There should never have been an "artisan era". We use computers to solve problems. You should have always getting stuff done instead of bikeshedding over nitty-gritty details, like when in the office people have been spending weeks on optimizing code... just to have the exact same output, exact same time, but now "nicer".
> Plenty of people are writing code without being paid for it.
This is rhetorically a non sequitur. As in, if you get paid (X) then you get stuff done (Y). But if you're not paid (~X), then, ?
Not being paid doesn't mean one does or doesn't get stuff done, it has no bearing on it. So the parent wasn't saying anything about people who don't get paid, they can do whatever they want, but yes, at a job if you're paid, then you better get stuff done over bikeshedding.
It depends how much money and energy in the form of manhours were spent to write it in an artisan way in the first place. I've been in a lot of PR reviews where it was clear that the amount of back and forth we had was simply not worth it for the code we wrote.
I think you're both right. There's a time and place for beautifully crafted code, but there's also a place for a hot mess that barely passes its own non-existing tests, and for anything in between.
> there's also a place for a hot mess that barely passes its own non-existing tests
For a long time that place has been "the commercial software marketplace". Let's all stop pretending that the code coming out of shops until now has been something you'd find at a guild craft expo. It's always been a ball of spit and duct tape, which is why AI code is often spit and duct tape.
Yeah. Exactly the same as there should never be an “artisan era” for chairs, tables, buildings, etc.
Hell even art! Why should art even be a thing? We are machine driven by neurons, feelings do not exist.
Might be your life, it ain’t mine. I’m an artisan of code, and I’m proud to be one. I might finally use AI one of these days at work because I’ll have to, but I’ll never stop cherishing doing hand-crafted code.
>> Yeah. Exactly the same as there should never be an “artisan era” for chairs, tables, buildings, etc.
That's funny you bring up those examples, because they have all moved on to the mass manufacturing era. You can still get artisan quality stuff but it typically costs a lot more and there's a lot less of it. Which is why mass-manufacturing won. Same is going to happen with software. LLMs are just the beginning.
I live in a city where there are new houses being built. They are ugly. Meanwhile, the ones that exist since a long time ago have charm and feel homely.
I don’t know, I‘m probably just a regular old man yelling at clouds, but I still think we’re going in the wrong direction. For pretty much everything. And for what? Money. Yay!
You're continuing to make good arguments for why mass-production should exist _alongside_ artisanal craftsmanship. Broad availability of housing which is functional, albeit of questionable aesthetic appeal, is a good thing to improve housing availability[0]; and also it is a good thing for (fewer) well-built, charming, individual homes to be available for those who want to spend more and to get more.
[0] I'm extremely aware that there are other contributing factors to housing shortages. Tax Billionaires, etc. My metaphor still works despite not being total.
The difference is that end users don't interact with the code that the artisan created, and don't care what it "feels like". One type of code that I do agree should be artisanal is the interface end of libraries.
Yes, it's like artisanal plumbing or electrical wiring... all hidden behind walls. A plumber might take pride in the quality of his soldered joints, but artisanal? Who wants to pay for that?
> just to have the exact same output, exact same time, but now "nicer".
The majority of code work is maintaining someone else's code. That's the reason it is "nicer".
There is also the matter of performance and reducing redundancy.
Two recent pulls I saw where it was AI generated did neither. Both attempted to recreate from scratch rather than using industry tested modules. One was using csv instead of polars for the intensive work.
So while they worked, they became an unmaintainable mess.
You use computers to solve problems. I use computers to communicate and create art. For me, the code I write is first and foremost a form of self expression. No one paid me to write 99% of the code I've written in my life.
For a long time computers were so expensive they could only be used to do things that generate enough money to justify their purchase. But those days are long gone so computers are for much much more than just solving problems and getting stuff done. Code can be beautiful in its own right.
The exact mindset is what has led to the transition from quality products to commercialized crapware, not just with software, but across all industries.
It sounds like you hate your job? To be sure, I've done plenty of grinding over my career as a software engineer but in fact I coded as a hobby before it turned into a career, I then continued to code on the side, now I am retired and code still.
I love my job FWIW. I work at performance engineering and we work with the most complex systems in the world (GB200/B300/...). Couldn't be happier.
But I just don't care if I have 5 layers of abstraction and SOLID principles and clean code and.... bah. I get it. I have an MSc in it and I've been doing this as a hobby and then professionally for decades now. It just doesn't matter. At the end of the day, we get paid to ship something that solves a problem.
It might be a novel problem. And it might be at the frontier of what we can do today. But it's still a problem that needs solving and the path we take is irrelevant from a user's perspective as long as it solves the problem.
I don't think they hate their job, just seem to be frustrated at slow bureaucratic processes and long code reviews which I've experienced too. After a while it can get aggravating as to why some people want to nitpick minute details of the code which slows down development overall. I am talking about cases where the initially submitted PR is perfectly fine, not grossly incorrect.
Oh wow, if we're talking about code reviews that's a different topic. I've never, FWIW, encountered "artisans" in code reviews. More like "that's not how I would have coded itsans" and "let me show you some new tricksans".
Yeah, to hell with code reviews. The best years of my career were when I was given carte blanche control over an entire framework, etc. When code reviews came along coding at work sucked.
If anything, the code reviews killed the artisanship.
90% of the CRs I've ever gotten have been "artisanal" just because nitpicking superficial nonsense is easier than meaningful critique, and even when the code is perfectly fine it looks more productive from a managers perspective if you're nitpicking a function name than if you just respond with lgtm.
Yeah that's what I understood them to mean from "like when in the office people have been spending weeks on optimizing code... just to have the exact same output, exact same time, but now "nicer"." There does come such a time either way when the juice isn't worth the squeeze so to speak in terms of optimization of code.
It's not that simple. That's how I started as well but now I have hooked up Gemini and GPT 5.2 to review code and plans and then to do consensus on design questions.
And then there's Ralph with cross LLM consensus in a loop. It's great.
8xGPUs per box. this has been the data center standard for the last 8ish years.
furthermore usually NVLink connected within the box (SXM instead of PCIe cards, although the physical data link is still PCIe.)
this is important because the daughter board provides PCIe switches which usually connect NVMe drives, NICs and GPUs together such that within that subcomplex there isn't any PCIe oversubscription.
since last year for a lot of providers the standard is the GB200 I'd argue.
Fascinating! So each GPU is partnered with disk and NICs such that theres no oversubscription for bandwidth within its 'slice'? (idk what the word is) And each of these 8 slices wire up to NVLink back to the host?
Feels like theres some amount of (software) orchestration for making data sit on the right drives or traverse the right NICs, guess I never really thought about the complexity of this kind of scale.
I googled GB200, its cool that Nvidia sells you a unit rather than expecting you to DIY PC yourself.
usually it's 2-2-2 (2 GPUs, 2 NICs and 2 NVMe drivers on a PCIe complex). no NVLink here, this is just PCIe - under this PCIe switch chip there is full bandwidth, above it's usually limited BW. so for example going GPU-to-GPU over PCIe will walk
GPU -> PCIe switch -> PCIe switch (most likely the CPU, with limited bw) -> PCIe switch -> GPU
NVLink comes into the picture as a separate, 2nd link between the GPUs: if you need to do GPU-to-GPU, you can use NVLink.
you never needed to DIY your stuff, at least not for the last 10 years: most hardware vendors (Supermicro, Dell, ...) will sell you a complete system with 8 GPUs.
what's nice on GH200/GBx00/VR systems, is that you can use chip-to-chip NVLink between the CPU and GPU, so the CPU can access GPU memory coherently and vica versa.
That's why you run with "dangerously allow all." What's the point of LLMs if I have to manually approve everything? IME you only get half decent results if the agent can run tests, run builds and iterate. I'm not going to look at the wall of texts it produces on every iterations, they are mostly convincing bullshit. I'll review the code it wrote once the tests pass, but I don't want to be "in the loop".
That's what good lights go for, they're niche and people pay good money for them. I really liked my office lamps and I wanted to get the same for home, after a quick search I discovered they were 1300+ euros
1000+ is the "designer" lighting territory. Margins are enormous margins, but to charge those you need to be an established designer and have a reputation.
You get paid to get stuff done, period.
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