The Endless Temptation of Claude
10 points by FedericoSchonborn
10 points by FedericoSchonborn
lol, i hope the author of paint.net doesn't read this. incredibly + gratuitously insulting. one of the problems with llms is their poor or missing "theory of mind" for their users, so it's ironic (morissette sense) to see the blogger here similarly incapable of conceptualising the other & hallucinating a stereotype to replace them.
think it’s impossible to underestimate the temptation that many [especially older] programmers seem to have for wanting a solution that will make their lives “easier” and fill a hole in their heart.
..
Wanting to spend less time at work, more time outside / with loved ones.
I feel like programming makes me feel younger, helps me remember my younger years.
I enjoy opening up a Turbo C++-like color-themed editor (emacs for me) and coding with a blue background/yellow font in a type-safe language, where I track in my head (and with destructors) how resources are used, I feel I understand how things are working between my stuff and down to processes, threads, interrupt handlers -- and with compiler magic dust helping with register allocations, optimized instructions for fetching data, etc.
When coding, I imagine I am in a fairy-tale story of sorts, where various participants have fairy-tale roles. Exceptions are the '666' and '667' and similar-numbered :-) ) in my code. I have recovery knights, defenders (constraints and guard), and so on. That world is something I enjoy spending part of life in.
I do not enjoy YAML configs, sorting out security-forced configurations, CSS, HTML, and type-less stuff (I feel like I'm on thin ice when I have to use those things).
But other than that -- coding is something I enjoy, because it makes me feel good, comfortable, and calm. I feel that I am interfacing with things I understand and that understand me, in a way :-)
Would be sad if LLMs take that away from me.
Instead I wish we could accept the limitations of our time, our bodies, our minds.
no (with or without LLMs). 99.9999% of the human experience since the dawn of time is to try and go past these limitations.
Does this program NEED to have these extra features? Does this software NEED to work on everything?
yes
On your death bed, nobody is going to care about how many features you pushed on git.
definitely, but in that moment I sure as hell hope I remember all the smiles of the people that have used the features I've added for them to make their artwork / performance / ... and of the audience that saw said shows, art installations, etc.
If there is just one child who only has access to some older machine running Linux that is happy because they made a fun painting with paint.net now available there thanks to the author's work, it validates all the LLM usage in the world for me
it validates all the LLM usage in the world for me
Do you know about all the negative externalities of AI? Does that really balance?
When people get older, they feel that they deserve upward mobility where eventually they become a manager who tells junior coders to do all the hard work. "AI Agents" allow for that fantasy, they're the tireless junior coders who you get to tell what to do, as if you've been promoted.
Is this a real thing people admit wanting? I am sure there are some people with a power fantasy like this but I can't imagine an LLM agent fulfilling this fantasy for them as it's generally about having authority over people who otherwise have agency unlike LLM agents.
The other two reasons seem right to me, and are enough on their own.
It has been a sad trend of the past years where some people like to compare LLMs to eager junior developers. Whenever I read that I can't help but think that the person has either lack of experience being a mentor/manager, lack of empathy, lack of authority, or all of that together. The reasons for the belittling can be motivated by a power fantasy but in general I think it's motivated by the insecurity that LLMs has brought to our professions.
Post of Paint.NET author announcing the change' https://forums.paint.net/topic/134563-%F0%9F%8D%B7-extremely-experimental-winelinux-support-how-to-get-started/. He has some words to say about it.
"an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D":
Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that it uses on WINE (triggered by using /wine). It lives in PaintDotNet.Windows.Direct2D1.Managed.dll. This was written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible and would NEVER have happened.
For it to be truly "internal, from-scratch, clean room", there'd need to be some proof that the original sources (and all pre/successors of it) are not in Claude's training data. Personally, I think that's unlikely.
There is a tinkling of an interesting blog post here, but it falls short by not exploring anything introduced further and just stating things as they are. If you are going to write an post like this I do strongly feel that you should spend more time on things like this
From where I stand I feel like this sadly comes from certain desires and insecurities:
- Wanting to spend less time at work, more time outside / with loved ones.
- Feeling like you should be able to accomplish so much more than your body and mind allows with limited time on Earth.
- When people get older, they feel that they deserve upward mobility where eventually they become a manager who tells junior coders to do all the hard work. "AI Agents" allow for that fantasy, they're the tireless junior coders who you get to tell what to do, as if you've been promoted.
I think the author is somewhat in the neighborhood with these points, but calls destination reached before even have reached the right street. To the point that you now have caricatures of reasons that fit what the author wants it to be rather than what is really going on.
The first on is the most reasonable one, which I wouldn't even qualify as a desire or insecurity. In the context of open source development I can understand it if the sole maintainer of something popular considers the aid of AI to balance the time invested a bit more evenly. If that result will be reached is a valid discussion to have, but the reasoning behind it is not something I would actually dispute.
The second point already starts to glide into the ridiculous, mostly be the addition of the last bit. And also here, I don't the desire to be able to do more is unreasonable in many ways. At least not as a standalone bullet point simplified to this point. Again, the valid discussion here is if LLMs can actually make people accomplish more. Extra points for making the discussion about what accomplishing something means if it is largely written by a LLM and if there is a tipping point somewhere.
The third bullet point is just plain ridiculous to me. Sure, I have seen agents described as "tireless juniors who do what I ask". But, that is always in the context the second bullet point and rarely if ever I have seen it in the context of some sort of "I deserve to be management" type of deal.
I've struggled with the decision of using LLMs in my own projects. Just to be upfront about it, I've made the decision of using them, and I use them very extensively for pretty much everything I build lately.
There's no high score, no reward, for endlessly expanding your software as far and fast as possible.
This is true. I agree that the ability to just more or less will some feature into existence makes scope creep and build stuff that nobody cares about extremely tempting.
Does this program NEED to have these extra features? Does this software NEED to work on everything?
For me, my thinking came down to something pretty simple.
I spend a LOT of time on my personal software projects, and I care about them very deeply. This has been the case for over a decade, and I was more than happy to hand-code things. I truly preferred the process of writing code by hand. I got very good at it, the fact that this skill was valuable to others and society in general was huge for my self-worth and livelihood.
Despite all that, I still can't justify not using AI to myself. I just picture the scenario where I decided to hand-code my projects, and then I log into Twitter and see a post from someone who built something very similar (or perhaps even better) with AI instead. Without a doubt, it's going to have more features, it's probably going to be more polished (on the surface at least), and it would have been built in an order of magnitude less time.
Even if that particular project was a shitty pile of vibe-coded slop with no soul or care put into it at all, it would still be crushing to witness. Thinking of seeing some kid with a small fraction of my experience and none of my deep interest and enthusiasm for the tech itself pump out something equivalent in 5% the time makes me sick to my stomach.
So that really only leaves me with a few options. I can despair and quit dumping effort into software projects and pursue my only other goal of getting to Platinum in Valorant. Or I can double down and use AI to accelerate my efforts and try to go far further and do more than I could without it.
To be clear, I've done plenty of despairing as well along the way. I still feel like the craft that used to define me is quite dead, and when I try to project forward to the logical conclusion of this AI revolution, I find it hard to see anything remotely positive. However, despite all that, I absolutely refuse to just sit here and watch others surpass me because I refuse to make use of tools at my disposal.