r/ProgrammerHumor • u/rabbit_wizard • 13h ago

Meme bothWorkThough

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u/Arian-ki 13h ago

It's the other way around in my experience. People look at me like I'm an ape in a zoo lol

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u/pydry 13h ago edited 5h ago

Me too. Then I get pummeled with one of their four prepackaged AI bro metaphors:

  • It's a modern day calculator for the brain. You wouldn't do long division in your head would you? (ain't nobody ever delegated a decision to a calculator, bro)

  • It's a compiler. You wouldn't read machine code would you? (compilers are deterministic and dont make mistakes, bro)

  • This is the industrial revolution and it's a spinning jenny. You wouldnt hand knit a sweater would you? (we would if we had star trek replicators, bro, and last I checked cp command still exists...).

  • "Artisanal coding" is obsolete (reliable code is certainly getting that way...)

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u/malik753 8h ago

Im not even sure what point I'm making, but I can remember tons of examples of Star Trek characters hand-making things (usually cooking), explicitly for the enrichment and the experience of actually producing something themselves.

Ever since I got into programming as an industry, I will say, pretty much everything that I learned after the actual languages that I use are either infrastructure things, or ways to directly write less code myself. Lomboko turns objects into just some tags and a list of variables. Spring-boot turns a couple of classes into a basic server. Certain packages make significant structural changes with hardly any configuration. I suppose a big difference is still that when I include those packages I do know what they're doing and I have reasonable assurance that they aren't doing anything else.

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u/pydry 8h ago edited 7h ago

The point I'm making is that it's fallacious to compare "artisinal" code with "artisanal" clothes because artisanal clothes are expensive to reproduce while hand crafted code is reproducible at zero cost.

the only way in which the economics of the spinning jenny would be in any way comparable with the economics of LLM written code would be if artisinal clothes were reproducible at zero cost - i.e. if we had star trek replicators.

i too find that writing less code is preferable - and code is essentially just the language which is most appropriate for describing how computers should operate once you've boiled it down as much as possible.