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The Productivity Mirage

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Re: The Productivity Mirage

#101

Post by loveparade »

embedding-shape wrote: post #77
loveparade wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It matters that you enjoy working with your tools. Even if they don't make you 10x more productive, focusing on what you're working on and enjoying the process is the most important part. Especially in the age of LLMs I think a lot of us hate the current tools that force you to context switch between N agents and terminals. Constant context switching takes the joy out of work and prevents you from getting in…

> Constant context switching takes the joy out of work and prevents you from getting into a flow state. I hope someone figures out the solution. Don't do that if it bothers you? My best experience for "agent produces good code following good design" essentially been to always work with one agent, at most two, but in the same project. And while the agent works, I continue taking my notes of what I'm doing, what's next…

> And while the agent works, I continue taking my notes of what I'm doing, what's next, what the design/architecture needs to evolve to do and so on.

That is still context switching for me. I do the same. While the agent works, which may be 10 minutes, I start planning follow up tasks, etc. But then eventually I still need to come back to the original task to review the agents work.

I don't switch across projects usually. But I can never get into a flow state like that. But I also don't want to sit there for 10 minutes doing nothing

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#102

Post by HyperL0gi »

I always admired people who spent hours configuring their local setup, but this was never me. For me I was always looking for the one script setup that would just get me 80% home and that was good enough. I’ve never had the patience to configure my vim or tmux bindings so I’d always use what out there. It’s not that I think it doesn’t matter but I could never find the motivation to spend that amount of time with it. I guess I always preferred to get from someone who already spent the time on. Open source is beautiful

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#103

Post by [deleted] »

skydhash wrote: post #55
nine_k wrote: post #44

I think it's a false dichotomy. A good craftsman cares deeply about their tools. But the tools are a means to an end, not a toy. I have a bunch of small productivity tools I made to match my workflows: tiny shell scripts and functions, custom Emacs functions and settings, small tools to control windows placement, etc. Cumulatively I spent many days building and adjusting it. But when I need to jump into a task, thing…

I truly believe a lot of people don’t really realize how good it is when you have a good environment for development work. It’s straight thinking to doing. And it’s not even about vim/tmux or emacs. You can do so with sublime or IDEA. In the pragmatic programmer book, it’s called editor fluency.

[deleted]

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#104

Post by DrewADesign »

skydhash wrote: post #55
nine_k wrote: post #44

I think it's a false dichotomy. A good craftsman cares deeply about their tools. But the tools are a means to an end, not a toy. I have a bunch of small productivity tools I made to match my workflows: tiny shell scripts and functions, custom Emacs functions and settings, small tools to control windows placement, etc. Cumulatively I spent many days building and adjusting it. But when I need to jump into a task, thing…

I truly believe a lot of people don’t really realize how good it is when you have a good environment for development work. It’s straight thinking to doing. And it’s not even about vim/tmux or emacs. You can do so with sublime or IDEA. In the pragmatic programmer book, it’s called editor fluency.

It’s a balance. It’s easy to spend more time dickering with tools than you save by having those tools. I used to have this amazing neovim setup that worked exactly like I wanted it to. Unfortunately, it was fragile, and while it was theoretically infinitely flexible, practically, it was too big of a PITA to change to be flexible on the run. Then a couple of unrelated plugin changes caused some big problems with my setup at the end of a big project and I pivoted to jetbrains stuff— specifically Rider, PyCharm, and WebStorm. There was a bit of a learning curve, but the discoverability of functionality was waaaaay better, and with a few single-click-install plugins for languages or environmental integrations, it did everything I needed it to do within 5 minutes on any machine I sat down at. I’ve moved on to other IDEs except for Rider, but I discovered that _for me_, learning how to do what I wanted to do in a well-designed batteries-included environment had a much bigger payoff than trying to manage a mini infrastructure project on my machine in parallel with whatever else I was working on.

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#105

Post by larodi »

Yokohiii wrote: post #83
larodi wrote: post #75

What incredible problem did FB/Meta solve with the Marketplace, anyone care to elaborate? What did they (this guy do) that was not there before or else hard to conceive?

It was just the heyday of facebook and groups being popular. If a company sees something is popular, they will of course add more crap to it. The hard part is that companies don't hire creative thinkers, but specialists. So you let people try stuff until you think something good happened.

Well my ask is in the context of narrative as presented by author in his blog post. This super productive guy writing code blindfolded seems to have reinvented the wheel in a very mature environment… not quite a breakthroughs business, even if we can assume certain level of engineering feat. Which is also not unheard of at time of release.

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#106

Post by earnest_baanter »

nine_k wrote: post #44

I think it's a false dichotomy. A good craftsman cares deeply about their tools. But the tools are a means to an end, not a toy. I have a bunch of small productivity tools I made to match my workflows: tiny shell scripts and functions, custom Emacs functions and settings, small tools to control windows placement, etc. Cumulatively I spent many days building and adjusting it. But when I need to jump into a task, thing…

I agree. after a certain point, let's say, post-mastery of a craft, nice tools can be a great joy to work with. But, same for less ideal stuff, some days. working with unfit toolsay even yield surprisingly desirable results for the post-master craftsman.

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#107

Post by inigyou »

earnest_baanter wrote: post #106
nine_k wrote: post #44

I think it's a false dichotomy. A good craftsman cares deeply about their tools. But the tools are a means to an end, not a toy. I have a bunch of small productivity tools I made to match my workflows: tiny shell scripts and functions, custom Emacs functions and settings, small tools to control windows placement, etc. Cumulatively I spent many days building and adjusting it. But when I need to jump into a task, thing…

I agree. after a certain point, let's say, post-mastery of a craft, nice tools can be a great joy to work with. But, same for less ideal stuff, some days. working with unfit toolsay even yield surprisingly desirable results for the post-master craftsman.

at one time I wrote Huffman compression in LambdaMOO, just because I could. This is a line editor akin to 'ed' accessed over telnet.

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#108

Post by inigyou »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #90
marcus_holmes wrote: post #28

This is so important. I've seen so many fellow technologists (and I've skated this myself) obsess about their setup to the point that they're spending more time on that than the actual thing they're building. The whole "90% of my time as a coder is spent typing, so I should optimise my ability to type fast" is so, well, wrong. 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading.

There's also the dissonance between actual productivity and perceived productivity. Being fluent in vim/emacs to navigate code may feel you're hacking the matrix etc, but that in itself does not mean you're productive. Spending a morbillion tokens on orchestrating a dozen AI agents may make you feel like God, but it doesn't mean whatever they're building actually works or solves a problem. etc

This is how I feel when I ctrl-click something to jump to definition and a vim user tells me they can easily do the same thing by navigating to it with the arrow keys and pressing some obscure combination.

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#109

Post by haritha-j »

discreteevent wrote: post #84

There's a bubble where VC backed companies are not producing anything that people are really using or paying for. So to justify their valuation they instead try to show just how productive they are. Surely if they are this busy and productive they must be worth something? (This could also explain the hype around AI which is all about "productivity/how" and nothing about "what") This article compares these kinds of co…

I wonder where the people who spend hours and hours making the perfect gaming setup isntead of gaming, or the audiophiles who spend their lives in an eternal quest to get the perfect equipemnt instead of listening to music, end up in this analogy.

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#110

Post by theshrike79 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #104
skydhash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly believe a lot of people don’t really realize how good it is when you have a good environment for development work. It’s straight thinking to doing. And it’s not even about vim/tmux or emacs. You can do so with sublime or IDEA. In the pragmatic programmer book, it’s called editor fluency.

It’s a balance. It’s easy to spend more time dickering with tools than you save by having those tools. I used to have this amazing neovim setup that worked exactly like I wanted it to. Unfortunately, it was fragile, and while it was theoretically infinitely flexible, practically , it was too big of a PITA to change to be flexible on the run. Then a couple of unrelated plugin changes caused some big problems with my s…

This is why I tend to gravitate towards either fully bespoke tools (made by me, for me, nobody else) or tools with sane defaults.

Emacs -> (n)vim -> hx for CLI editor. Helix just works out of the box pretty much, no need for a Doom Helix or Oh-my-Helix to get it comfortable to use.

In terminals I finally ended up on Ghostty, I think the only significant configuration I have is setting `macos-option-as-alt`.

As for shell, fish + starship prompt has been my choice for years now. Very little customisation needed for either.

And for all software I pick the one that stores its configuration in a sane format in a XDG compatible location so I can shove it into chezmoi easily (looking at you iTerm2).

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