alt Hacker NewsFor another human being to look at my open source code, learn from it, get inspired by it, appreciate what I did, and let it influence their own creativity would bring me joy. That's why I open sourced it in the first place.
Few people ever actually read open source code, but I'd like to think on the rare occasions they do, they share a connection with the author. I know when I read somebody else's code, for me to understand it I have to be thinking about the problem the same way they were when they wrote it. I feel empathy with them and can sometimes picture the struggle, backtracking, and eureka moments they went through to come up with their solution.
Somehow I don't get the same warm fuzzy feelings about a machine powered by investor money ingesting my work automatically, in milliseconds, and coldly compressing it down to a few nudges on a few weights out of trillions of parameters. All so the machine can produce outputs on-demand for lazy users who will never know of me or appreciate my little contribution, and ultimately for the financial benefit of some billionaires who see me as an obsolete waste of space.
I guess I'm just irrational that way.
We're moving into the 'industrial age of software'. You exact issue, of bespoke, well thought out and well-crafted code is one that craftsmen felt at the beginning of the industrial age. Now, parts are designed and churned out by machines that no one sees or cares about (generally speaking). This is where we are going with software, and production at a truly industrial scale has its place.
And so does well-crafted bespoke software.
The engineers who built the foundation for the industrial expansion of our forefathers went through the same exact thing we're going through now. They look at what existed, and use it to inform their efforts. This is what LLMs do.
I'm not attempting to moralize here, just comment on the parallels. Do I agree that a craftman's work is consumed by the juggernauts and no second thought is given? No. I think its a shame. But I also think the output will never match the artisans that practice now. By the very nature of the machines we employ, we cannot match the skill or thought that goes into bespoke code.