Largely agree. Thoreau said for every 1000 hacking at the leaves of evil, there was 1 hacking at the roots.
Web programming is not fun. Years ago, a colleague who had pivoted in the early years said "Web rots your brain" (we had done some cool work together in real time optical food sorting).
I know it (web programming) gives a lot of people meaning, purpose, and a paycheck, to become a specialist in an arcane art that is otherwise unplumbable by others. First it was just generally programming. But it's bifurcated into back end, front end, db, distributed, devops, meta, api, etc. The number of programmers I meet now days, who are at start ups that eventually "pivot" to making tools for the tool wielders is impressive (e.g. "we tried to make something for the general public, but that didn't stick, but on the way, we learned how to make a certain kind of pick axe and are really hoping we can get some institutional set of axe wielders at a big digging corporation to buy into what we're offering"). Instead of "Software is eating the world" the real story these days may be "Software is eating itself"
Mired with a mountain of complexity we've created as a result of years of "throw it at the wall and ship what sticks", we're now doubling down on "stochastic programming". We're literally, mathematically, embracing "this probab[i]l[it]y works". The usefulness/appeal of LLMs is an indictment and a symptom. Not a cause.
I'm constantly surprised by developers who like LLMs because "it's great for boiler plate". Why on earth were you wasting your time writing boiler plate before? These people are supposed to be programmers. Write code to generate the boiler plate or get abstract it away.
I suppose the path of least resistance is to ignore the complexity, let the LLM deal with it, instead of stepping back and questioning why the complexity is even there.
> Write code to generate the boiler plate or get abstract it away.
That doesn’t make any sense. I want to consider what you’re saying here but I can’t relate to this idea at all. Every project has boilerplate. It gets written once. I don’t know what code you’d write to generate that boilerplate that would be less effort than writing the boilerplate itself…
>Every project has boilerplate. It gets written once.
Agree with you - I think when my colleagues have talked about boilerplate they really mean two kinds of boilerplate: code written once for project setup, like you describe, and then repetitive code. And in the context of LLMs, they talking about repetitive code.
Web programming is not fun. Years ago, a colleague who had pivoted in the early years said "Web rots your brain" (we had done some cool work together in real time optical food sorting).
I know it (web programming) gives a lot of people meaning, purpose, and a paycheck, to become a specialist in an arcane art that is otherwise unplumbable by others. First it was just generally programming. But it's bifurcated into back end, front end, db, distributed, devops, meta, api, etc. The number of programmers I meet now days, who are at start ups that eventually "pivot" to making tools for the tool wielders is impressive (e.g. "we tried to make something for the general public, but that didn't stick, but on the way, we learned how to make a certain kind of pick axe and are really hoping we can get some institutional set of axe wielders at a big digging corporation to buy into what we're offering"). Instead of "Software is eating the world" the real story these days may be "Software is eating itself"
Mired with a mountain of complexity we've created as a result of years of "throw it at the wall and ship what sticks", we're now doubling down on "stochastic programming". We're literally, mathematically, embracing "this probab[i]l[it]y works". The usefulness/appeal of LLMs is an indictment and a symptom. Not a cause.