> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.
That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
I used to find joy in knowing how things worked inside-out. Whether it was Postgres, or browser engines, or some detail about compilers... I used to find joy in developing the little techniques that made programming NOT building on quicksand. There was satisfation in what you had done being robust.
Pardon my lack of creativity but I'm not even sure what mastery with the new tools (LLMs) would look like.
When you are so abstracted from the details and don't have to know anything, what _is_ mastery? (I am not asking rhetorically and if people have overcome this thought I would be interested in hearing from them.)
Knowing how to ask a machine questions in the right way? Playing as a manager in control of non-human developers?
It all sounds really silly and something that is difficult to aspire to (and I can't imagine explaining my job to others with a straight face).
I think I find it even more egregious because it's all built on paying rent to the LLM operators.
It's not that I don't enjoy results in their own right sometimes but I think I am definitely in the 'this is giving me an identity crisis' camp.
How do LLMs work? Yes there's a model and there's inference, but dig deeper. How can you, today, with < $50, train a small GPT-2 class model,
how do you fine tune it, what training data do you give it, how do you give it training data, what algorithms do you use for reinforcement learning, what even is RLHF? You don't have to know any of those details to use ChatGPT, just like you don't need to know how a D flip-flop works in a CPU to write some code that runs on one, but if you're looking for feeling like you know what's going on, at their heart, LLMs are still next word prediction engines, so knowing, deeply, how that engine is created and works, would be my idea of mastery of it. Karpathy has a good set of tutorials on this.
>How do LLMs work? Yes there's a model and there's inference, but dig deeper. How can you, today, with < $50, train a small GPT-2 class model, how do you fine tune it, what training data do you give it, how do you give it training data, what algorithms do you use for reinforcement learning, what even is RLHF? You don't have to know any of those details to use ChatGPT, just like you don't need to know how a D flip-flop works in a CPU to write some code that runs on one, but if you're looking for feeling like you know what's going on, at their heart, LLMs are still next word prediction engines, so knowing, deeply, how that engine is created and works, would be my idea of mastery of it. Karpathy has a good set of tutorials on this.
Knowing how an LLM is built, is trained, inferences, isn't
"mastery" in the sense that crafts people use the word.
Mastery to a craftsmen is as much a product of mechanical performance as it is knowledge. For a software craftsmen, that means knowing how to code, debug, and architect a software application by hand.
This, plus since you can't realistically run these LLMs at home, the motivation to get invested in them is not really there (for me at least)
I mean, yes I do find the mathematical background of LLMs fascinating, but it's not going to be something that I can put to practical use (much), if that makes sense?
hangrybear666 · · focus · HN ↗
I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.
That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
ipsod · · focus · HN ↗
It does feel a bit like building on quicksand, but coding has always been that way for me. Well, less so with embedded than webdev, but still.
VGHN7XDuOXPAzol · · focus · HN ↗
Pardon my lack of creativity but I'm not even sure what mastery with the new tools (LLMs) would look like. When you are so abstracted from the details and don't have to know anything, what _is_ mastery? (I am not asking rhetorically and if people have overcome this thought I would be interested in hearing from them.)
Knowing how to ask a machine questions in the right way? Playing as a manager in control of non-human developers? It all sounds really silly and something that is difficult to aspire to (and I can't imagine explaining my job to others with a straight face). I think I find it even more egregious because it's all built on paying rent to the LLM operators.
It's not that I don't enjoy results in their own right sometimes but I think I am definitely in the 'this is giving me an identity crisis' camp.
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
jplusequalt · · focus · HN ↗
Knowing how an LLM is built, is trained, inferences, isn't "mastery" in the sense that crafts people use the word.
Mastery to a craftsmen is as much a product of mechanical performance as it is knowledge. For a software craftsmen, that means knowing how to code, debug, and architect a software application by hand.
VGHN7XDuOXPAzol · · focus · HN ↗
I mean, yes I do find the mathematical background of LLMs fascinating, but it's not going to be something that I can put to practical use (much), if that makes sense?