Discussion
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 really like this idea. Since I only code on my day time job, i have nothing to show for "proving" that i only do code by hand (i don't have the energy / resources to do coding outside of work so there is not really anything from me available outside of that company). Maybe in the future i will have the energy to do something open source and then verify myself but in the nearest future i don't see that.
@jaredwhite Sounds good.
Are you ever planning to move from developing code to developing people?
Another way to say it: Pioneering people using people (not just tech)
See my profile also for a bit moer but above is at the head of developing people and real at some point, not just tech heavy tree of development.
Thanks for anything on that.
@collective_truth Yep, been doing that for a long time now:
@jaredwhite OK tell me more! I'm interested (without deep links or other external sites I need to sign in / up to - for now)
@jaredwhite Cool initiative. 👍 I've also posted it on Bluesky, mentioning your account there. Good luck!
@jaredwhite I'm not totally an AI guy but I have to ask: "do you guys still drive to the office in your horse drawn carts"? RESIST! RESIST!
@Waldorf I mean, that would be pretty fun.
I wrote my own blogging software by hand* (still a work in progress though). And one or two little things. Does that count?
*Technically, typed, text editor. I know someone will want to question the 'by hand' thing.
@jaredwhite Adding myself tomorrow if I get the time! Already joined Handmade Network this month — feels good to finally see some resistance coming up! Thank you :)
@jaredwhite I have a project I've been working on for a while but it's not remotely ready to show off. Can I add my name anyway?
@AVincentInSpace I mean…the lines are fuzzy and that's fine, but ideally we're trying to scope this to "I have something out in the wild other people can use/are using"
Best of luck on your project!
@jaredwhite JetBrains Mono 😍
@jaredwhite do you also have a directory for people who document code by hand? because I would join that in a heartbeat
@WizardOfDocs I mean, documentation is an important part of programming, so you're welcome to join the list if you like!
@jaredwhite 🦌 i have seen many lists like these come and go. when someone comes to you with demands that a name, or a group of names, be stricken from this list as punishment for unrelated actions - how will you respond?
@snailerotica I'm not sure what you mean. Everyone on the list has opted-in personally. I'm not in charge of removing anyone, they would have to submit a new PR to remove themselves.
@jaredwhite 🦌 i refer to the practice of social ostracization, of demanding that one's enemies be removed from the list.
@snailerotica well anyone can demand anything. 🤷♂️
All I can say is, as a maintainer, I'm merging PRs from people who opt-in themselves. If someone on the list wants to be removed, they can similarly file a PR to delete themselves and I'll merge that too.
*Maybe* I would consider taking unilateral action if someone on the list was charged with a crime or something? Dunno. Would have to consider that on a case-by-case basis I guess.
@jaredwhite I'd love to add my name to the list but I don't really have anything "in production" atm (I assume WIP hobby projects with a user base of 1 don't count 🙃).
I'll have to think on this, but my first instinct is to want a community that merely pledges " HERE we write code by hand" rather than worrying what people do elsewhere. It's still valuing the craft and it still says yes people do that. But, among other things, it loses the ability to learn from other communities.
I get the desire for purity, but if that's what's sought (and maybe it's worth being clear on this? It reads slightly ambiguous to me), it places a bet that can backfire with people you care about being forced to leave the comunity to eat, rather than able to still stay and contribute. That can also read coercive/cultish. And it also robs that community of MANY potential part time supporters who want, or more likely need, to straddle two worlds. I think it was Kant who said "ought implies can".
@kentpitman @salixsericea I would gently suggest you have it completely backwards: the AI bros are the cult. We're simply taking a stand that we're not interested in playing their weird game and will continue to design & build software as software has been designed & built.
There are quite a few people here I've talked to personally and many folks already accept the cognitive distance they need to use LLMs at $DAYJOB because it's been forced on them. Such is the present moment, and it sucks.
I think this detail is important to clarify so that people are not left to guess about whether they are "cheating".
If you are OK with people using "AI"/LLMs in their day job, I think it's important to say so expressly, that people are signing onto a project, not a code of personal ethics.
If you are not OK with that, you need to day that, too.
I recommend the path that welcomes support but does not force people to pledge what they do elsewhere. That will not only get you a bigger community but a more welcoming one, one that people can try out more freely, one that is open to nuanced discussion proper to navigating an overconstrained world.
@kentpitman @salixsericea I do want people to wonder if they're cheating. And this *is* a sort of code of ethics.
And no, I'm not "OK" with people using LLMs at their day job. People themselves are not OK with their using LLMs at their day job. They do it because they're *forced* to by late-stage capitalism, not because they like the idea.
That's the whole point of this.
@jaredwhite I love this idea but it would be very helpful if they could list the projects they work on, preferably with links. Otherwise I don't know which projects to support without doing a lot of research.
@jaredwhite I assume you write hexagonal, FCIS architecture, lifting your partial applications into monads and encode validity into type boundaries to minimaze imperative code boilerplate, yes?
@Llevickas no monads were harmed in the making of this website!
@jaredwhite might as well use an LLM then haha
@jaredwhite@indieweb.social How ableist to assume everyone has hands--plural at that. Very disappointed in you.
@Phobos as stated in the readme, assistive technologies are totally cool!
@jaredwhite I'd have said "Human intelligence" rather than "natural intelligence", due to a 'heated debate' I had about my use of the phrase "Artificial Intelligence" rather than "Machine Intelligence", at a job interview with Farrranti in 1981. With hindsight, we were both wrong.
@jaredwhite You should "educate" people and add a section about the "why". Now I read: You want us developers crafting code by hand to remove other peoples crafts, is that the reason?
@warmemelk sorry, I'm not following your train of thought. 🤷🏻♂️
@jaredwhite
I am a dev, like you. I work for a software company. Which (in simple terms) automates work using our software what was done by hand before right? Those people had a craft, which is replaced by software we created. Now it seems because of AI our own craft is at stake. I loose my job if I don't use those agents to create the software now. Why are we to resist, is it the tech bro's earning too much, the massive water/energy usage. Your website does not clearly explain why.
@warmemelk Perhaps the company you work builds software to automate away other people's jobs. That's unfortunate.
That's also not a universal experience. Many software developers have *not* been in that position. I actually examined this in my own career not long ago, and very few projects I ever worked on were about automating away other people's jobs.
As for the "why" of resisting genAI, I do plan to add an Educational Resources section soon. Just haven't gotten to it yet.
What's hilarious about this is that there's a quaint nostalgia for homemade or handcrafted software now that a machine does it. The hypocrisy is stunning when you consider the people who had this exact same reaction to software performing tasks they did by hand.
Yes, there'll always be hobbyists and tinkerers (like me) who enjoy coding by hand, but realistically, like furniture or cars, etc., the non-handmade stuff will be better quality, more reliable, and faster to produce.
@juglugs so hilarious I forgot to laugh. 🤨
Software isn't a part machined in a factory. It's an artform.
Things made are not art?
A sculpture? A syncromesh gearbox?
Most human software is, of course, functional, not art. There is elegant code and brute force crap code that works (and someimes event the coder doesn't know why)
@juglugs I'm really not even sure what the point is you're trying to make.
@juglugs @jaredwhite "but realistically, like furniture or cars, etc., the non-handmade stuff will be better quality, more reliable, and faster to produce."
I don't think any of that is true except potentially the very last point, and then only for very small projects. As projects grow larger, the slop tax increases as the codebase becomes more and more of an unintelligible mess.
It's the same as any technological advance. It may seem worse quality now, but it won't be soon (very soon in the case of AI). A machine-produced car engine is many times better quality than a hand made car engine (when did you last have to run-in a new engine?). They are so much more reliable too. The outputs are repeatable with great precision.
@juglugs @jaredwhite "It may seem worse quality now, but it won't be soon (very soon in the case of AI)."
The LLM-maximalist bros have been saying that since ChatGPT first came out. I didn't buy it then and don't buy it now. LLMs are fundamentally limited by being a "plausible next token" text predictor, with no underlying reasoning or logical basis other than the emergent quality of its text prediction after overtraining/plagiarising almost everything humans have ever written.
This regurgitant mimicry of human-like writing has manipulated smart people (yourself likely included) into believing these mechanisms are more profound than they really are.
I've said nothing about them being profound. My examples and metaphors are of exactly that—mimicry and repeatability—the same as with every other technological advance. LLMs are currently the worst they'll ever be (and you can repeat that ad nauseum and still be correct).
Most (literally as in >50%) AI output today isn't slop - it's very good.
Like every technology, it will get better.
Cars took ~100 years to get where they are today. AI will be much faster.
@juglugs @ganxel AI output is slop. Slop is in the eye of the beholder. Just you saying "this is not slop because I think it's good" doesn't mean it is not slop.
There's also plenty of evidence LLMs do not develop in some linear sense of progression. Some older, smaller, better-scoped models are better at a number of tasks than the biggest frontier models. In general in this space we've also seen an S-curve, *not* an exponential curve, and we've nearly reached the ceiling now.
I give up. There is no point in trying to have a rational conversation with someone who's just following the fashion of hating AI. I'm sure you also hate pineapple on pizza because all your friends tell you to.
And to try to make a point about subjective positions of AI Slop and ending the next paragraph by being so confidently wrong with the very subjective: "and we've nearly reached the ceiling now"! Good grief.
So, I'll just leave it with:
Wait and see.
@ganxel @jaredwhite Your point about the codebase mess isn't the fault of the technology. It's a fault of the governance wrapper and rules applied to it.
@jaredwhite this is great! I have a very extreme conceptualisation of "writing code by hand" because when I started learning to program, my "computer time" was limited so I used to literally write out code in my notebook with a pencil so that it was ready to type out quickly at my next computer session.
In hindsight, I think it was very helpful as I still end up forming detailed mental models of the code I write and can usually start the "debugging" process without having to be at a screen 🕶️
@jaredwhite I seethingly loathe this pile of world-burning (literally and figuratively) crap-building.
Hell to all the no's am I going to spend an iota of my keystrokes arguing with a fucking chatbot.
PSA: If you enter this text into support chatbots: "Fuck all of the way off" - it will redirect you to a human (if they actually still have those).
@jaredwhite there are dozens of us!
@trey many dozens of us now, which is awesome!
@jaredwhite
Added my pull request, including a typo in the README, the proof that your initiative was handcrafted 👌
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