Well I guess we could even take a step back and say "hustle culture" instead of crypto bubble. Those people act like they are they are hard working to create financial freedom, but in reality they take every opportunity to get there asap. You just have to tell them something will get them there. Instant religion for them, but actually a hype or scheme. LLMs are just another option for them to foster their delusion.
In a team environment, half of the job is communication.
That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is old news.
But to be honest, I usually don't care to write properly into an LLM prompt. An LLM will ignore grammar and form and just extract the essence. If I make an actual mistake I will notice quickly and fix it.
If I'd send slack messages like that to an peer, they'd either mock me or simply think I am dumb.
We also know the stories about people that use LLMs for any communication or anything they write. Probably for the exact reason that being lazy with writing is acceptable now. My call is that writing skill will decline, not improve. This could probably be the case for anything that people use LLMs as a proxy for.
Broadly agree, but one point I think is (sadly) relevant:
> That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is old news.
Even a decade after Word Lens had demonstrated augmented reality live translation through a smartphone camera, I was amazing people by showing them the same feature in Google Translate.
Similar anecdotes about Shakuntala Devi, even in 2018 I was seeing claims about her mental arithmetic beating a supercomputer (claims that ignored that this happened in 1977 and the computer was already obsolete at the time), even though my mid-2013 MacBook Air could not only beat her by a factor of 150 million, it could also train an AI to read handwritten numbers from scratch in 0.225 seconds, and then perform inference (read numbers) at just over 6,629 digits per second*.
You say "old news", I say this discussion will be on repeat even in the early 2030s. And possibly even the 2060s.
I assume you have absolutely no clue what it refers to.
Handmade Hero is a long running yt series by Casey Muratori. He builds a game engine from scratch, no cheats, no shortcuts, straight to the metal (from C-ish perspective). So you learn how to deal with computers to achieve things, fast and efficient, by understanding computers.
At some point Casey thought it was a failure and a waste of time. But to his surprise quite a fanbase evolved around it and it turned that it really helped people to go from zero to "hero". The handmade "movement" relates to this timeline and the aftermath of people thriving from it. My rough definition of "Handmade" dev mentality would be: Ignore the things that seem to make things "easy" (high level software) and learn the actual thing. So you learn what a framebuffer is instead of looking for a drawing api, applicable to different contexts.
That being said is that this foundation doesn't seem to be endorsed by Casey. Their mission goals seem quite shallow, if at all.
> no cheats, no shortcuts, straight to the metal (from C-ish perspective)
Not the person you replied to but even when I stumbled over this (the network, not the game) for the first time, I was left wondering where the line is drawn.
> You can learn how computers actually work, so you can unleash the full potential of modern systems. You can dig deep into the tech stack and learn what others take for granted.
Just.. no libraries? Are modern languages with batteries included ok? What makes a library for C worse than using Python? Is using Python too bloated already? Why is C ok and I don't have to bootstrap a compiler first? (E.g. building with Rust is a terrible experience from a performance perspective, the resulting software can be really nice and small)
I'm not even trying to be antagonistic, I simply don't understand. I'm just not willing to accept "you'll notice when you see it" as an example.
My former company had the brilliant idea to outsource native app development to india. This was mabye 2015 in germany and they tried to roll out the app for several years. There were severe communication and quality problems. Our company wasted massive time on it, until they finally added a single native app dev and we started making progress. We already had like 30 people in tech department and adding a single position was a fucking joke on the payroll.
Any manager that thinks he can beat the value of a single dev with a random ass sweatshop from india is delusional. The cultural difference is massive, quality and work ethics as well. It's a high friction job for a manager. Well at least if you expect a bit of quality and timeliness.
(Sorry for all indians that do a good job, it's just the sweatshop/agency remote software dev culture simply doesn't work. Even a european sweatshop usually delivers worse quality then inhouse devs.)
I’ve worked with great engineers from India/Pakistan. I didn’t hire them, so don’t know too much about the process of how to find them but they were definitely as good as anyone I’ve seen in Europe.
I disagree with most of the article, but your response to that quote is quite a lot. "Purist" doesn't say much without context, but you imply perfection and to a wider degree excessive escalation of not-good-enough. I don't read that at all from it.
I also see the other side quite a lot. People read tickets half assed, quickly write some code and move on. Their first thought is good enough. Which is usually not.
That mindset was born in the VC startup world. Of course it makes sense to shorten the time of burning money and bringing new features to beat the competition. But that doesn't makes it always justified. The tech world has more and more visible problems with security and quality. Good enough plays a part in it.
That's totally fair. I was contemplating that myself but the fact that they specifically mentioned their manager saying it combined with how the article focuses on being detail oriented (defending that behavior (something I agree with, but needs context)) I felt the inference was justified. But hard to tell without the OP coming in.
> I also see the other side quite a lot.
This bugs me A TON. But it also feels like these are the ones using these clichés.
From my personal experience, my first thought is always shit. I really internalize the non-existence of perfection. It is equivalent to "I'm always wrong." I find this helps because I no longer think "am I right or am I wrong" but "how wrong am I?". I tend to think this also makes me more agreeable, as I'm open to changing my mind (I'll often explicitly state what will do that). If you want to be "right" and you know you're always some amount of wrong, it becomes natural to do that and it is hard to have your ego hurt when someone points out an error in your logic. They likely just helped you find an unknown unknown :)
> That mindset was born in the VC startup world.
I think I see what you're saying. Are you referring to 'The Silicon Valley model': "run at a loss, corner the market, then raise prices with your (near or effective) monopoly power"? Setting aside that this feels like metric hacking the economy, I do agree that it incentivizes myopic thinking. "Move fast and break things" is a great strategy when working on tough problems and you're just starting. But it is also a terrible strategy when established. I mean... you just broke a bunch of things and the garbage is laying around all over the place, right? We need the addendum "then clean up, everybody do their share." If this is what you're talking about, I'm in full agreement.
The myopia makes sense for startups, you shouldn't prioritize long term business strategies when you're worrying about your business existing next week. But the momentum of that strategy persisting in established businesses is definitely detrimental. I mean that's one of the biggest downfalls of monopolies. You can make shittier and shittier products because the fewer competitors you have the lower the bar is for "good enough."
I won't be surprised if we see these established players be disrupted. It's pretty hard to do so, but every day average people are getting fed up with the enshitification. It is entirely their battle to lose. I mean we're seeing a big uptick in linux users. As a long time daily driver, I do think linux has gotten better, but I still think the major factor is people just getting pissed at Microsoft. I mean if you're going to be constantly fighting your computer might as well do it on a system that actually lets you control it and doesn't randomly revert your settings, right?
The article glorifies neurodiversity as an wanted trait, which is perfectly suited to build perfect software. There are no downsides, you just have to sooth neurodivergent people somehow with some dim cozy lighting and silence.
I wish some programmers would be more stubborn exploring a problem space. But being randomly obsessed about a detail can also be a distraction. Loosing track of time during an obsessed phase isn't always helpful. All this is also often a easy way to ignore responsibilities of life.
I suggest that all nerodivergent peers go on high alert if they encounter business people and wanna be hustlers that pretend to care.
I wanted to read about their AphyOS operating system, but it seems that information about it is also quite minimal. So I assume an modified stock android, with their services bolted on.
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