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Some things just take time

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: Some things just take time

#101

Post by bytefish »

As for the tree analogy and open source.

Yes, you cannot build years of community and trust in a weekend. But sometimes it's totally sufficient to plant a seed, give it some small amounts of water and leave it on its own to grow. Go ask my father having to deal with a huge maple tree, that I’ve planted 30 years ago and never cared for it.

Open Source projects sometimes work like this. I've created a .NET library for Firebase Messaging in a weekend a few years ago… and it grew on its own with PRs flowing in. So if your weekend project generates enough interest and continues to grow a community without you, what’s the bad thing here? I don’t get it.

Sometimes a tree dies and an Open Source project wasn’t able to make it.

That said, I’ve just finished rewriting four libraries to fix long standing issues, that I haven’t been able to fix for the past 10 years.

It's been great to use Gemini as a sparring partner to fix the API surface of these libraries, that had been problematic for the past 10 years. I was so quick to validate and invalidate ideas.

Once being one of the biggest LLM haters I have to say, that I immensely enjoy it right now.

Re: Some things just take time

#102

Post by nabbed »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #60

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of bot…

>Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction.

I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate more quickly.

Re: Some things just take time

#103

Post by imilev »

Awesome article, I feel a lot of people have also forgotten that good projects take iteration not 100 new features. To get few features to an excelent state it requires multilpe iterations at multiple stages. 1) The developer who does a task validates that their thinking was the correct one, they see how they changes impact the system, is it scalable? Does it need to be scalable? While you are working and thinking on it you get more and more context which simply wasn't there at the begining. 2) A feature done once (even after my perfect ClaudeCode plan) is not done forever, people will want to make it better/faster/smoother/etc. But instead of taking the time to analyze and perfect it we go onto the next feature, and if we have to iterate on the current one, we don't iterate we redo...

Really like the article I think it is awesome, and I strongly believe AI for coding will stay, but I also beleive that we need to still have a strong understanding of why we are building things and what they look like.

Re: Some things just take time

#104

Post by [deleted] »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #60

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of bot…

[deleted]

Re: Some things just take time

#105

Post by scuff3d »

We're gonna have to learn some lessons from other engineering fields in this regard. Electrical, civil, mechanical, aerospace... They've all had to put processes in place to intentionally slow things down for a long time. I could throw a circuit board layout together 1000x faster then a team of engineers could have 50 years ago, but that industry has developed a culture of rigorous review processes to ensure quality, which means I couldn't actually move nearly as fast as possible.

Undoubtedly a lot of that comes down to production cost and safety. A plane is far more likely to kill people and it costs a shitload more to produce then an app (though plenty of software is mission critical). But now in software we can move quick enough up front that if we don't start applying some discipline it's going to bite us in the ass in the long run.

Re: Some things just take time

#106

Post by keiferski »

One of my favorite ideas from Nietzsche [1] is that civilizations take millennia to “digest” or integrate concepts. It seems a little obvious, maybe, until you look at the modern world and realize the baseline assumption is something like, “every problem is just a question of resources.”

An example being the common attitude that [advanced tech] is just a math problem to be solved, and not a process that needs to play itself out in the real world, interacting with it and learning, then integrating those lessons over time.

Another way to put this is: experience is undervalued, and knowledge is overvalued. Probably because experience isn’t fungible and therefore cannot be quantified as easily by market systems.

1. Probably not his original idea, and now that I think about it this is kind of more Hegelian. I’m not familiar enough with Hegel to reference him though.

Re: Some things just take time

#107

Post by roughly »

nabbed wrote: post #102
Chris_Newton wrote: post #60

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of bot…

>Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate more quickly.

It's still faster and cheaper to just build the right thing to begin with. As the old saying goes, spend your time sharpening your ax.

Re: Some things just take time

#108

Post by Ezra »

gopalv wrote: post #100
Chris_Newton wrote: post #60

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of bot…

> Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. This is a real problem when the "direction" == "good feedback" from a customer standpoint. Before we had a product person for every ~20 people generating code and now we're all product people, the machines are writing the code (not all of it, but enough of it that I will -1 a ~4000 line PR and ask someone to start…

This is the article you referred to:

https://newsletter.posthog.com/p/the-hidden-danger-of-shippi...

Re: Some things just take time

#109

Post by ivanjermakov »

We value human ingenuity and effort. If there was a button "create an Oscar-worty movie" anyone could press it would make a paradox. The trick is that this won't render film industry useless, since we watch movies only when we believe they're worth our time, which is not true for zero-effort content.
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