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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

#211

Post by tikotus »

apricot wrote: post #86

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…

A bit tangential, but I believe dynamic vs static typing works the same. I switch quite often between them, and when ever I've had a longer break from dynamic typing, coming back to it feels quite heavy. "How did I ever do this?" It feels so heavy.

But a few hours (or days) in, I forget what the problem was. A part of my brain wakes up. I start thinking about what I'm passing around, I start recognizing the types from the context and names...

It's just a different way of thinking.

I recognized the same feeling after vibe coding for too long and taking back the steering wheel. I decided I'd never let go again.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#212

Post by s1mplicissimus »

sagacity wrote: post #179
cobbzilla wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love all of this, but at least let your students use vi, it was around back then (or close). plus they don’t have to give it up when they go back in the real world, it’s an evergreen skill!

To be fair, it's mostly an evergreen skill because people don't know how to exit.

I don't have a problem, I can quit anytime I want!

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#213

Post by imtringued »

sgarland wrote: post #140
scarface_74 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My responsibility is to make sure my code meets functional and non functional requirements. It’s to understand the *behavior*. My automated unit, integration, and load tests confirm that. Someone thought I was naive when I said my vibe coded internal web admin site met the security requirements without looking at a line of code. I knew that because the requirements were that anyone who had access to the site could do…

Did you mean to reply to someone else? This seems awfully defensive for a reply to parent’s comment.

Yeah only the first two sentences were actually relevant. The rest was a humble brag that there is no application level security, which is a really weird thing to brag about.

When I use SAML, I still have to check that the user has some sort of attribute that indicates that access was granted to the application. If this access rule is defined outside the application, then why bring up Claude? If it isn't then Claude is responsible for implementing the access rule, which means the comment is 100% wrong.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#214

Post by TeMPOraL »

sagacity wrote: post #179
cobbzilla wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love all of this, but at least let your students use vi, it was around back then (or close). plus they don’t have to give it up when they go back in the real world, it’s an evergreen skill!

To be fair, it's mostly an evergreen skill because people don't know how to exit.

Friends don't let friends use vi - they know that once you start, you'll never quit!

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#215

Post by imtringued »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #149

I wonder if we could design a programming language specifically for teaching CS, and have a way to hard-exclude it from all LLM output. Kinda like anti virus software has special strings that are not viruses but trigger detections for testing. This would probably require cooperation during model training, but now that I think of it, is there adversarial research on LLM? Can you design text data specifically to mess w…

Just make a procedurally generated programming language.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#216

Post by juliendorra »

apricot wrote: post #86

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…

This is a really close equivalent to keep learning sketch and clay modeling in design school

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#217

Post by vaginaphobic »

lionkor wrote: post #207
bdangubic wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it catches a lot of bugs maybe you’d be better of letting it write it in the first place :)

It also writes lots of bugs which it'll catch some of, in an independent review chat. This is bogus. If you think LLMs write less buggy software, you haven't worked with seriously capable engineers. And now, of course, everyone can become such an engineer if they put in the effort to learn. But why not just use the AI? Because you can still use the AI once you're seriously good.

[dead]

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#219

Post by agdexai »

bsder wrote: post #154
JuniperMesos wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

1) 20 minutes is barely enough time to get into flow. 2) There are different levels of debugging. Are your eyes going to glaze over searching volumes of logs for the needle in a haystack with awk/grep/find? Fire up the LLM immediately; don't wait at all. Do the fixes seem to just be bouncing the bugs around your codebase? There is probably a conceptual fault and you should be thinking and talking to other people rath…

Good breakdown. I'd add a layer to point 2: beyond deciding when to use the LLM, there's a separate question of which tool in the LLM ecosystem fits the task.

For haystack-style debugging (searching logs, grepping stack traces), a fast cheap model with large context (Gemini Flash, Claude Haiku) is more cost-effective than a frontier model. For the conceptual fault category you mention — where you actually need to reason about system design — that's when it might be worth paying for o3/Claude Opus class models.

The friction is that most people default to whatever chatbot they have open, rather than routing to the right tool. The agent/LLM tooling space has gotten good enough that this routing is automatable, but most devs haven't set it up yet.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#220

Post by Remdo »

sph wrote: post #200

This title is the most depressing thing I have read on this site

I thought Hacker News was a place where you could share your views and discuss them with different people, but your comment seems to show that it now became a Facebook comment section. Thank you for your eye-opening contribution.
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