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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

#91

Post by grebc »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #84
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 C…

It’s always the journey that matters.

If you’re experienced as you are, you’re not learning the same way a junior assigned this might learn from it.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#92

Post by demorro »

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?

20 minutes is not enough time to drive you into a state of desperation, where you may be forced to try something novel which will expand your mind and future capabilities in unknown and unexpected ways. You might be driven to contact another human being, for example.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#93

Post by LeCompteSftware »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #84
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 C…

Did you miss this part?

   But he was doing this for education, not for work.
That's why he should spend 6 hours on it, and not give up and run to the gym. That's like saying "I shouldn't spend an hour at the gym this week, lifting weights is hard and I want to watch TV. I'll just get my forklift to lift the weights for me!"

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#94

Post by tayo42 »

phoronixrly wrote: post #16
sho_hn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember the old days of our youth, i.e. last week Monday, when we still wrote code by hand ?

I can't tell if OP is satire... I've just seen so many unhiged takes that this article reads completely in line with the discourse...

Taking 3 months off from work to do program some basic stuff is already kind of disconnected from reality.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#95

Post by abcde666777 »

Personally I haven't stopped doing things the old way. I haven't had any issues using LLMs as rubber ducks or brain storming assistants - they can be particularly useful for identifying algorithms which might solve a given problem you're unfamiliar with. Basically a variant on google searching.

But when it comes to the final act I find myself unwilling to let an LLM write the actual code - I still do it myself.

Perhaps because my main project at the moment is a game I've been working on for four years, so the codebase is sizable, non-trivial, and all written by me. My strong sense even since coding LLMs showed up has been that continuing to write the code is important for keeping it coherent and manageable as a whole, including my mental model of it.

And also: for keeping myself happy working on it. The enjoyment would be gone if I leaned that far into LLMs.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#96

Post by bhelkey »

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?

There wasn't always an external resource to go to for help. Especially for legacy pieces of software, it was easy to become the person with most context on the team.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#97

Post by bluefirebrand »

delbronski wrote: post #46

So we’ve already grown nostalgic for the old days… skimming through an alien looking codebase, scratching your head trying to figure what crazy abstraction the last person who touched this code had in mind. Oh shit it was me? That made so much more sense back then… but it’s been 6 hours and I can’t figure out why this does not work anymore. So you read some docs but they are poorly written. So you find something on G…

Yeah, why spend time puzzling over old, proven code that you wrote. Instead spend your time puzzling over new, unproven code that an LLM generated

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#98

Post by chasd00 »

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.

Geez you guys need to spend some time in orgs where your paycheck is depends on getting the bugs fixed and deployed. If your direct deposit happens whether you deliver or not then you’re missing the most valuable career lesson of all.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#99

Post by jazz9k »

rafaelmn wrote: post #23
sho_hn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers? Serious question.

Even by pessimistic progress projections AI will be better than most at coding before this is a long term issue. And the output multiplier I'm seeing I suspect the number of SWEs needed to achieve the same task is going to start shrinking fast. I don't think SWE is a promising career to get started in today.

Perhaps at some point, but tokens are expensive and the major providers are burning through cash.

I suppose it's like bandwidth cost in the 90s. At some point, it becomes a commodity.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#100

Post by bluefirebrand »

adamddev1 wrote: post #27
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…

> It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work. It's not though. It's fundamentally different because TurboTax will still work with clear deterministic algorithms. We need to see that the jump to AI is not a jump from hand written math to calculators. It's a jump from understanding how the math works to another world of depending on magic mac…

Imagine if Math calculators were just subtly wrong some percentage of the time for use cases that people use dozens or hundreds of times a day. If you could punch in the same math formula 100 times and get more than 1 answer on a calculator, most people wouldn't trust those for serious work.

They probably wouldn't think that the calculator makes them faster either

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