greediest assholes on the planet

jodrellblank 4d ago

If we strip away all the layers of onion, we are not left with a Platonic ideal onion, we're left with nothing. Removing every chore, task, craft, friction from life does not leave an ideal perfect life, it leaves nothing. Some people are feeling closer to that nothing than others. A human who liked caring for horses, feeding them, brushing them, comforting them during thunderstorms, blanketing them in cold weather, riding them through the fields, tolerated mucking out the stables, is not just biding their time until someone invents the city bus so they can free up all of that timewasting labour and sit in a box turning a wheel left and right for the rest of their days, and then the self-driving taxi, so they can finally "be free". You can say that they can still care for horses today, but if mansions don't need stables and horses, if deliveries don't use horses, then it's no longer a tangled up job, life, part of a community, way of earning money, way to get some respect, feel useful, it's just standing in a field stroking an animal.

socalgal2 3d ago
The difference is that person who loved tending to horses had no delusions they were mot out of a job and their horse tending would just be a hobby with few exceptions. They didn’t complain trucks sucked and couldn’t do the job of hauling people and goods better than horses. They saw the progress and had to come to terms what it. That’s a far cry from how many on HN are dealing with LLMs
whstl 4d ago
That's beautiful, and true.
weakfish 4d ago
I love this articulation.
properbrew 4d ago
I can see the analogy, but fundementally that human liked caring for animals, they didn't like transporting the goods as effectively as possible, if they did then sitting in a box optimising delivery time would make them feel useful and respected. The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would make them feel even more fulfilled.

sashank_1509 4d ago

This is a terrible example. Cars qualitatively opened up something that humans could never do before. Same with the computer. What about LLMs? LLMs just replace what you were already doing, but don’t qualitatively open up all that much in the frontier. A million lines of LLM slop? Arguably LLMs close the frontier, rely too much on it and your ability to think hard and long ends up getting crushed.

michaelrpeskin 4d ago
I don't think it's as much as opening up what we _could_ do, it's opening up time so that more can be done. Slop is too generic of a complaint. Do LLMs write code exactly how I would? No. Is my way right? Probably not. But what LLMs are great at are pre-emptively thinking about edge cases that I forget when writing the code. I'm surprised as how many fewer weird bugs come back to me now after a release. Should I have thought of them? Yes probably, but I don't and they do. So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself). But more importantly is that it allows me to take on projects that I never would have. Some of them are personal projects, some of them are work projects. I often didn't even consider a project because the time it would take _me_ to do it would not be worth the value. But now that _I_ don't have to do it, I can do more things. At the end of the workday last week, I kicked off a project that I've wanted to do for the last 5 years but could never justify writing it. The LLM crunched for 36 hours, I checked in on it this morning and it's ready for me to deploy next week when I get in the office. Something that would have taken me probably 9 months of focused effort. It would never have been worth 9 months of engineering time, but it sure is worth the 36 hours of background work while I was doing something else productive. I guess it's not a quantum leap in the frontier of what _can_ be done, but it is a leap in what _will_ be done because the cost/benefit parameters change.
- johnnyanmac 4d ago
  >So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself). "correct" code is not "good" code. We see this quite a bit with the analogue of AI-generated text. Having all your grammar and spelling correct does not make for a more compelling read. like, a correct, tested class doesn't necessarily stand up to integrating into a million line legacy code. Executives don't understand this, but this is the value being shedded as they try their 4th or 5th wave of attempts to take the programmer out of programming.

ThrowawayR2 4d ago

Let's plug AI into the parent's post and see where that takes us. > "Used to be you had to reason things out using your brain. Then we got LLMs, then AI. Complaining that using your own brain was better seems like nonsense. I'm old enough to have had to use my intelligence and my education to figure out solutions and if the engineering challenge was too hard, I had to really work at it. I don't want to go back." That is where "LLM is no different from a calculator, bro" argument falls down hard; it's one thing to lose your arithmetic skills but it's quite another to lose your reasoning and learning skills. We are already seeing students who use LLMs to do their schoolwork failing to get properly educated (and they themselves acknowledge it), so this isn't some kind of made up hyperbole. The only thing that separates humans from animals is their reasoning and their intelligence. If some people want to give that up to climb down the evolutionary ladder, well, have fun with that.

whstl 3d ago
I've seen a few people already descending into pure AI madness, not able (wanting?) to do their work anymore, and just repeating everything the AI says, going to it for every single decision on the job. A few of those were fired. Another two are just producing slop and are being kept because nobody cared about their work in the first place. It's not just generating text, but using the agent to make every single decision.