Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I’m spending months coding the old way

miguelconner.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 387 posts

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#61

Post by brianjlogan »

I started using Zed as a half measure. I think I'll start using AI for planning and suggested implementation steps.

I am seeing non technical people getting involved building apps with Claude. After the Openclaw and other Agentic obsession trends I just don't see it pragmatic to continue down the road of AI obsession.

In most other aspects of life my skills were valuated because of my ability to care about details under the hood and the ability to get my hands dirty on new problems.

Curious to see how the market adapts and how people find ways to communicate this ability for nuance.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#63

Post by einpoklum »

lrvick wrote: post #17

I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way. What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and jus…

> LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing

If that's true, then you likely used to produce slop for code. :-(

> I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out.

You wrote so much code as to wear out your carpal tunner? Are you sure it isn't the documentation and the online chatter with your peers? :-(

... anyway, I know it's corny to say, but - you should have, and shoudl now, improve the ergonomics of your setup. Play with things like the depth of your keyboard on your desk, the height of the chair and the desk, with/without chair handrests, keyboard angle, etc.

> Job one of everyone I mentor is to build Linux from scratch

"from scratch" can mean any number of things.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#64

Post by Trasmatta »

echelon wrote: post #57
Trasmatta wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES. I don't know how many multi WEEK sessions of debugging I've been through in my career. Frustrating, but so many valuable lessons learned in the process. LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important.

> LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important The time wasted thinking our craft matters more than solving real world problems? The amount of ceremony we're giving bugs here is insane. Paraphrasing some of y'all, > "I don't have to spend a day stepping through with a debugger hoping to repro" THAT IS NOT A PROBLEM! We're turning sand into magic, making the universe come alive. It's as if we just g…

> The time wasted thinking our craft matters more than solving real world problems?

This is both a strawman and a false dichotomy.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#65

Post by jjice »

Trasmatta wrote: post #34
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #21

This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he…

YES. I don't know how many multi WEEK sessions of debugging I've been through in my career. Frustrating, but so many valuable lessons learned in the process. LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important.

But oh my god, do you remember how good it felt to finally fix it?

The euphoria I felt after fixing bugs that I stayed up late working on is like nothing else.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#66

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

Gigachad wrote: post #38
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #21

This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he…

Often when LLMs give me some command option or advice I haven’t seen before I try to independently verify it. And I’ve often been frustrated just how hard it is to find this info from the source documents. Though a lot of the time this is more an inefficiency of the documentation and Google rather than something only LLMs could do.

As the rate of 'hallucinations' seems to have dropped dramatically (at least IME as regards non-existent flags and the like), I'm more concerned with usage. I often use grep.app/GH code search to look for usage examples as a sanity check when things look "off", for exactly the reason you described--there's often a total lack of good documentation on things like that, especially on "younger" tools/stuff.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#67

Post by 8note »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #54
hallway_monitor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Junior developers have always been a lot less effective than senior developers. We will need new senior developers so we will need to train junior developers. Maybe we train them by forcing them to do things the hard way. The slow way. By hand. Because if we let them do things the fast way they are going to cause some serious damage.

Who's going to be doing that? Employers were already refusing to hire juniors, even when 0.5-1 years' salary for a junior would be cheaper than spending the same on hiring a senior. They'll never accept intentionally "slower" development for the greater good.

internships for one.

my last summer intern did everything the manual way, except for a chunk where I wanted him to get something done fast without having to learn all the underlying chunks

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#68

Post by derangedHorse »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #21

This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he…

I'm sure the author will encounter problems where the only way to solve them will be the marginal effort provided by a human. At that point he won't be just be solving problems to work his brain, but also to accomplish a goal.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#69

Post by echelon »

Trasmatta wrote: post #64
echelon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important The time wasted thinking our craft matters more than solving real world problems? The amount of ceremony we're giving bugs here is insane. Paraphrasing some of y'all, > "I don't have to spend a day stepping through with a debugger hoping to repro" THAT IS NOT A PROBLEM! We're turning sand into magic, making the universe come alive. It's as if we just g…

> The time wasted thinking our craft matters more than solving real world problems? This is both a strawman and a false dichotomy.

I mean to cause a stir! Let me invoke every logical fallacy and dirty rhetorical device I can if it draws attention.

Too many of our engineering conversations are dominated by veneration of the old. Let me be hyperbolic so that I can interrupt your train of thought and say this:

We're starting to live in the future.

Let go of your old assumptions. Maybe they still matter, but it's also likely some of them will change.

The old ways of doing things should be put under scrutiny.

In ten years we might be writing in new languages that are better suited for LLMs to manipulate. Frameworks and libraries and languages we use today might get tossed out the door.

All energy devoted to the old way of doing things is perhaps malinvested into a temporary state of affairs. Don't over-index on that.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#70

Post by badc0ffee »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #52
voidfunc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I told someone I spent a week debugging a problem these days I think I would get laughed out of the call. Even a day might hit somw chuckles. If you cant fix the bug just slop some code over it so its more hidden. This is all gonna be fascinating in 5-10 years.

This does depend on who you are; If you're a senior with 10+ years of experience, it's a failure of your abilities to cut your losses or know when to seek help if you take far too long debugging something. But for juniors, it's invaluable experience. And as a field we're already seeing problems resulting from the new generations of juniors being taught with modern web development, whose complexity is very obstructing…

There are definitely situations where you can't ask for help and you can't turn your back on the bug.

I worked on a project that depended on an open source but deprecated/unmaintained Linux kernel module that we used for customers running RHEL[1]. There were a number of serious bugs causing panics that we encountered, but only for certain customers with high VFS workloads. I spent days to a week+ on each one, reading kernel code, writing userland utilities to repro the problem, and finally committing fixes to the module. I was the only one on the team up to the task.

We couldn't tell the customers to upgrade, we couldn't write an alternative module in a reasonable timeframe, and they paid us a lot of money, so I did what I had to do.

I'm sure there are lots of other examples like this out there.

[1] Known for its use of ancient kernels with 10000 patches hand-picked by Red Hat. At least at the time (5-10 years ago).

Post reply on HN