... I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 118
Excellent reflections on how, as software engineers dedicated to the craft, to respond to the push to use AI for all the things
Let me be clear: I’m not anti-AI. In fact, I find it incredibly useful – for the boring parts.
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But the core of programming – the thinking, the designing, the architectural decisions – these are the parts I want to preserve as my craft.
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In a world pushing for “reflexive AI usage,” I’m advocating for something different: thoughtful, intentional collaboration with AI that preserves the essence of coding as a craft.
The engineer reduces a problem to its essential functions and realizes the latter in the most efficient way possible. Such isolating of functions seems to be a purifying, liberating, and rational affair. It eliminaties the ballast of tradition, site, commitment, and fixity. But ends cannot be kept firm when means are relativized, nor can problems remain articulate when their context is erased. Ends and problems so treated are attenuated to commodities until they almost disappear there is nearly nothing,.
— Technology and the Character of Comtemporary Life, Albert Borgmain, p. 66
If this works near as well as it looks, I so want to use this.
Datastar helps you build reactive web applications with the simplicity of server-side rendering and the power of a full-stack SPA framework.
Interesting approach that mashes up HTMX and Alpine.js. Hacker News discussion →
Which is why I am constantly flabbergasted by the fact that actual decision makers persist in the belief that AI is going to magically improve productivity without thinking about quality and correctness–without proper domain expertise and critical thinking that is simply not going to happen, and it’s a shame that so many people are wasting their time (and their shareholders’ money) peddling that notion.
I can never find this when I'm looking for it. So finally making a note of it:
All Purpose Wing Seasoning Mix
All Purpose Wing Sauce
Here’s the main problem I’ve found with generative AI, and with “vibe coding” in general: it completely sucks out the joy of software development for me.
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So there’s my overwhelming feeling at the end of this post: ambivalence. I feel besieged and horrified by what gen-AI has wrought on my industry, but I can no longer keep my ears plugged while the tsunami roars outside. Maybe, like a lot of other middle-aged professionals suddenly finding their careers upended at the peak of their creative power, I will have to adapt or face replacement. Or maybe my best bet is to continue to zig while others are zagging, and to try to keep my coding skills sharp while everyone else is “vibe coding” a monstrosity that I will have to debug when it crashes in production someday.
Aside from the whole "master’s in computational linguistics" bit, I think I could have written this nearly word-for-word.