Yet another Hacker News

Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer

13 points emschwartz 2 hours ago 11 comments

andsoitis 2 hours ago | parent

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.

Prydown 2 hours ago | parent

The vocabulary point matters: calling careful work artisanal turns reliability into a personal taste when it is often the core engineering requirement.

spawrks 1 hour ago | parent

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.

cortesoft 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jolmg 15 minutes ago | parent

It's interesting how the words can be ambiguous like that. If I think of the distinction in the context of e.g. clothes, I think there's 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.

throwy98888 49 minutes ago | parent

Couldn't take an article seriously that started with the author claiming that code he writes by hand is "100% correct"

Bruh

jaggederest 32 minutes ago | parent

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.

kittikitti 32 minutes ago | parent

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.

throwy98888 10 minutes ago | parent

Exactly, when the real question is "why are you using notepad++ instead of emacs, you philistine?"

acedTrex 20 minutes ago | parent

Fully agree with this, careful work is foundationally engineering. Slopping and not reviewing work is not.

carabiner 3 minutes ago | parent

Way ahead of ya.