Engineering is about creating something that serves a purpose, while operating within a set of constraints. Part of that is realizing that "100% correct/reliable in all circumstances" is an unrealistic goal, since implementation time and cost is one of those constraints.
A good engineer will acknowledge this tradeoff between robustness and cost and behave accordingly. For example, if you're working on safety critical or very foundational systems like OSes, medical tech, etc you should bias very heavily in favor of robustness. If you're not, this can easily be an act of overengineering. The engineer's job is to find the right spot along the cost-correctness curve for the thing they are building.
This has always been true, and LLMs just change certain parts of the equation. For example, code writing is far less of a bottleneck than before, so "we can just try with a throwaway impl and see if this works" is suddenly economically viable. It also turns out that many things, in practice, don't need to be as correct as some of us may have believed.
We can still enjoy making quality things, but doing so is often an act of artisanship rather than engineering.
> LLMs just change certain parts of the equation. For example, code writing is far less of a bottleneck than before, so "we can just try with a throwaway impl and see if this works" is suddenly economically viable.
The economic costs of LLM use have been abstracted away, but they're still very much there. The ecological cost of building and running data centres will be a pretty heavy economic cost somewhere in the future. It's not obvious, but it still exists.
(I'm not dumping on LLMs — otherwise I wouldn't even be here. I'm not a glutton for punishment. I know well that HN users excited about LLM use now vocally outweigh, and are pretty intolerant of people who are more on the cautious/negative end of the spectrum. I don't want that trouble in my life).
> Engineering is about creating something that serves a purpose, while operating within a set of constraints.
A builder fits that description. Even a cook fits that description.
Engineering is something else. It's hard to describe what it is, probably why it has its own word. Dictionaries probably offer a definition.
> A good engineer will acknowledge this tradeoff between robustness and cost and behave accordingly.
An engineer will never intentionally produce something shoddy for cost reasons. They will simply refuse to do it. What you are getting at it some tasks don't require an engineer at all. You want to build a bridge to span a kilometer of water? You need an engineer. You need to occasionally cross a ditch? Anyone could lay plank across. No engineer required. The author makes this point too, with software craftsmen.
Weirdly, I thought the terms would be reversed… I think of a craftsman as someone who values quality over quantity, and makes everything beautiful and long lasting, while an engineer is more about productivity and tolerances and efficiency. A craftsman makes better quality but doesn’t scale the way an engineer and the factory process does, although mass produced goods sacrifice quality for quantity.
It's interesting how the words can be ambiguous like that. If I think of the distinction in the context of e.g. clothes, there's likely more engineering in fast fashion and more crafting in bespoke clothing. With food, more engineering in the food items you'd find at a gas station and more crafting at a restaurant.
>> “artisanal” coders who value the experience of coding over the final product
I don't see "artisanal" as that. It may be more that they value the details rather than the experience of coding. They value the details of the final product. Details that most people will not care about. The details that are present in bespoke clothing but missing in fast fashion, the details that are present in a good restaurant's food but missing from a gas station food item.
id consider that a craftsman tends to build without constraints. an enginner meets the constraints with a defined safety factor.
an engineer uses tools that represent the current state of the science, while a craftsman uses tools passed down as archaic art that require meticulous skill to use rather than repeatable math
In food contexts when I see "artisinal" I usually just think of rich white people buying the same stuff in nicer packaging and typography for twice the price.
The actual artisans don't need to advertise themselves as artisans, they just sell shit.
Actual artisans largely make "shit" and mostly leave the selling to others.
There are always exceptions, of course, and people that seek out crafted goods often want to climb over counters and into workshops .. but the crafting time tends to outweigh the selling time by a magnitude or two.
Very little of it lasts for long. And if it does, it's legacy banking or some ossified terrible thing people are afraid to touch - not something revered.
Every piece of software today will be rewritten. By 2100 much of it will be dead and gone. Like punch cards that have rotted away.
Thank you for sharing this. This is a concern many of us had — I sure did — but I always felt like an unfortunate bystander with little control over the situation. This posts shows how we can at least start talking about this in a constructive manner.
Isn't there a difference between making things that code does and the code itself? Ive seen truly beautiful software with terrible to follow but effective code and I've seen beautiful code that while technically amazing didn't do anything of substance. Software is like woodworking, it includes all levels of care and product outcomes.
The vocabulary point matters: calling careful work artisanal turns reliability into a personal taste when it is often the core engineering requirement.
I find more pleasure and satisfaction by programming at a higher altitude, at the system level. This zooming out gives you a better feel for building an effective scaffold and you can iterate on ideas faster.
But can they compete with my shade grown software? It does result in a 40% markup, but there's no putting a price on being raised in a loving environment, is there.
I've gone back over most of my contributions to open source using LLMs and honestly, even though it was my best work at the time, there are big gaps that they find right away.
The myth that we've been shipping perfect code for years, but you can't trust LLMs, is just subjective blindness. People can't see the issues that they can't see, definitionally.
You can absolutely use the exact techniques we used to use in "the old days" to produce reliable code with LLMs generating most of it. The issue is, it's really not a lot less conceptual and intellectual effort than in "the old days", at root. You speed up the programming part, but the rest is still a hard slog, so nobody is out here doing really thorough testing in ways we used to dream of.
I think the issue people run into is that the types of errors the LLM makes are ones humans wouldn’t make, like having a basic misunderstanding of the goal of the software and making silly logic errors that technically work, but don’t serve the correct purpose.
This can be seen more clearly with self-driving cars as an example. A self-driving car may be safer than a human driver, but when the self-driving car plows into the side of a semi truck in broad daylight… that’s generally not a mistake a human would make. Humans and AI have different failure modes, so when AI fails where we generally wouldn’t, it really stands out and gets judged harshly.
Likewise, I've found many bugs using LLMs in the small software libraries I hand wrote and considered complete and correct - even though it was my sole focus at the time and I thought I had perfected it
This seems to be changing, in the year of heavy LLM use that I’ve done.
When I started, I had to review every line, and frequently found bugs, but lately, I’ve been impressed with the quality of the code. I don’t think that I’ve had to make any code-level adjustments, in a while.
Do you have any analytic basis to make that assertion? I haven't found that to be true, it'd be more accurate in my experience to say that LLM code has different issues than the code humans write.
Yes, these are the only two options. That is definitely true.
It's of course impossible to have any nuance or middle ground here where you use LLMs to assist while you still focus on the engineering design decisions and the quality.
I would call myself an artisanal programmer. Software Engineers are some of the least likable people I've ever met and being associated with them is cringe. Questions like, "Why are you using Notepad++ instead of using VSCode with 100+ plugins?" in a very condescending manner gets old very quickly. They need the title of Engineer because deep down they are very insecure.
On the plus side, they're usually promoted very quickly to management and never code again.
> I would call myself an artisanal programmer. Software Engineers are (...) very condescending (...) They need the title of Engineer because deep down they are very insecure.
I'm reasonably sure/hopeful all of these discussions will be as important as people's discussions about whether using vim makes you a real programmer or not.
"Does it work" is what matters. We already know that "do this make no mistakes" works on some things. And then some things that are very "wide" e g "integrations for lots of different things" you basically write a new layer of software on top of the software in specs and .md and that yields a software project that you can mostly just add features by asking for them. But there's still deep narrow projects where creating that context is way more work than just implementing it. And then you have some projects where you can mix approaches and use the "metasoftware" for all the cicd and boring bits but not the core. I'd argue all of the above it's kind of meaningless to try to distinguish it as even if it's fully handrolled an llms still there as a search engine and task runner.
A good engineer will acknowledge this tradeoff between robustness and cost and behave accordingly. For example, if you're working on safety critical or very foundational systems like OSes, medical tech, etc you should bias very heavily in favor of robustness. If you're not, this can easily be an act of overengineering. The engineer's job is to find the right spot along the cost-correctness curve for the thing they are building.
This has always been true, and LLMs just change certain parts of the equation. For example, code writing is far less of a bottleneck than before, so "we can just try with a throwaway impl and see if this works" is suddenly economically viable. It also turns out that many things, in practice, don't need to be as correct as some of us may have believed.
We can still enjoy making quality things, but doing so is often an act of artisanship rather than engineering.
The economic costs of LLM use have been abstracted away, but they're still very much there. The ecological cost of building and running data centres will be a pretty heavy economic cost somewhere in the future. It's not obvious, but it still exists.
(I'm not dumping on LLMs — otherwise I wouldn't even be here. I'm not a glutton for punishment. I know well that HN users excited about LLM use now vocally outweigh, and are pretty intolerant of people who are more on the cautious/negative end of the spectrum. I don't want that trouble in my life).
A builder fits that description. Even a cook fits that description.
Engineering is something else. It's hard to describe what it is, probably why it has its own word. Dictionaries probably offer a definition.
> A good engineer will acknowledge this tradeoff between robustness and cost and behave accordingly.
An engineer will never intentionally produce something shoddy for cost reasons. They will simply refuse to do it. What you are getting at it some tasks don't require an engineer at all. You want to build a bridge to span a kilometer of water? You need an engineer. You need to occasionally cross a ditch? Anyone could lay plank across. No engineer required. The author makes this point too, with software craftsmen.
we built cathedrals without a detailed understanding of load calculations and material properties
>> “artisanal” coders who value the experience of coding over the final product
I don't see "artisanal" as that. It may be more that they value the details rather than the experience of coding. They value the details of the final product. Details that most people will not care about. The details that are present in bespoke clothing but missing in fast fashion, the details that are present in a good restaurant's food but missing from a gas station food item.
an engineer uses tools that represent the current state of the science, while a craftsman uses tools passed down as archaic art that require meticulous skill to use rather than repeatable math
The actual artisans don't need to advertise themselves as artisans, they just sell shit.
There are always exceptions, of course, and people that seek out crafted goods often want to climb over counters and into workshops .. but the crafting time tends to outweigh the selling time by a magnitude or two.
The true crossovers are the artisans that make crafting a performance and sell by making, eg: Lino Tagliapietra - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luU1mlCZc8U
Very little of it lasts for long. And if it does, it's legacy banking or some ossified terrible thing people are afraid to touch - not something revered.
Every piece of software today will be rewritten. By 2100 much of it will be dead and gone. Like punch cards that have rotted away.
Not a loaded question but a genuine one.
Bruh
The myth that we've been shipping perfect code for years, but you can't trust LLMs, is just subjective blindness. People can't see the issues that they can't see, definitionally.
You can absolutely use the exact techniques we used to use in "the old days" to produce reliable code with LLMs generating most of it. The issue is, it's really not a lot less conceptual and intellectual effort than in "the old days", at root. You speed up the programming part, but the rest is still a hard slog, so nobody is out here doing really thorough testing in ways we used to dream of.
This can be seen more clearly with self-driving cars as an example. A self-driving car may be safer than a human driver, but when the self-driving car plows into the side of a semi truck in broad daylight… that’s generally not a mistake a human would make. Humans and AI have different failure modes, so when AI fails where we generally wouldn’t, it really stands out and gets judged harshly.
I’m still in the process of revisiting and refining the many hand-coded dependencies that I’ve created, over the years.
Most of the issues found, were corner cases, that would likely never be encountered, but they are issues, nonetheless.
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news: human coding has not improved a lick since then.
When I started, I had to review every line, and frequently found bugs, but lately, I’ve been impressed with the quality of the code. I don’t think that I’ve had to make any code-level adjustments, in a while.
Holy reach
It's of course impossible to have any nuance or middle ground here where you use LLMs to assist while you still focus on the engineering design decisions and the quality.
On the plus side, they're usually promoted very quickly to management and never code again.
Jokes really do write themselves sometimes...
"Does it work" is what matters. We already know that "do this make no mistakes" works on some things. And then some things that are very "wide" e g "integrations for lots of different things" you basically write a new layer of software on top of the software in specs and .md and that yields a software project that you can mostly just add features by asking for them. But there's still deep narrow projects where creating that context is way more work than just implementing it. And then you have some projects where you can mix approaches and use the "metasoftware" for all the cicd and boring bits but not the core. I'd argue all of the above it's kind of meaningless to try to distinguish it as even if it's fully handrolled an llms still there as a search engine and task runner.