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I’m spending months coding the old way

miguelconner.substack.com

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Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#81

Post by JuniperMesos »

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…

Why shouldn't someone consult some kind of external resource for help, after struggling with a specific coding problem for 20 minutes? Why is 6 hours the right amount of time to timebox this to?

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#82

Post by derangedHorse »

> We don’t have teachers or a curriculum, and there’s very little required structure beyond making a full-time commitment during your retreat

I saw this quote when looking at the Recurse Center website. How does one usually go about something like this if they work full time? Does this mainly target those who are just entering the industry or between jobs?

I know the article is mostly about what the author built at the coding retreat, but now he has me interested in trying to attend one!

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#83

Post by thesz »

slopinthebag wrote: post #55
thesz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I remember, typical new C++ debugged code speed is about 20-25K lines per year, lines that are non-blank, non-comment and not completely verifiable by compiler. E.g., standalone bracket or comma or semicolon are not lines of code, function header is too not a line of code, but computation, conditions and loops are. This is from old IBM statistics, I learned about it circa 2007. If we assume that there are 5…

LOL. If you look at their comment history, they sure are typing a lot of characters for their wrists.

Yes, I checked their history of comments before posting. It made me confident that I hit the right note.

My software engineering experience longs almost 37 years now (December will be anniversary), six-to-seven years more than Earth's human population median age. I had two burnouts through that time, but no carpal tunnel syndrome symptoms at all. When I code, I prefer to factor subproblems out, it reduces typing and support costs.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#84

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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…

Why? I’m as old timer as old timer can get - started programming as a hobby in 1986 in assembly on an Apple //e in 65C02 assembly language.

But just today a bug was reported by a customer (we are still in testing not a production bug). I implemented this project myself from an empty git repo and an empty AWS account including 3 weeks of pre implementation discovery.

I reproduced the issue and through the problem at Claude with nothing but two pieces of information - the ID of the event showing the bug and the description.

It worked backwards looking at the event stream in the database, looking at the code that stored the event stream, looking at the code that generated the event stream (separate Lambda), looking at the actual config table and found the root cause in 3 minutes.

After looking at the code locally, it even looked at the cached artifacts of my build and verified that what was deployed was the same thing that I had locally (same lambda deployment version in AWS as my artifacts). I had it document the debug steps it took in an md file.

Why make life harder on myself? Even if it were something I was doing as a hobby, I have a wife who I want to spend time with, I’m a gym rat and I’m learning Spanish. Why would I waste 6 hours doing something that a computer could do for me in 5 minutes?

Assuming he has a day job and gets off at 6, he would be spending all of his off time chasing down a bug that he could be using doing something else.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#85

Post by birdfood »

Getting to spend 3 months on a self learning journey sounds wonderful. My hunch is that these deep skills will be valuable long term and that this new abstraction is not the same as moving from assembly to c, but I am not completely sure. Lately most of my code has been llm generated and I can’t say I feel any sense of enjoyment, accomplishment, or satisfaction at the end of a work day. But I’ve also come to realise I really only enjoy 5-10% of the coding anyway and the rest is all the tedious semi-mechanical changes that support that small interesting core. On the scale of human history working with computers is a blip in time and I wonder how the period of hand writing code will be viewed in a hundred years, perhaps as a footnote or simply bundled as ‘everything before machines were self automating’.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#86

Post by apricot »

I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment.

Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one.

We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I taught them about assembly language and told them about the registers, instructions, and addressing modes of the chip, memory map and monitor routines of the Apple, and after that we went and wrote a few programs together, mostly using the low-resolution graphics mode (40x40): a drawing program, a bouncing ball, culminating in hand-rolled sprites with simple collision detection.

Their assignment is to write a simple program (I suggested a low-res game like Snake or Tetris but they can do whatever they want provided they tell me about it and I okay it), demo their program, and then explain to the class how it works.

At first they hated the line editor. But then a very interesting thing happened. They started thinking about their code before writing it. Planning. Discussing things in advance. Everything we told them they should do before coding in previous classes, but they didn't do because a powerful editor was right there so why not use it?...

And then they started to get used to the line editor. They told me they didn't need to really see the code on the screen, it was in their head.

They will of course go back to modern tools after class is finished, but I think it's good for them to have this kind of experience.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#87

Post by th0ma5 »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #81
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…

Why shouldn't someone consult some kind of external resource for help, after struggling with a specific coding problem for 20 minutes? Why is 6 hours the right amount of time to timebox this to?

[dead]

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#88

Post by jacobsenscott »

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.

> They'll never accept intentionally "slower" development for the greater good.

That comes post Chernobyl.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#89

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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.

And if I were your boss you would immediately be fired if you spent weeks trying to debug an issue a junior developer solved just by launching Claude and telling it the symptoms of the issue because you refused to use an LLM.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#90

Post by thrance »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #81
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…

Why shouldn't someone consult some kind of external resource for help, after struggling with a specific coding problem for 20 minutes? Why is 6 hours the right amount of time to timebox this to?

The struggle is the point, that's how you learn. If you offload your task to someone/something else after barely 20 minutes of head scratching, you've missed the plot entirely.
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