alt Hacker News>>“I didn’t care about practicality, building useful programs, or writing code per se: all I wanted is to understand how the machine works.”
I like lifting heavy things and moving them around. In fact I like it so much it’s a massively effective buoy for my mental health. However, I don’t expect the economy to make space for me to move farm equipment around to make food and expect to get paid a living wage doing it.
Software like food is now a civilizational requirement and transient LLM crappiness notwithstanding, accessing well-built flexible plentiful software is a major unlock for humanity.
I’m happy now to go the gym and lift heavy things and let everyone have plentiful food grown by mechanized agriculture. I’m looking forward to do the same for my intellectual pursuits.
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I found that since LLMs can produce any code I want, I don't really feel the same drive to learn React or whatever is popular and trendy to make myself useful in a new job. Instead I feel like I have the space to play with something that I enjoy instead, like learning Z80 assembly and writing games for the Gameboy that I would have wanted as a kid. I think you're right that it feels just like going to the gym, intellectually.
Personally speaking, I started my programming journey a long time ago, building stuff for DOS - one of the first-ish things I did was build a Windows-like GUI interface, which was quite functional given the circumstances, basically writing pixel colors to the framebuffer in C.
The whole thing was quite functional, and a few thousand lines total, and built a bit naively - the framework and the app were under 10k lines combined total.
Later I tried rebuilding it for Win32, and it ended up being more code (sans bespoke UI framework), and I'm not sure it was better, though I'm certain, the whole mass of code doing the thing was an order of magnitude more.
If I were to attempt building it in Electron, I could add 2-3 orders of magnitude to that easy, all for the same basic functionality.
All I'm saying is abstraction isn't really what it's cracked up to be.
I could have done many different things as a career - I chose what I do because I love(d) it. I think many of us were raised believing that a job you love is not a job and we’re now grieving the loss of fulfillment that came along with doing something you love and getting paid for it. I spend far more time working for people I don’t know than I do with my family or my hobbies, and perhaps I was foolish enough to think I’d escaped from wasting my life doing something I despise. You are correct that we can all seek fulfillment outside of work, but for those of us that used to get it there it hurts, or maybe it’s just me.
I know things get worse before they get better - but some of us are at the point in our career where we likely won’t be around to see it get better again.
This metaphor does fall apart somewhat when you consider that farm tractors are not made from farmhand muscle fibers, whereas LLMs are in fact made out the stuff they’re rapidly replacing.
Great sentiment about reserving intellectual heavy lifting to your personal life. I've always valued keeping enough in the tank for myself (and now my family) outside of work.
It seems in our profession there might be less satisfaction from work, but if it leaves me with more space to accomplish things in my own time, I think I prefer it.
Can you show me something, that is not just a one-off or demonstration, that is well-built? Code that is a joy for humans to read? That is not a harness or anything like that, but something we wish we could have gotten made this well so easily before, and that we now have?
the problem is we refuse (americans) to let things that we need to be civilized to be in the public domained, "owned" by government and pushed into our "free" spaces.
Libraries are the last time americans agreed on basic principal that a public space with a public good is worth investing in everywhere.
> transient LLM crappiness notwithstanding
Bold of you to assume.
>food, physical fitness, health (obesity, life expectancy, etc)
Those are unfortunate examples. The US doesn't do them very well compared to other OECD countries.
Why do you look forward to this happening to your intellectual pursuits?
If I grant you that cheap plentifull code will be a net boon to humanity, it's still normal to be unhappy that it's you specifically that will need to be ground-down in the cogs of progress. 5 years ago I also believed that the future could (and would!) be vastly better for many people, I just didn't know that betterment would be conditional on me losing the work I enjoy. In that sense LLM's are only a loss to me.
Many people feeling equanimous about this stuff are financially secure, later in their career or working at a manegerial level. That's fine, but at that point you're obviously not suffering the same pain as the author.