But you can move a layer up.
Instead of pouring all of your efforts into making one single static object with no moving parts, you can simply specify the individual parts, have the machine make them for you, and pour your heart and soul into making a machine that is composed of thousands of parts, that you could never hope to make if you had to craft each one by hand from clay.
We used to have a way to do this before LLMs, of course: we had companies that employed many people, so that the top level of the company could simply specify what they wanted, and the lower levels only had to focus on making individual parts.
Even the person making an object from clay is (probably) not refining his own clay or making his own oven.
> we had companies that employed many people, so that the top level of the company could simply specify what they wanted, and the lower levels only had to focus on making individual parts.
I think this makes a perfect counter-example. Because this structure is an important reason for YC to exist and what the HN crowd often rallies against.
Such large companies - generally - don't make good products. Large companies rarely make good products in this way. Most, today, just buy companies that built something in the GP's cited vein: a creative process, with pivots, learnings, more pivots, failures or - when successful - most often successful in an entirely different form or area than originally envisioned. Even the large tech monopolies of today originated like that. Zuckerberg never envisioned VR worlds, photo-sharing apps, or chat apps, when he started the campus-fotobook-website. Bezos did not have some 5d-chess blueprint that included the largest internet-infrastructure-for-hire when he started selling books online.
If anything, this only strengthens the point you are arguing against: a business that operates by a "head" "specifying what they want" and having "something" figure out how to build the parts, is historically a very bad and inefficient way to build things.
And therein lies the crux: some people love to craft each part themselves, whereas others love to orchestrate but not manufacture each part.
With LLMs and engineers often being forced by management to use them, everyone is pushed to become like the second group, even though it goes against their nature. The former group see the part as a means, whereas the latter view it as the end.
Some people love the craft itself and that is either taken away or hollowed out.
This is really what it’s about.
As someone that started with Machine Code, I'm grateful for compiled -even interpreted- languages. I can’t imagine doing the kind of work that I do, nowadays, in Machine Code.
I’m finding it quite interesting, using LLM-assisted development. I still need to keep an eye on things (for example, the LLM tends to suggest crazy complex solutions, like writing an entire control from scratch, when a simple subclass, and five lines of code, will work much better), but it’s actually been a great boon.
I find that I learn a lot, using an LLM, and I love to learn.
But we become watchers instead of makers.
There is a difference between cooking and putting a ready meal into the microwave.
Both satisfy your hunger but only one can give some kind of pride.
The same thing happens if you are the head cook in a restaurant.
If you are a cook wanting to open a restaurant, you will be delegating, the same thing with AI. If you are fine only doing what your hands can possibly do in the time allotted, go ahead and cook in your kitchen.
But I need to make money to be able to trade for the food I eat.
You will make money but the others are the artists.
That’s the whole point. You become a customer of an AI service, you get what you want but it wasn’t done by you. You get money but not the feeling of accomplishment from cracking a problem. Like playing a video game following a solution or solving a crossword puzzle with google.
Check this out: https://imgur.com/a/aVxryBf
It's a carved wooden dragon that my dad got from Indonesia (probably about 50 years ago).
It's hard to appreciate, if you aren't holding it, but it weighs a lot, and is intricately carved, all over.
I guarantee that the carver used a Dremel.
I still have a huge amount of respect for their work. That wood is like rock. I would not want to carve it with hand tools.
There's just some heights we can't reach, without a ladder.
What good is a “feeling of accomplishment” as I am on the street homeless, hungry and naked?
Pretty B/W view. The feeling of accomplishment is the part that makes a job interesting, if it’s just about money it becomes dull.
And don’t forget, it’s more likely to find someone cheaper who can write the same prompts as you than people with the same kind of experience in cracking problems.
To tackle the second part first, do you think creating finely crafted bespoke code is going to save a mid level ticket taker (not referring to you of course) who can take well defined requirements and create code is going to save anyone’s job - ie “a human LLM”?
Those types of developers on the enterprise dev side - where most developers work - were becoming a commodity a decade ago and wages have been basically stagnant. Now those types of developers are finding it hard to stand out and get noticed.
The trick is to move “up the stack” and closer to the customer whether that be an internal customer or external customer and be able to work at a higher level of scope, impact and ambiguity.
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
It’s been well over a decade and 6 jobs ago that I had to do a coding interview to prove I was able “to codez real gud”, every job I’ve had since then has been more concerned with whether I was “smart and get things done”. That could mean coding, leading teams, working with “the business”, being on Zoom calls with customers, flying out to the customers site, or telling a PE backed company with low margins that they didn’t need a team of developers, they needed to outsource complete implementations to other companies.
I’ve always seen coding as grunt work. But the only way to go from requirements -> architectural vision -> result and therefore getting money in my pocket.
My vision was based on what I could do myself in the allotted time at first and then what I could do with myself + leading a team. Now it’s back to what I can do by myself + Claude Code and Codex.
As far as the first question, my “fun” during my adult life has come from teaching fitness classes until I was 35 and running with friends in charity races on the weekend, and just hanging out, spending time with my (now grown) stepsons after that and for the past few years just spending time with my wife and traveling, concerts, some “digital nomadding” etc
Eh. I've had pride in my work for over 40 years.
The tools change, but the spirit only grows.
[dead]
Yes, but bad ingredients do not make a yummy pudding.
Or, it's like trying to make a MacBook Pro by buying electronics boards from AliExpress and wiring them together.
I'd rather have a laptop made from AliExpress components than only have a single artisanal hand-crafted resistor.
That's a false dichotomy, because transistors and ICs are manufactured to be deterministic and nearly perfect. LLMs can never be guaranteed to be like that.
Yes, some things are better when manufactured in highly automated ways (like computer chips), but their design has been thoroughly tested and before shipping the chips themselves go through lots of checks to make sure they are correct. LLM code is almost never treated that way today.
Yes, the point is that only if you're willing to accept crappy results then you can use AI to build bigger things.
To me that seems like a spurious (maybe even false) dichotomy. You can have crappy results without AI. And you can have great results with AI.
Your contrast is an either or, that - in the real world - does not exist.
Take content written by AI, prompted by a human. A lot of it is slop and crap. And there will be more slop and crap with AI than before. But that was the case, when the medium changed from hand writen to printed books. And when paper and printing became cheap, we had slop like those 10 Cent Western or Romance novellas.
We also still had Goethe, still had Kleist, still had Grass (sorry, very German centric here).
We also have Inception vs. the latest sequel of any Marvel franchise.
I have seen AI writen, but human prompted short stories, that made people well up and find ideas presented in a light not seen before. And I have seen AI generated stories that one wants to purge from my brain.
It isn't the tool - it is the one yielding it.
Question: Did photoshop kill photography? Because honestly, this AI discussion to me sounds very much like the discussion back then.
> Question: Did photoshop kill photography? Because honestly, this AI discussion to me sounds very much like the discussion back then.
It killed an aspect of it. The film processing in the darkroom. Even before digital cameras were ubiquitous it was standard to get a scan before doing any processing digitally. Chemical processing was reduced the minimum necessary.
Lightroom killed photography.
I was going to reply defending AI tooling and crappy results, but I think I'm done with it.
I think there are just a class of people know that think that you cannot get 'macbook' quality with a LLM. I don't know why I try to convince them, it's not in my benefit.
It's more like the chess.com vs lichess example in my mind. On the one hand you have a big org, dozens of devs, on the other you have one guy doing a better job.
It's amazing what one competent developer can do, and it's amazing how little a hundred devs end up actually doing when weighed down by beaurocracy. And lets not pretend even half of them qualify as competent, not to mention they probably don't care either. They get to work and have a 45 min coffee break, move some stuff around in the Kanban board, have another coffee break, then lunch, then foosball etc. Ad when they actually write some code it's ass.
And sure, for those guys maybe LLMs represent a huge productivity boost. For me it's usually faster to do the work myself than to coax the bot into creating something acceptable.
Agreed. Most people don't do anything and this might actually get them to produce code at an acceptable rate. I find that I often know what I need to do and just hitting the LLM until it does what I want is more work than writing the damn code (the latter also being a better way to be convinced that it works, since you actually know what it does and how). People are very bad code reviewers, especially those people who don't do anything, so making them full time code reviewers always seemed very odd to me.