Comment by pdimitar

I see this "prompting is an art" stuff a lot. I gave Claude a list of 10 <Route> objects and asked it to make an adjustment to all of them. It gave me 9 back. When I asked it to try again it gave me 10 but one didn't work. What's "prompt engineering" there, telling it to try again until it gets it right? I'd rather just do it right the first time.

> Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could.

Hard disagree, I get to hyperfocus on making magical things that surprise and delight me every day.

>most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could.

Laughably narrow-minded projection of your own perspective on others.

> Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could.

I don’t think this is the case, if anything the opposite is true. Most of us would like to do the work code but have realized, at some career point, that you’re paid more to abstract yourself away from that and get others to do it either in technical leadership or management.

I wouldn't, I got into software exactly because I enjoy solving problems and writing code. Verifying shitty, mindless, computer generated code is not something I would consider doing for all the money in the world.

> most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could.

I saw your objections to other comments on the basis of them seemingly not having a disdainful attitude towards coding they do for work, specifically.

I absolutely do have tasks, coding included, that I don't want to do, and find no joy in. If I can have my manager assign the task to someone else, great! But using an LLM isn't that, so I'm still on the hook for ensuring all the most boring parts of that task (bugfixing, reworks, integration, tests, etc) get done.

My experience with LLMs is that they simply shift the division of time away from coding, and towards all the other bits.

And it can't possibly just be about prompting. How many hundreds of lines of prompting would you need to get an LLM to understand your coding conventions, security baselines, documentation reqs, logging, tests, allowed libraries, OSS license restrictions (i.e. disallowed libraries), etc? Or are you just refactoring for all that afterwards?

Maybe you work somewhere that doesn't require that level of rigor, but that doesn't strike me as a good thing to be entrenching in the industry by increasing coders' reliance on LLMs.

> most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could

Not me. I code because I love to code, and I get paid to do what I love. If that's not you…find a different profession?

The act of coding preserves your skills for that all-important verification step. No coding and the whole system falls apart.

> Still, prompting LLMs well requires eloquence and expressiveness that many programmers don't have

It requires magical incantations that may or may not work and where a missing comma in a prompt can break the output just as badly as the US waking up and draining compute resources.

Has nothing to do with eloquence

> "verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!)"

100% this.

> work on whatever code makes you happy without using an LLM?

This isn't how it works, psychologically. The whole time I'm manual coding, I'm wondering if it'd be "easier" to start prompting. I keep thinking about a passage from The Road To Wigan Pier where Orwell addresses this effect as it related to the industrial revolution:

>Mechanize the world as fully as it might be mechanized, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working—that is, of living.

>At a first glance this might not seem to matter. Why should you not get on with your ‘creative work’ and disregard the machines that would do it for you? But it is not so simple as it sounds. Here am I, working eight hours a day in an insurance office; in my spare time I want to do something ‘creative’, so I choose to do a bit of carpentering—to make myself a table, for instance. Notice that from the very start there is a touch of artificiality about the whole business, for the factories can turn me out a far better table than I can make for myself. But even when I get to work on my table, it is not possible for me to feel towards it as the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago felt towards his table, still less as Robinson Crusoe felt towards his. For before I start, most of the work has already been done for me by machinery. The tools I use demand the minimum of skill. I can get, for instance, planes which will cut out any moulding; the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago would have had to do the work with chisel and gouge, which demanded real skill of eye and hand. The boards I buy are ready planed and the legs are ready turned by the lathe. I can even go to the wood-shop and buy all the parts of the table ready-made and only needing to be fitted together; my work being reduced to driving in a few pegs and using a piece of sandpaper. And if this is so at present, in the mechanized future it will be enormously more so. With the tools and materials available then, there will be no possibility of mistake, hence no room for skill. Making a table will be easier and duller than peeling a potato. In such circumstances it is nonsense to talk of ‘creative work’. In any case the arts of the hand (which have got to be transmitted by apprenticeship) would long since have disappeared. Some of them have disappeared already, under the competition of the machine. Look round any country churchyard and see whether you can find a decently-cut tombstone later than 1820. The art, or rather the craft, of stonework has died out so completely that it would take centuries to revive it.

>But it may be said, why not retain the machine and retain ‘creative work’? Why not cultivate anachronisms as a spare-time hobby? Many people have played with this idea; it seems to solve with such beautiful ease the problems set by the machine. The citizen of Utopia, we are told, coming home from his daily two hours of turning a handle in the tomato-canning factory, will deliberately revert to a more primitive way of life and solace his creative instincts with a bit of fretwork, pottery-glazing, or handloom-weaving. And why is this picture an absurdity—as it is, of course? Because of a principle that is not always recognized, though always acted upon: that so long as the machine is there, one is under an obligation to use it. No one draws water from the well when he can turn on the tap. One sees a good illustration of this in the matter of travel. Everyone who has travelled by primitive methods in an undeveloped country knows that the difference between that kind of travel and modern travel in trains, cars, etc., is the difference between life and death. The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet so long as the railways exist, one has got to travel by train—or by car or aeroplane. Here am I, forty miles from London. When I want to go up to London why do I not pack my luggage on to a mule and set out on foot, making a two days of it? Because, with the Green Line buses whizzing past me every ten minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary. Hence the absurdity of that picture of Utopians saving their souls with fretwork. In a world where everything could be done by machinery, everything would be done by machinery. Deliberately to revert to primitive methods to use archaic took, to put silly little difficulties in your own way, would be a piece of dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements. Revert to handwork in a machine age, and you are back in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe or the Tudor villa with the sham beams tacked to the wall.

>The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation. It makes unnecessary and even impossible the activities of the eye and the hand. The apostle of ‘progress’ will sometimes declare that this does not matter, but you can usually drive him into a comer by pointing out the horrible lengths to which the process can be carried.

sorry it's so long