I miss thinking hard
jernesto.com
I miss thinking hard
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Re: I miss thinking hard
#2The problem with the "70% solution" is that it creates a massive amount of hidden technical debt. You aren't thinking hard because you aren't forced to understand the edge cases or the real origin of the problem. It used to be the case that you will need plan 10 steps ahead because refactoring was expensive, now people just focus in the next problem ahead, but the compounding AI slop will blow up eventually.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#3I generally feel the same. But in addition, I also enjoy the pure act of coding. At least for me that’s another big part why I feel left behind with all this Agent stuff.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#4The problem with the "70% solution" is that it creates a massive amount of hidden technical debt. You aren't thinking hard because you aren't forced to understand the edge cases or the real origin of the problem. It used to be the case that you will need plan 10 steps ahead because refactoring was expensive, now people just focus in the next problem ahead, but the compounding AI slop will blow up eventually.
would you agree that there's more time to think about what problems are worth solving?
Re: I miss thinking hard
#5I've found that it's often useful to spend the time thinking about the way I would architect the code (down to a fair level of minutia) before letting the agent have a go.
That way my 'thinker' is satiated and also challenged - Did the solution that my thinker came up with solve the problem better than the plan that the agent wrote?
Then either I acknowledge that the agent's solution was better, giving my thinker something to chew on for the next time; or my solution is better which gives the thinker a dopamine hit and gives me better code.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#6I generally feel the same. But in addition, I also enjoy the pure act of coding. At least for me that’s another big part why I feel left behind with all this Agent stuff.
I agree, that's another factor. Definitely the mechanical act of coding specially if your are good at it gives the type of joy that I can imagine an artisan or craftsman having when doing his work.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#7Dude, I know you touched on this but seriously. Just don't use AI then. It's not hard, it's your choice to use it or not. It's not even making you faster, so the pragmatism argument doesn't really work well! This is a totally self inflicted problem that you can undo any time you want.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#8I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#9I think AI didn't do this. Open source, libraries, cloud, frameworks and agile conspired to do this.
Why solve a problem when you can import library / scale up / use managed kuberneted / etc.
The menu is great and the number of problems needing deep thought seems rare.
There might be deep thought problems on the requirements side of things but less often on the technical side.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#10I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.
I echo this sentiment. Even though I'm having Claude Code write 100% of the code for a personal project as an experiment, the need for thinking hard is very present.
In fact, since I don't need to do low-thinking tasks like writing boilerplate or repetitive tests, I find my thinking ratio is actually higher than when I write code normally.