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I miss thinking hard
11–20 of 764 posts
Re: I miss thinking hard
#12I'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 som…
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Re: I miss thinking hard
#13I feel like AI has given me the opportunity to think MORE, not less. I’m doing so much less mindless work, spending most of my efforts critically analyzing the code and making larger scale architectural decisions.
The author says “ Even though the AI almost certainly won't come up with a 100% satisfying solution, the 70% solution it achieves usually hits the “good enough” mark.”
The key is to keep pushing until it gets to the 100% mark. That last 30% takes multiples longer than the first 70%, but that is where the satisfaction lies for me.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#14I'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.
Yes, if anything I think harder because I know it's on the frontier of whatever I'm building (so i'm more motivated and there's much more ROI)
Re: I miss thinking hard
#15I feel that AI doesn't necessarily replace my thinking, but actually helps to explore deeper - on my behalf - alternative considerations in the approach to solving a problem, which in turn better informs my thinking.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#16With AI, I now think much harder. Timelines are shorter, big decisions are closer together, and more system interactions have to be "grokked" in my head to guide the model properly.
I'm more spent than before where I would spend 2 hours wrestling with tailwind classes, or testing API endpoints manually by typing json shapes myself.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#17I miss the thrill of running through the semi-parched grasslands and the heady mix of terror triumph and trepidation as we close in on our meal for the week.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#18I feel like I'm doing much nicer thinking now, I'm doing more systems thinking, not only that I'm iterating on system design a lot more because it is a lot easier to change with AI
Re: I miss thinking hard
#19I haven't reduced my thinking! Today I asked AI to debug an issue. It came with a solution that it was clearly correct, but it didn't explain why the code was in that state. I kept steering AI (which just wanted to fix) toward figuring out the why and it digged through git and github issue at some point,in a very cool way.
And finally it pulled out something that made sense. It was defensive programming introduced to fix an issue somewhere else, which was also in turn fixed, so useless.
At that point an idea popped in my mind and I decided to look for similar patterns in the codebase, related to the change, found 3. 1 was a non bug, two were latent bugs.
Shipped a fix plus 2 fixes for bugs yet to be discovered.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#20> At the end of the day, I am a Builder. I like building things. The faster I build, the better.
This I can’t relate to. For me it’s “the better I build, the better”. Building poor code fast isn’t good: it’s just creating debt to deal with in the future, or admitting I’ll toss out the quickly built thing since it won’t have longevity. When quality comes into play (not just “passed the tests”, but is something maintainable, extensible, etc), it’s hard to not employ the Thinker side along with the Builder. They aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
Then again, I work on things that are expected to last quite a while and aren’t disposable MVPs or side projects. I suppose if you don’t have that longevity mindset it’s easy to slip into Build-not-Think mode.