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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#91

Post by tock »

abletonlive wrote: post #75
guzfip wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Name a single time doomers were right about anything. - NFTs - Surveillance schizos - Global Pedophile Cabal schizos - Anyone who didn’t believe we were a year out from Star Trek living when LLMs first started picking up steam - People who predicted the flood of people entering Software via bootcamps, etc. would never cause any problems because their god of software is consuming the world too quickly for supply and…

- NFTS doomers? I mean I appreciate the humor here. - Surveillance schizos - Society still works - Global Pedophile Cabal schizos - Again, funny use of 'doomers' but that's what the current society seems to be run by so I wouldn't say it's fitting for doomerism. - People who predicted the flood of people entering Software via bootcamps, etc. would never cause any problems because their god of software is consuming th…

What do you think is a valid doomer warning that came true? Or do you think literally everything that is pessimistic is doomerism?

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#92

Post by skybrian »

SoftTalker wrote: post #44

> Companies claiming 100% of their product's code is now written by AI consistently put out the worst garbage you can imagine. Not pointing fingers, but memory leaks in the gigabytes, UI glitches, broken-ass features, crashes One thing about the old days of DOS and original MacOS: you couldn't get away with nearly as much of this. The whole computer would crash hard and need to be rebooted, all unsaved work lost. You…

I think you're just recalling the few software products that were actually good. There was plenty of crap software that would crash and lose your work in the old days.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#93

Post by dec0dedab0de »

badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.

It's a craft.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#94

Post by trinsic2 »

> And I would like to suggest that slowing the fuck down is the way to go. Give yourself time to think about what you're actually building and why. Give yourself an opportunity to say, fuck no, we don't need this. Set yourself limits on how much code you let the clanker generate per day, in line with your ability to actually review the code.

This is a great point.

I have been avoiding LLM's for awhile now, but realized that I might want to try working on a small PDF book to Markdown conversion project[0]. I like the Claude code because command line. I'm realizing you really need to architect with good very precise language to avoid mistakes.

I didn't try to have a prompt do everything at once. I prompted Claude Code to do the conversion process section by section of the document. That seemed to reduce the mistake the agent would make

[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-my-fir...

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#95

Post by podgietaru »

abletonlive wrote: post #65
margalabargala wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change would be a big one. Also, there have been plenty of awful things caused by technological progress. Tons of death and poverty was created by the transition to factories and mechanization 150 years ago. Did we come out the other end with higher living standards? Yes, but that doesn't make the decades of brutal transition period any less awful for those affected.

> Climate change would be a big one. That's generous. Climate scientists were right, climate doomers were definitely wrong. Society is mostly unchanged due to climate change. That's not to say climate has no effect, but it is certainly still not some doomer scenario that's played out. New York and Florida are most certainly not underwater as predicted by the famous "Inconvenient Truth". People still live in deserts j…

The effects of climate change are just starting to happen. Ecosystems are dying. Very few "climate doomers" thought the world would be like the Day after Tomorrow.

The earth is becoming more hostile to it's inhabitants. There are famines caused by climate change. We will undoubtedly within the next 20 years see mass migration from the areas hardest hit.

Climate scientists, and climate reporting, often UNDERSTATED the worst of these effects.

I think it'd be worth stating what your definition of doomerism is. For me, seeing the increases in forest fires, seeing the sky reddened and the air quality diminish and floods and hurricanes increase... I don't think being able to buy a big mac doesn't make that any less pessimistic.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#96

Post by lesam »

brightball wrote: post #51
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had jobs where my title was “software engineer”, but I never refer to myself as such outside of work. When I tell others what I do, I say I am a software developer. It may seem a pointless distinction, but to me there is a distinction. Neither myself nor the vast majority of other “software engineers” in our field are living up to what it should mean to be an “engineer”. The people that make bridges and building…

I was won over by this distinction from another senior some years ago. I think he said… “Developers build things. Engineers build them and keep them running.” I like the linguistic point from a standpoint of emphasizing a long term responsibility.

When your bridge falls down, you don't call an incident and ask your engineer to fix it, you sue them.

In software there's a lot more emphasis on post-hoc fixes rather than up front validation, in my experience.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#97

Post by dirkc »

latchkey wrote: post #22
pixl97 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a world where every line of code written by a human should be reviewed by another human. We can't even do that! Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever.

> Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever. I'm one-shotting AI code for my website without even looking at it. Straight to prod (well, github->cf worker). It is glorious.

It's tough to not interpret this as "I don't care about my website". Do you not check the copy? Or what if AI one-shots something that will harm your reputation in the metadata?

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#98

Post by layer8 »

somethingsome wrote: post #86
kemiller2002 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe back in the beginning, but I don't think it's an engineering discipline now. I don't think that's bad though. I always thought we tagged on the word "engineer" so that we could make more money. I'm ok with not being one. The engineers I've known are very strict in their approach which is good since I don't want my deck to fall down. Most of us are too risky with our approach. We love to try new things and patte…

At the same time, if you remove 'engineer' , informatics should fall under the faculty of Science, so scientists, which are even more rigorous than engineers ;) Maybe software tinkerer?

Software craftsman seems to strike a good balance.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#99

Post by dstroot »

badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

> I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.

If I engineer a bridge I know the load the bridge is designed to carry. Then I add a factor of safety. When I build a website can anyone on the product side actually predict traffic?

When building a bridge I can consult a book of materials and understand how much a material deforms under load, what is breaking point is, it’s expected lifespan, etc. Does this exist for servers, web frameworks, network load balancers, etc.?

I actually believe that software “could” be an engineering discipline but we have a long way to go

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#100

Post by skybrian »

vardalab wrote: post #46
jaffee wrote: post #16

> You installed Beads, completely oblivious to the fact that it's basically uninstallable malware. Did I miss something? I haven't used it in a minute, but why is the author claiming that it's "uninstallable malware"?

It's not really malware, but it's a mess. It installed so much shit and it interfered with your git hooks and stuff. It was kind of messy. I kind of gave up on it. I just went back to using built-in claude code todowrite tasks.

Haven't tried it, but this rewrite might be better?

https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_rust

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