Posted by signa11 14 hours ago
Same people that make clothes for fun usually do not work at sweatshops.
Some bakers started baking as a hobby, got really good at it, and then better tools and profit margins came about. Now they were forced to make low quality bread at work for 8 hours straight every day and seeing 90% of their colleagues that they considered pretty good bakers actually be fine with it.
How exciting do you think those bakers are to bake more bread at home after they go though slopping bread at work? How enthusiastic are they still about their hobby after a few years or a decade?
[1] On another note, a lot of my friends who are professional musicians barely play or make music in their free time, apart from keeping their skills up.
And I still very much like using LLMs for certain things. I do not miss Googling for hours to compile the right information.
No. The people. You know, the Shown HN: I wrote a cool thing. Here's the thing on GitHub.
It's not about selling, it's about sharing and people appreciating it, using it, sharing tips to improve it. Most people who write FLOSS in their free time do it to solve their own problem first, but they also do it to share with others a cool thing they did etc.
> Most people who craft as a hobby never sell a thing
Sure. But they do craft for SOMEONE. Initially for themselves but at some point they want to show their skills to someone, even if only to family and friends. People are social animals.
I don't know that hand crafted software has the same appreciation as say woodworking.
Yet. But I doubt you'll find that appreciation here on Hacker News, or on GitHub. You'll probably have to find a community of like-minded people who enjoy tinkering with software by hand, and those already exist, e.g. parts of the IndieWeb, or Lobsters. Posting your hand-crafted software here is a bit like a knitting enthusiast showing off their sweater at a textile industry trade fair.
1. Because they're genuinely better quality. Usually.
2. There's a human connection (way more important than people think. I.e commodity fetishism)
3. Less people can do it.
-- all of these properties will apply to software in the near future. The person that can hand code the thing an llm does poorly, or because an llm cant be trusted will be extremely valuable, especially as this category of people begins to shrink, as peoppe atrophy their skills with llms.
The rest of y'all are excited about handing over the value of your labor to some billionaires thinking machine because that same billionaire has convinced you that you're going to be able to create your own startup or something stupid.
Nah, you're going to become a (underpaid/poor) conveyor belt operator making mass manufactured slop. Some smart ones will become the swiss watchmakers of software. Rare and in demand.
I just pray open weight wins at the end and people actually utilize their ai and own their ai.
But what’s far far more important is making people happy by producing good software. Ever since my very first SWE internship I’ve cared most about the user. I’m extremely bummed if the user isn’t happy with my work. I’m ecstatic if my work can improve their day. LLMs change how my work gets done and what it is that my effort goes towards. But the core reason to be here instructing computers hasn’t changed.
I write software because I am interested in the final outcomes, not because I enjoy the journey, which is often infuriating because of the mistakes you make, or the crap you depend on to get your work done.
Whether people will still have jobs in three years, or thirty, only time will tell, but I feel people are kidding themselves if they think LLMs won't have an impact. We were fine with using machines to automate physical labor as we now balk at the same thing happening to the intellectual side of things.
I, personally, have done a complete volte-face as far as my views on the subject are concerned over the past year or so as I use LLMs more and more for coding and other tasks.
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[1] There is this idea I have had of an Excel replacement: simple, purely functional, TSV-based spreadsheet with zero backward compatibility with styles as purely optional sidecar material that I have always wanted to do but lacked the time. Brainstormed a spec with Claude today. Might work on it in the near future.
I used to enjoy the journey more. I feel like the explosion of insane complexity and layers and the mess of dependencies and all the rest ruined the fun of the journey long before AI came along.
Take user interfaces. Making one wasn’t so bad in the 90s or 2000s. Now it’s a hellscape of either bloated Electron or the shifting sands of native APIs that are all complex and special.
All of it imposes cognitive load that has nothing to do with the problem I want to solve and it foists ugliness on you. Before you can touch your problem you have to create all this boilerplate.
I can just have the bot do that crap now.
If I want to code for fun I can code only the parts that are fun.
Oh sure, you are not an LLM bro! Honest!
The amount of new LLM articles that try to feed them like vegetables to a child is amusing and tragic at the same time.