Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project.
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Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project.

We write code by hand.


️It's a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. When you hear someone tell you “nobody does that” you can point to this and say “well these folks do.”
If you're #ProCraft and care about the future of handcrafted software, please add yourself to the list! I'd love to see this grow to 100s of signatories (I know y'all are out there!) and really send a message.
@jaredwhite I LOVE this!!!

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Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project.

We write code by hand.


️It's a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. When you hear someone tell you “nobody does that” you can point to this and say “well these folks do.”
If you're #ProCraft and care about the future of handcrafted software, please add yourself to the list! I'd love to see this grow to 100s of signatories (I know y'all are out there!) and really send a message.
@jaredwhite I assume that you mean without AI?
But with compilers on a computer and not with pen and paper.
What is the main motivation for not using LLMs as part of the development process?
I am asking mainly to understand as I am head of studies at a department of computer science and we are currently getting ready to put more coding with LLMs into courses.
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Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project.

We write code by hand.


️It's a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. When you hear someone tell you “nobody does that” you can point to this and say “well these folks do.”
If you're #ProCraft and care about the future of handcrafted software, please add yourself to the list! I'd love to see this grow to 100s of signatories (I know y'all are out there!) and really send a message.
@jaredwhite but what if someone does it with voice? It's "manual" then rather.
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Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project.

We write code by hand.


️It's a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. When you hear someone tell you “nobody does that” you can point to this and say “well these folks do.”
If you're #ProCraft and care about the future of handcrafted software, please add yourself to the list! I'd love to see this grow to 100s of signatories (I know y'all are out there!) and really send a message.
Unfortunate that the acronym AI is in use, otherwise you could deem yourselves "Actual Intelligence"
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Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project.

We write code by hand.


️It's a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. When you hear someone tell you “nobody does that” you can point to this and say “well these folks do.”
If you're #ProCraft and care about the future of handcrafted software, please add yourself to the list! I'd love to see this grow to 100s of signatories (I know y'all are out there!) and really send a message.
@jaredwhite If anyone makes something 88x31-ish for this project, please share
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@jaredwhite I assume that you mean without AI?
But with compilers on a computer and not with pen and paper.
What is the main motivation for not using LLMs as part of the development process?
I am asking mainly to understand as I am head of studies at a department of computer science and we are currently getting ready to put more coding with LLMs into courses.
@UlrikNyman @jaredwhite My main motivation in not using LLMs is to maximize my own learning and retention, to avoid offloading critical thinking to digital landlords, to avoid paying for a service that will only ever continue to cost more, and to resist contributing to the inflated prices of hardware being caused by this bubble.
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@jaredwhite I assume that you mean without AI?
But with compilers on a computer and not with pen and paper.
What is the main motivation for not using LLMs as part of the development process?
I am asking mainly to understand as I am head of studies at a department of computer science and we are currently getting ready to put more coding with LLMs into courses.
@UlrikNyman @jaredwhite LLMs are non deterministic, so you can't know what it's doing and it potentially does different things when you run it a second time. They have no concept of architecture or design, just what is the statistically most likely next symbol. They are extremely inefficient because they have to re-read the whole codebase for every output token. Overuse encourages de-skilling, so you become more dependent on the LLM
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Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project.

We write code by hand.


️It's a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. When you hear someone tell you “nobody does that” you can point to this and say “well these folks do.”
If you're #ProCraft and care about the future of handcrafted software, please add yourself to the list! I'd love to see this grow to 100s of signatories (I know y'all are out there!) and really send a message.
-
@jaredwhite I assume that you mean without AI?
But with compilers on a computer and not with pen and paper.
What is the main motivation for not using LLMs as part of the development process?
I am asking mainly to understand as I am head of studies at a department of computer science and we are currently getting ready to put more coding with LLMs into courses.
The "main" reason is because they hurt people including the programmer.
AI data centers driving the major coding LLMs are publicly and visibly hurting people and the environment where they are built and exacerbating climate change with their energy use.
Coding LLMs are being used as a justification for mass layoffs, so again, they're hurting people by breaking labor power.
Coding LLMs are part of a hail mary to keep the infinite money glitches that tech had relied upon going and in the process is enriching outright fascists, deepening inequality, and setting us all up for a painful economic collapse. So, once again, it hurts people.
Also, the various technical reasons other folks will list, which again, hurts you as the programmer.
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@jaredwhite I assume that you mean without AI?
But with compilers on a computer and not with pen and paper.
What is the main motivation for not using LLMs as part of the development process?
I am asking mainly to understand as I am head of studies at a department of computer science and we are currently getting ready to put more coding with LLMs into courses.
-
Unfortunate that the acronym AI is in use, otherwise you could deem yourselves "Actual Intelligence"
@misterscience @jaredwhite https://zuzai.org/
Just found this earlier in my feed. Not super enamored with the word, but glad someone is trying to own a positive non-AI term.
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Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project.

We write code by hand.


️It's a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. When you hear someone tell you “nobody does that” you can point to this and say “well these folks do.”
If you're #ProCraft and care about the future of handcrafted software, please add yourself to the list! I'd love to see this grow to 100s of signatories (I know y'all are out there!) and really send a message.
@jaredwhite
I've worn out many keyboards & mice writing in the last 25 years.
Project proposals, manuals, history, programs and novels.
I've researched Chatbots since 1980s and the current LLMs using data scraped from the Internet & books are able to do a more realistic conversation due to astronomic amount of processing and (stolen) data. They are still toys. A dead end. There are more useful computer tools with an AI label.
I've managed programmers & engineers. Most programmers are poor. -
The "main" reason is because they hurt people including the programmer.
AI data centers driving the major coding LLMs are publicly and visibly hurting people and the environment where they are built and exacerbating climate change with their energy use.
Coding LLMs are being used as a justification for mass layoffs, so again, they're hurting people by breaking labor power.
Coding LLMs are part of a hail mary to keep the infinite money glitches that tech had relied upon going and in the process is enriching outright fascists, deepening inequality, and setting us all up for a painful economic collapse. So, once again, it hurts people.
Also, the various technical reasons other folks will list, which again, hurts you as the programmer.
To be fair, some of this can be remediated through use of local, open models, but I don't see local LLMs used much in workplaces and that still doesn't remediate all the harms. Maybe academia could surprise me and would put some focus there.
It still has issues that the hardware for local coding LLMs is by no means cheap, but academia still charges hundreds for books and had dedicated labs with high grade hardware for running CAD software when I went, so it's not unreasonable to do.
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Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project.

We write code by hand.


️It's a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. When you hear someone tell you “nobody does that” you can point to this and say “well these folks do.”
If you're #ProCraft and care about the future of handcrafted software, please add yourself to the list! I'd love to see this grow to 100s of signatories (I know y'all are out there!) and really send a message.
@jaredwhite you might enjoy my post about #slowsoftware
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S sam@social.data.coop shared this topic
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@jaredwhite
I've worn out many keyboards & mice writing in the last 25 years.
Project proposals, manuals, history, programs and novels.
I've researched Chatbots since 1980s and the current LLMs using data scraped from the Internet & books are able to do a more realistic conversation due to astronomic amount of processing and (stolen) data. They are still toys. A dead end. There are more useful computer tools with an AI label.
I've managed programmers & engineers. Most programmers are poor.@jaredwhite
I got a Cherry TKL mechanical keyboard for my workstation (with RGB lights set to a dim white). The matt tops are getting shiny.I used to have a small UPS to have enough time to save my work. Laptops are far better than All-in-ones as the UPS is built in.
The UPS is replaced by a 3KW Solar UPS with 12 kWh of batteries and 8 panels. A separate one charged from main one feeds 3 freezers and has 4 panels. So all the computers, satellite gear, fibre & router & switches are on UPS.
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To be fair, some of this can be remediated through use of local, open models, but I don't see local LLMs used much in workplaces and that still doesn't remediate all the harms. Maybe academia could surprise me and would put some focus there.
It still has issues that the hardware for local coding LLMs is by no means cheap, but academia still charges hundreds for books and had dedicated labs with high grade hardware for running CAD software when I went, so it's not unreasonable to do.
But also, from personal experience with the output, at a very mundane level it destroy comprehensibility of the code base and documentation. People will use LLMs to generate documentation that is voluminous but also is targeted towards other LLMs rather than human comprehension.
The net result is that even if a stated rule is that people will review and understand the code, that becomes functionally unachievable. This becomes doubly problematic when grappling with generated documentation for integrating components in a larger system. The code changes downstream then become larger than they needed to be because the documentation was more verbose and less comprehensible than it needed to be.
These are negative outcomes that I have seen in action.
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Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project.

We write code by hand.


️It's a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. When you hear someone tell you “nobody does that” you can point to this and say “well these folks do.”
If you're #ProCraft and care about the future of handcrafted software, please add yourself to the list! I'd love to see this grow to 100s of signatories (I know y'all are out there!) and really send a message.
@jaredwhite I'll add myself later if I don't forgor
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@jaredwhite I assume that you mean without AI?
But with compilers on a computer and not with pen and paper.
What is the main motivation for not using LLMs as part of the development process?
I am asking mainly to understand as I am head of studies at a department of computer science and we are currently getting ready to put more coding with LLMs into courses.
@UlrikNyman @jaredwhite there are a myriad of reason: technical, practical, business, legal, environmental, political, ethical, psychological ... . take a look at the the work of Emily M Bender, Timnit Gebru, and Paris Marks (all on the fedi) for a more rigours go over the above
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Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project.

We write code by hand.


️It's a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. When you hear someone tell you “nobody does that” you can point to this and say “well these folks do.”
If you're #ProCraft and care about the future of handcrafted software, please add yourself to the list! I'd love to see this grow to 100s of signatories (I know y'all are out there!) and really send a message.
@jaredwhite Thanks for the great work you are doing.
Meanwhile,I am also practising food production and environmental conservation from Uganda with other people ,I being the founder of #GreenYouthaMovement .
Would you help in marketing our work such that we can be able to feed more vulnerable families,train more people about environmental conservation after setting up a large tree nursery that will help provide fruit tree seedlings to serve to the communities? -
@jaredwhite you might enjoy my post about #slowsoftware