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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#251

Post by theshrike79 »

salawat wrote: post #157
tomrod wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%! There is significant analogy between the two!

There is a reason management types are drawn to it like flies to shit.

Working with and communicating with offshored teams is a specific skill too.

There are tips and tricks on how to manage them and not knowing them will bite you later on. Like the basic thing of never asking yes or no questions, because in some cultures saying "no" isn't a thing. They'll rather just default to yes and effectively lie than admit failure.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#252

Post by vaylian »

oceanplexian wrote: post #186
gyomu wrote: post #32

This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080 "Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about wha…

Coding is not at all like working a lump of clay unless you’re still writing assembly. You’re taking a bunch of pre-built abstractions written by other people on top of what the computer is actually doing and plugging them together like LEGOs. The artificial syntax that you use to move the bricks around is the thing you call coding. The human element of discovery is still there if a robot stacks the bricks based on a…

> You’re taking a bunch of pre-built abstractions written by other people on top of what the computer is actually doing and plugging them together like LEGOs.

Correct. However, you will probably notice that your solution to the problem doesn't feel right, when the bricks that are available to you, don't compose well. The AI will just happily smash together bricks and at first glance it might seem that the task is done.

Choosing the right abstraction (bricks) is part of finding the right solution. And understanding that choice often requires exploration and contemplation. AI can't give you that.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#253

Post by m0rc »

I think the article has a point. There seem to be two reactions among senior engineers atound me these days.

On one side, there are people who have become a bit more productive. They are certainly not "10x," but they definitely deliver more code. However, I do not observe a substantial difference in the end-to-end delivery of production-ready software. This might be on me and my lack of capacity to exploit the tools to their full extent. But, iterating over customer requirements, CI/CD, peer reviews, and business validation takes time (and time from the most experienced people, not from the AI).

On the other hand, soemtimes I observe a genuine degradation of thinking among some senior engineers (there aren’t many juniors around, by the way). Meetings, requirements, documents, or technology choices seem to be directly copy/pasted from an LLM, without a grain of original thinking, many times without insight.

The AI tools are great though. They give you an answer to the question. But, many times making the correct question, and knowing when the answer is not correct is the main issue.

I wonder if the productivity boost that senior engineers actually need is to profit from the accumulated knowledge found in books. I know it is an old technology and it is not fashionable, but I believe it is mostly unexploited if you consider the whole population of engineers :D

Re: I miss thinking hard

#255

Post by duskdozer »

w4yai wrote: post #132
beebmam wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like these are why I don't browse HN nearly ever anymore

Nothing new. Whenever a new layer of abstraction is added, people say it's worse and will never be as good as the old way. Though it's a totally biased opinion, we just have issues with giving up things we like as human being.

The difference is that LLM output is very nondeterministic.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#256

Post by thorum »

> but the number of problems requiring deep creative solutions feels like it is diminishing rapidly.

If anything, we have more intractable problems needing deep creative solutions than ever before. People are dying as I write this. We’ve got mass displacement, poverty, polarization in politics. The education and healthcare systems are broken. Climate change marches on. Not to mention the social consequences of new technologies like AI (including the ones discussed in this post) that frankly no one knows what to do about.

The solution is indeed to work on bigger problems. If you can’t find any, look harder.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#257

Post by nielsbot »

gyomu wrote: post #32

This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080 "Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about wha…

While there is still a market for artisanal furniture, dishes and clothes most people buy mass-produced dishes, clothes and furniture.

I wonder if software creation will be in a similar place. There still might be a small market for handmade software but the majority of it will be mass produced. (That is, by LLM or even software itself will mostly go away and people will get their work done via LLM instead of "apps")

Re: I miss thinking hard

#258

Post by lccerina »

"Oh no, I am using a thing that no one is forcing me to use, and now I am sad".

Just don't use AI. The idea that you have ship ship ship 10X ship is an illusion and a fraud. We don't really need more software

Re: I miss thinking hard

#259

Post by fragmede »

tired-turtle wrote: post #86
keyle wrote: post #63

I don't get it. I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review. If anything, all we've changed is working at a higher level. The product is the same. But these people just keep mixing things up like "wow I got a ferrari now, watch it fly off the road!" Yeah so you got a tools upgrade; it's faster, it's more powerful. Keep it on the road or give up driving! We went from auto completing keywords, t…

> We're all Linus Torvalds now. So...where's your OS and SCM? I get your point that wetware stills matter, but I think it's a bit much to contend that more than a handful of people (or everyone) is on the level of Linus Torvalds now that we have LLMs.

My hair hasn't turned blonde and I don't suddenly know how to speak Finnish, either.

You might have missed their point.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#260

Post by glemmaPaul »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #200
throwerxyz wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I haven't reduced my thinking! You just detailed an example of where you did in fact reduce your thinking. Managers who tell people what to get done do not think about the problem.

I think my message is doing a disservice to explaining what actually happened because a lot of it happens in my head. 1. I received the ticket, as soon as I read it I had a hunch it was related to some querying ignoring a field that should be filtered by every query (thinking) 2. I give this hunch to the AI which goes search in the codebase in the areas I suggested the problem could be and that's when it find the iss…

Thanks for expanding your comment. But to what you explain here, I think your knowledge and comprehension has only slimmed down a notch. It seems to me that this argument equates thinking to be on the vertical vertices only, but may I say there is a horizontal/broad aspect to it? e.g. You lose grip on what is a good combination of framework/language/standards, you remove the abstraction of multiple layers of external and internal APIs, you leave to study the right software pattern for the job, having the AI comprehend the large chunks for you (thats all loss on thinking). You've lost simple querying and digging through codebase. Gosh, lets even say you lost a bit of git command knowledge. You catch my drift here? I am completely for using AI as a tool to do a lot of the boilerplate work with the right directions. Though remembering some changes in codebase before and letting LLMs do the work, is not the same to me as fully owning up to your system as you know, you actually know. Old man shouting at screen so, to each their own of course! Cheers
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