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Ask HN: How correct are geohot's opinions on CRUD developers?
2 points by tr1ll10nb1ll on Nov 16, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments
Geohot once said in his streams that CRUD developers ( people working on frameworks like Ruby on Rails, React or something similar ( I'm assuming Django as well ) ) aren't even real developers. They are mere translators and that bootcamps basically just teach you these frameworks that make you a translator between `input -> system -> output`, a job that'll be replaced to some extent by AI in the future. He also compared CRUD devs to those who wrote news by hand before the printing press.

How correct are these opinions? My recent work includes a large Django project with multiple components for an SaaS I'm building and that got me thinking, is this even real coding? Idk Geohot took a toll on me I suppose. I mean I'm not particularly restricted to a framework per se, I just like to use whatever the right tool/technology is to get an objective done.

Either way, would love to have some opinions flowing.




Why do you care?


He's a developer who's been around for a while and has done some particularly great things so far. There has to probably be some weight in what he says.


He's wrong. There's no such thing as a CRUD developer. No one would pay someone just to make essentially GUIs for the database tables. Also CRUD is ancient history, webapps are all interactive react now. CSS is hard. Also AI-generated CRUD or even CSS would be hilarious, I want to see that.


Another thing though, web apps are not all interactive React now. That's falsified information. There are multiple cases where webapps aren't even backed by React.

Webapps are still being built in CRUD frameworks.


Yes, but no one is hired to just make CRUD apps. Those are like 10% of the work that needs to be done to maintain a business. Just throwing in authorization/authentication provides enough "house rules" (business-specific rules) that AI would have trouble with it.


Yeah that's definitely true. No one just makes CRUD apps.


GPT3 has some impressive results with generated code [1]. I don't think it's production ready but it seems to have potential to one day replace a room of frontend devs with just 1 dev to clean up the code.

[1] https://twitter.com/sharifshameem/status/1282676454690451457...


It's honestly really pathetic IMHO. https://twitter.com/sharifshameem/status/1282693205813628929...


That would actually be a pretty fun project to build, AI generated CSS, HTML and MVC.

What he meant by CRUD devs was, developers whose job is just to build stuff like, a contact information page, or basically anything that does CRUD operations. He for some reason considers only `input->compute->output` as the correct paradigm which also aligns with his jalbreaking stuff and what he's doing at comma.ai now.


You write to and read from a data store? That's what CRUD is, and it predates web apps. It has zero to do with CSS or react or any other presentational technology.


Half true, I guess? I'm definitely in the camp of the CRUD developers. I do accept that I don't do lower level work (even making plugins/affecting how the framework works) in my day to day job. And it's fine. Evidently these skills are worth paying for and create value (monetary or otherwise) in the world.

An interesting take on this and the wider topic of how to write software is DHH's keynote from 2014[0]. He states that he himself is more interested in the 'Information System' parts instead of the 'Computer Science' part. I think there's space for more specialized titles to differentiate these jobs/skillsets.

0: https://youtu.be/9LfmrkyP81M




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