Claude makes me mad:
even when I ask for small code snippets to be improved, it increasingly starts to comment "what I could improve" in the code I stead of generating the embarrassingly easy code with the improvement itself.
If I point it to that by something like "include that yourself", it does a decent job.
> This sort of protectionism is also seen in e.g. controlled-appelation foods like artisanal cheese or cured ham. These require not just traditional manufacturing methods and high-quality ingredients from farm to table, but also a specific geographic origin.
Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?
> Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?
Steve Gibson was hand-coding assembly (often beautifully and making for very compact binaries) long after almost everyone else had switched to C language or higher in abstraction. This is the closest analogy I can think of it.
It had it's own cult following, but I wouldn't say it was a massive movement.
>If you ask me, no court should have ever rendered a judgement on whether AI output as a category is legal or copyrightable, because none of it is sourced. The judgement simply cannot be made, and AI output should be treated like a forgery unless and until proven otherwise.
Guilty until proven innocent will satisfy the author's LLM-specific point of contention, but it is hardly a good principle.
What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code.
Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzzy abstracting repeatable code, and it’s simply not possible to get the same result from other manual methods.
I empathise because it is distressing to realise that most of value we provide is not in those lines of code but in that small innovation at the higher layer. No developer wants to hear that, they would like to think each lexicon is a creation from their soul.
It has been automated as much as possible, boilerplate is the result of people being terrible at designing programming languages. The whole idea of increasingly higher level ones was just that all along. Is there any point in writing a billion ADDC commands in assembly by hand when it takes one line in python?
LLM type systems are the final level of abstraction that lifts it up to literal natural language. Any dev with decent self awareness would admit they were just copying shit from stackoverflow half the time before LLMs anyway, high level languages and libraries just streamline that process with canonical implementations.
The value we provide is turning "person with problem" -> "person with solution to said problem" with as few caveats as possible. A programmer is that arrow, we solve problems. The more code we have to write to solve that problem, the worse we are at our job.
> Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home. It's a forgery because it's not authentic.
On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that I can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is very beautiful. Me labeling "authentic" it or not should not affect it's artistic value.
For a piece of code you might care about many things: correctness, maintainability, efficiency, etc. I don't care if someone wrote bad (or good) code by hand or uses LLM, it is still bad (or good code). Someone has to take the decision if the code fits the requirements, LLM, or software developer, and this will not go away.
> but also a specific geographic origin. There's a good reason for this.
Yes, but the "good reason" is more probably the desire of people to have monopolies and not change. Same as with the paintings, if the cheese is 99% the same I don't care if it was made in a region or not. Of course the region is happy because means more revenue for them, but not sure it is good.
> To stop the machines from lying, they have to cite their sources properly.
I would be curious how can this be applied to a human? Should we also cite all the courses, articles that we have read on a topic when we write code?
>Me labeling "authentic" it or not should not affect it's artistic value.
The problem with automated imitation generators is that they can produce thousands of painting that imitate Van Gogh, but does not have the same soul.
It is the same reason why these things cannot create genuinely funny jokes. They cannot assess the funnyness of the themselves. They cannot feel, and cannot do the filtering based on emotion.
It is easy to recognize the emptiness of a joke, but not so easy for a painting, or some other form of art.
This is why it will never work for art. But the sad thing is that that will not stop them from being used to create art. Because it just needs to sell.
I would say that for art, at least for most of the movies, music etc, this was already the case. So nothing much to lose.
> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively
No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written.
If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this:
> content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc.
No 'code' or 'programming.'
If game players are the most anti-AI group then it's crystal clear that LLM coding is inevitable.
> This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't suffer from re-use at all, or may even benefit from it, if it's infrastructure.
Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing.
> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver.
Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. The fact one developer fumbled it doesn't make the idea of procedural generation bad. This is a perfect example of that a tool isn't inherently good or bad. It's up to the tool's wielder.
No one even cares how architecture is done. Unless you are the one fixing it or maintaining it.
Sorry, no one. We all know Apple did some great stuff with their code, but we care more about the awful work done on the UI, right? I mean - the UI seems to not be breaking in these new OSs which is amazing feature... for a game perhaps, and most likely the code is top notch. But we care about other things.
This is the reality, and the blind notion that so-many people care about code is super untrue. Perhaps someone putting money on developers care, but we have so many examples already of money put on implementation no matter what the code is. We can see everywhere funds thrown at obnoxious implementations, and particularly in large enterprises, that are only sustained by the weird ecosystem of white-collar jobs that sustains this impression.
Very few people care about the code in total, and this can be observed very easy, perhaps it can be proved no other way around is possible.
One the topic procedural generation; rogue likes are all about it and new generation Diablo like games have definitely similar things, well respected new games like Blue Prince. There has never been such as successful period of time for procedural generation in games like now, and all of these are pre-AI. AI powered procedural generation is wet dream of rogue-like lovers
Also RE: procgen, one of the hit games right now, Mewgenics, is doing super well and uses it extensively. Obviously it's old school procgen that makes use of tons of authored content, but it's still procgen.
> Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious.
Restaurant-goers only object against you spitting in their food if it's painfully obvious (i.e. they see you do it, or they taste it)
Players are buying your art. They are valuing it based on how you say you made it. They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the rise of AI (where someone else made the art and you just shoved it together... and the combination didn't add up to much) and they come down hard on AI slop today, especially if you don't disclose it and you get caught.
No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written.
This reminded me of a conversation about AI I had with an artist last year. She was furious and cursing and saying how awful it is for stealing from artists, but then admitted she uses it for writing descriptions and marketing posts to sell her art.
At least to some extent, the anti-ai folks don't care about ai assisted programming because they see programmers as the "techbro" boogieman pushing ai into their lives, not fellow creatives who are also at a crossroads.
Its creature creator was, but as a game it was always mediocre to bad. They had to drop something like 90% of the features and extremely dumb down the stages to get it released.
It was also what introduced a lot of us to SecuROM DRM - it bricked my laptop in the middle of a semester.
Games with ai art assets are some of the most popular right now in any case. Arc raiders being a great example where some of the voice assets are AI generated.
Be careful of reading any viewpoint on the internet. Apparently no one used facebook or instagram and everyone boycotts anything with ai in it.
In reality i think you’d be foolish not to make use of the tools available. Arc Raiders did the right thing by completely ignoring those sorts of comments. There may be a market for 100% organic video games but there’s also a market for mainstream ‘uses every ai tool available’ type of games.
Let's not forget No Man's Sky here. Or Elite Dangerous' planet-scale procedural generation using solar system properties to fuel the deterministic but procedural generation of tectonic plates that again seed how a planet's surface is deterministically generated, even down to impact craters over millennia, for a universe of billions of consistent deterministically generated full-scale planets you can land on. Something you couldn't do without proc-gen because there's not enough disk space to store it.
I think it says a lot about this opinion piece that the people agreeing with it are posting short comments saying "So true!" and "Great!" whilst the people criticizing it are writing paragraphs of well-spoken criticism.
Sigh. Another one standing on the train tracks giving the approaching train a good scolding. First this article tries to equate AI-generated code with "forgery". Please, tell me how you "forge math". Next, it makes a little dig at senior engineers who use LLMs, because they must not realize that "every line of code is a liability". No no, senior engineers realize this, but they are also adept at observing successes and failures and coming up with a mental model for risk. That's part of keeping an application running, otherwise we'd all still be using jQuery and leftPad. We made the jump to react because we recognized that these NEW lines of code were far more valuable than their "liability". Somehow the author decided to store "liability" in a boolean. Oh, was AI involved, or is that a genuine human error..? Next the article makes a tired appeal to the fact that LLMs are trained on open-source code and are therefore "plagiarizing" this code constantly. This is where the train comes around the mountain. So when the AI generates Carmack's Reverse, is it plagiarizing Carmack or the book that he got the idea from? In what percentages? And what do I do with this valuable insight? Send Carmack $0.01 in an envelope for the privilege? In short, I don't know what the author wants, but I hope writing this helped.
Its unfortunate that there’s mode collapse around what the consensus “best way” to use these things are. It’s too bad we didn’t have a period where these things were great teachers but didn’t attempt to write code because in my opinion the ideal way to use them is not by agents mass producing sloppy buggy disorganized code, but to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives, rubber duck, and occasionally write snippets of functions when your brain is too tired or it’s throwaway cli code or some api you’re not familiar with.
113 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 88.2 ms ] threadClaude makes me mad: even when I ask for small code snippets to be improved, it increasingly starts to comment "what I could improve" in the code I stead of generating the embarrassingly easy code with the improvement itself.
If I point it to that by something like "include that yourself", it does a decent job.
That's so _L_azy.
Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?
Steve Gibson was hand-coding assembly (often beautifully and making for very compact binaries) long after almost everyone else had switched to C language or higher in abstraction. This is the closest analogy I can think of it.
It had it's own cult following, but I wouldn't say it was a massive movement.
Love it. Calling it "Copilot" in itself is a lie. Marketing speak to sell you an idea that doesn't exist. The idea is that you are still in control.
Guilty until proven innocent will satisfy the author's LLM-specific point of contention, but it is hardly a good principle.
This is an absolute chef-kiss double-entendre.
btw you can make git commits with AI as author and you as commiter. Which makes git blame easier
Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzzy abstracting repeatable code, and it’s simply not possible to get the same result from other manual methods.
I empathise because it is distressing to realise that most of value we provide is not in those lines of code but in that small innovation at the higher layer. No developer wants to hear that, they would like to think each lexicon is a creation from their soul.
LLM type systems are the final level of abstraction that lifts it up to literal natural language. Any dev with decent self awareness would admit they were just copying shit from stackoverflow half the time before LLMs anyway, high level languages and libraries just streamline that process with canonical implementations.
The value we provide is turning "person with problem" -> "person with solution to said problem" with as few caveats as possible. A programmer is that arrow, we solve problems. The more code we have to write to solve that problem, the worse we are at our job.
On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that I can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is very beautiful. Me labeling "authentic" it or not should not affect it's artistic value.
For a piece of code you might care about many things: correctness, maintainability, efficiency, etc. I don't care if someone wrote bad (or good) code by hand or uses LLM, it is still bad (or good code). Someone has to take the decision if the code fits the requirements, LLM, or software developer, and this will not go away.
> but also a specific geographic origin. There's a good reason for this.
Yes, but the "good reason" is more probably the desire of people to have monopolies and not change. Same as with the paintings, if the cheese is 99% the same I don't care if it was made in a region or not. Of course the region is happy because means more revenue for them, but not sure it is good.
> To stop the machines from lying, they have to cite their sources properly.
I would be curious how can this be applied to a human? Should we also cite all the courses, articles that we have read on a topic when we write code?
The problem with automated imitation generators is that they can produce thousands of painting that imitate Van Gogh, but does not have the same soul.
It is the same reason why these things cannot create genuinely funny jokes. They cannot assess the funnyness of the themselves. They cannot feel, and cannot do the filtering based on emotion.
It is easy to recognize the emptiness of a joke, but not so easy for a painting, or some other form of art.
This is why it will never work for art. But the sad thing is that that will not stop them from being used to create art. Because it just needs to sell.
I would say that for art, at least for most of the movies, music etc, this was already the case. So nothing much to lose.
No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written.
If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this:
> content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc.
No 'code' or 'programming.'
If game players are the most anti-AI group then it's crystal clear that LLM coding is inevitable.
> This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't suffer from re-use at all, or may even benefit from it, if it's infrastructure.
Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing.
> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver.
Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. The fact one developer fumbled it doesn't make the idea of procedural generation bad. This is a perfect example of that a tool isn't inherently good or bad. It's up to the tool's wielder.
I would overstate:
No one even cares how architecture is done. Unless you are the one fixing it or maintaining it.
Sorry, no one. We all know Apple did some great stuff with their code, but we care more about the awful work done on the UI, right? I mean - the UI seems to not be breaking in these new OSs which is amazing feature... for a game perhaps, and most likely the code is top notch. But we care about other things.
This is the reality, and the blind notion that so-many people care about code is super untrue. Perhaps someone putting money on developers care, but we have so many examples already of money put on implementation no matter what the code is. We can see everywhere funds thrown at obnoxious implementations, and particularly in large enterprises, that are only sustained by the weird ecosystem of white-collar jobs that sustains this impression.
Very few people care about the code in total, and this can be observed very easy, perhaps it can be proved no other way around is possible.
People definitely do care. Nobody wants vibe-coded buggy slop code for their game.
They want well designed and optimized code that runs the game smoothly on reasonable hardware and without a bunch of bugs.
Restaurant-goers only object against you spitting in their food if it's painfully obvious (i.e. they see you do it, or they taste it)
Players are buying your art. They are valuing it based on how you say you made it. They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the rise of AI (where someone else made the art and you just shoved it together... and the combination didn't add up to much) and they come down hard on AI slop today, especially if you don't disclose it and you get caught.
This reminded me of a conversation about AI I had with an artist last year. She was furious and cursing and saying how awful it is for stealing from artists, but then admitted she uses it for writing descriptions and marketing posts to sell her art.
Its creature creator was, but as a game it was always mediocre to bad. They had to drop something like 90% of the features and extremely dumb down the stages to get it released.
It was also what introduced a lot of us to SecuROM DRM - it bricked my laptop in the middle of a semester.
Be careful of reading any viewpoint on the internet. Apparently no one used facebook or instagram and everyone boycotts anything with ai in it.
In reality i think you’d be foolish not to make use of the tools available. Arc Raiders did the right thing by completely ignoring those sorts of comments. There may be a market for 100% organic video games but there’s also a market for mainstream ‘uses every ai tool available’ type of games.
And if you actually read the article, you'd see it addressed that.
> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times.
Like a library?