Discussion

The peril of laziness lost

gnerd00: oh this hits all the right note for me! I am just the demographic that tried to perl my way into the earliest web server builds, and read those exact words carefully while looking at the very mixed quality, cryptic ascii line noise that is everyday perl. And as someone who had built multi-thousand line C++ systems already, the "virtues" by Larry Wall seemed spot on! and now to combine the hindsight with current LLM snotty Lord Fauntleroy action coming from San Francisco.. perfect!

suzzer99: > Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.Maybe this was true when Programming Perl was written, but I see the opposite much more often now. I'm a big fan of WET - Write Everything Twice (stolen from comments here), then the third time think about maybe creating a new abstraction.

johnfn: As dumb as it is to loudly proclaim you wrote 200k loc last week with an LLM, I don’t think it’s much better to look at the code someone else wrote with an LLM and go “hah! Look at how stupid it is!” You’re making exactly the same error as the other guy, just in the opposite direction: you’re judging the profession of software engineering based on code output rather than value generation.Now, did Garry Tan actually produce anything of value that week? I dunno, you’ll have to ask him.

ObscureScience: "Value generation" is a term I would be somewhat wary of.To me, in this context, it's similar to drive economic growth on fossil fuel.Whether in the end it can result in a net benefit (the value is larger than the cost of interacting with it and the cost to sort out the mess later) is likely impossible to say, but I don't think it can simply be judged by short sighted value.

nixpulvis: I've been advocating for writing everything twice since college.

simianwords: This is a person clearly grieving that his hard earned knowledge in his field is now not that valuable.It is * exactly * the same as a person who spent years perfecting hand written HTML, just to face the wrath of React.

lapcat: > This is a person clearly grieving that his hard earned knowledge in his field is now not that valuable.He's co-founder and CTO of his own company, so I think he's doing fine in his field.

simianwords: It doesn't change the fact that much of what (I think) he prides in himself in is getting commoditised.

btrettel: Similar to bragging about LOC, I have noticed in my own field of computational fluid dynamics that some vibe coders brag about how large or rigorous their test suites are. The problem is that whenever I look more closely into the tests, the tests are not outstanding and less rigorous than my own manually created tests. There often are big gaps in vibe coded tests. I don't care if you have 1 million tests. 1 million easy tests or 1 million tests that don't cover the right parts of the code aren't worth much.

sdevonoes: > Now, did Garry Tan actually produce anything of value that week? I dunno, you’ll have to ask him.Let’s not be naive. Garry is not a nobody. He absolutely doesn’t care about how many lines of code are produced or deleted. He made that post as advertisement: he’s advertising AI because he’s the ceo of YC which profitability depends on AI.He’s just shipping ads.

progbits: Great article, I've been saying something similar (much less eloquently) at work for months and will reference this one next time it comes up.Quite often I see inexperienced engineers trying to ship the dumbest stuff. Back before LLM these would be projects that would take them days or weeks to research, write, test, and somewhere along the way they could come to the realization "hold on, this is dumb or not worth doing". Now they just send 10k line PR before lunch and pat themselves on the back.

rakel_rakel: https://xkcd.com/1053/I recommend you go look at some of his talks on Youtube, his best five talks are probably all in my all time top-ten list!

roncesvalles: The main value he generated from that exercise was the screenshot. It's a kind of credentialism.

vsgherzi: Disregarding the fact that Bryan operates oxide a company that has multiple investors and customers (id say this proves valuable knowledge) the crazier fact is that people think html is useless knowledge.React USES html. Understanding html is core to understanding react. React does not in anyway devalue html in the same way that driving automatic devalues driving manual

xhrpost: I've had this exact sentiment in the past couple months after seeing a few PRs that were definitely the wrong solution to a problem. One was implementing it's own parsing functions to which well established solutions like JSON or others likely existed. I think any non-llm programmer could have thought this up but then immediately decide to look elsewhere, their human emotions would have hit and said "that's way too much (likely redundant) work, there must be a better way". But the LLM has no emotion, it isn't lazy and that can be a problem because it makes it a lot easier to do the wrong thing.

layer8: More than twice is a rather low bar, I don’t think that it conflicts with the quote from Programming Perl.

fao_: Yeah! It's not like code quality matters in terms of negative value or lives lost, right?!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_IT_scandalFurthermore,> As for the artifact that Tan was building with such frenetic energy, I was broadly ignoring it. Polish software engineer Gregorein, however, took it apart, and the results are at once predictable, hilarious and instructive: A single load of Tan’s "newsletter-blog-thingy" included multiple test harnesses (!), the Hello World Rails app (?!), a stowaway text editor, and then eight different variants of the same logo — one of which with zero bytes.Do you think any of the... /things/ bundled in this software increased the surface area that attacks could be leveraged against?

SvenL: I also struggle with this all the time, balance between bringing value/joy and level of craft. Most human written stuff might look really ugly or was written in a weird way but as long as it’s useful it’s ok.What I don’t like here is the bragging about the LoC. He’s not bragging about the value it could provide. Yes people also write shitty code but they don’t brag about it - most of the time they are even ashamed.

simianwords: Go to Facebook.com and right click view source and tell me html is not being devalued. No person who wants to write aesthetic html would write that stuff.

vsgherzi: Do the same to Google.comWhen it matters it matters. Even in facebooks case they made react fit for their use case. You think the react devs didn’t understand html? Do you think quality frontends can be written without any understanding of html?Like the article says we’ve moved an abstraction up. That does not make the html knowledge useless

g-b-r: Your account name is so fittingNow look up who he actually is.

spprashant: At this point, I almost feel bad that people are piling on Garry Tan. Almost.

njarboe: German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (a high-ranking army officer in the Reichswehr/Wehrmacht era):“I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined.Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff.The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties.Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership posts, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions.One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”

quantummagic: Where my fellow ninety-percenters at?

dijit: I think we put too much negative emphasis on people who aren’t as gifted intellectually.In reality, the world works because of human automotons, honest people doing honest work; living their life in hopefully a comforting, complete and wholesome way, quietly contributing their piece to society.There is no shame in this, yet we act as though there is.

Jtarii: The movie Perfect Days captures this perfectly.

lotsofpulp: The Horizon IT scandal was not caused by poor code quality, the scandal was the corrupt employees of the UK government.

ChosenEnd: Human automatons? Why would you have mercy for automatons?