I had fun playing around in Claude getting it to write 6502 assembler for the BBC Micro. It is fun to imagine what we could have built on those old machines with these new coding agents! But it is kind of hollow isn't it.
I think it's an issue for hobby projects. The other day I had a neat idea, looked into it and realized I would not have time to do it but still wanted to use it so I vibe coded it over an evening and there it was. But the code is not mine, I feel bad about it, it's completely hollow, I wish I had the time to do it properly. I'm glad I'm still hand coding my main hobby projects to avoid that.
Not for me. I do like having an agent at my disposition that accelerates the way into making those little experiments a reality.
A sloppy reality? Maybe. But It's just tinkering, there's no other use case for this outside of saying "So this can be done, huh? Okay time to go to for a walk".
While it's totally respectable to treat your code as your personal zen garden, I like the idea of having a highway where I can make reality anything that comes from my imagination, and also having time for family, friends, work and exercising out of sedentarism.
Thats your life and your opinion which you are fully entitled to, but dont make the mistake of thinking your life and opinion is better than anyone elses. It suits you, thats whats important.
Designing a table and letting somebody else build it can be enjoyable, too.
There are plenty of people enjoying designing, for example people who 3D print objects they design, or people designing PCBs or even entire gadgets but outsourcing production.
With LLMs, I guess a factor is how much direction you give the machine. “Build me a graphical desktop” likely isn’t very enjoyable, but I can see co-working with a LLM being enjoyable. Examples
- think of some novel UI interaction, and let the LLM code it
- spending hours to speed up the GUI or to make it use less memory
INHO the only unsatisfactory part for this "explorative" work is that you never really get into the flow since the LLM just takes too long between interactions (sometimes minutes). That's long enough to prevent from getting into the flow, but not long enough to focus on something else in the meantime.
Knowing your limitations of building, but being good at designing and watching somebody/something else realise your vision is incredibly satisfying.
I see it like 3D printing. Nobody can extrude molten plastic out of their bodies to make things, but the skill of designing the construction well and then watch the machine execute it is certainly a good feeling. I dont really see how this is different to designing some software verbally and prompting an ai to build it for you.
I have coded big projects manually for a long time. Being able to get ai to do it, then step back and marvel at knowing how much work that would have taken manually is very satisfying.
You can say the same for building computers. You didn't actually "built" a computer from the ground up. You just bought the pre-made hardware and plugged it in the places that are made to be easily pluggable.
Everything in tech is about standing in the shoulders of what came before.
At least when plugging a computer together I know who built the components. When building with LLMs I have no idea who actually wrote the code snippets that are thrown into the mixer ;)
> If you've never done anything for yourself, usually with your own hands, you don't understand the pleasure and satisfaction that comes from doing it.
That’s an absurd thing to say.
Doesn’t matter what “AI” feels or doesn’t feel. AI is a tool. You can derive as much pleasure from having an ideia, planning it, working on it from a higher level, and seeing it come to life as you do when you get down and dirty with it and do it from the low level up.
You are arguing against a very well known phenomenon. Technical people often avoid getting promoted to management precisely because they love doing the thing themselves. Despite the higher potential for impact in a management position, losing the detailed view of a practitioner is a real loss. This phenomenon is less obvious in big tech because there are so many people who really wanted to be managers the whole time, but had to be engineers first or never really cared about the work, but want a promotion for the better pay.
You either replied to the wrong comment or didn’t and proved my point exactly: some people like the technical low level approach, others prefer the higher level architectural work.
There’s space for both and there’s a need for both.
It's not absurd if you've actually done these things. I can only conclude from your response that you have not, so you don't know what it's like, therefore you don't know what the rest of us talking about.
Well, given that you are selfishly and arrogantly trying to set universal boundaries on what constitutes labour and effort, and what qualifies as “work” based on your feelings alone, then it seems fairly on brand for you to go about assuming things about people you don’t know from atom.
So you do you.
Go have fun bringing other people’s work down so you can feel better about yourself.
It's worse even than that. Although I personally wouldn't pay for a bespoke hand designed piece of furniture I can at least see that it is an artisan piece and understand the rationale.
Software is all shit anyway, it just helps me get a job done. How would artisanal software even distinguish itself. Leave the visual appearance aside. I mean the functionality.
Well for one, a lot of people now solo dev a project with AI and then often seem to abandon the project. There's not much sense of owndership in some of it. I try and use software that has as little AI influence as possible.
It's perhaps the most pernicious Claudism. Or just the one that gets my goat the most. Saying what something isn't, usually twice, before saying what it is. What a fucking waste of words.
That's the most annoying one, and the two negated things more often than not end up being something no one would have ever considered in the first place.
I'm not defending claudeslop, but TBF, anaphora and its lesser-known sibling: epistrophe far predate the English language, let alone something new like LLMs.
"I'm not defending claudeslop, but <defends slop>". People obviously know this. The problem is that using a dramatic rhetorical flourish every third sentence for completely un-dramatic things is fucking tiring. And so are the people defending this shit. "Oh, humans use em-dashes too, so actually there's literally no difference between a human using one or two and Claude using 400 em-dashes in one article". A human using things correctly and a language model using them incorrectly are not the same fucking thing.
I believe that what the previous commment is trying to say is that even when we identify phrases highly attributable to llm output we can never be certain. Which is the nefarious thing about broad use of computer generated text. I noticed comments here on hacker news containing conspicous mistakes which llms hardly ever do anymore and was wondering whether it was people purposefully adding mistakes to identify as noslop or whether llms got worse or if it was bots trying to fool me. My misspelling of conspicuous was left in on purpose in this case. All i can say is "trust me bro, I am not ai".
Repetition at the start or end (i.e. Anaphora/Epistrophe) are not used lightly in prose or verse, they serve a rhetorical purpose - usually add rhythm or strengthen the theme.
The type of repetition Claude uses is what Fowler[1] called "elegant variations" and discouraged in modern style guides for a good reason - people find it really annoying.
The core idea being that each time humanity was going to exceed the carrying capacity of its environment, we invented a new technology which increased the headroom. Obviously this ratchet only goes in one direction. The only way to go backwards is collapse.
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