Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

They lied to you. Building software is hard

blog.nordcraft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–119 of 119 posts

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#111

Post by bdangubic »

AuthAuth wrote: post #91
bdangubic wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds of talking to my nephew at Thanksgiving years ago. He was studying for an exam after the holidays and I was looking at his screen open to a Google Doc which looked like his study notes except - they were being edited as I was watching - by someone else. I asked about it and he goes “we have a single Google Doc where all students collaborate on the study notes.” My mind was blown, I was also using Google…

All students collaborating on notes kind of defeats the point no? As I see it study notes are reminders to link you back to when you were reviewing the material. If you never wrote the notes you wont get that connection back to the material.

The shared study notes represent shared understanding of the topics at hand. Different people grasp concepts in different way and seeing how other people think/understand/deduce/... (at least for me) makes a world of difference.

Like seeing a PR and going "holy s**, would never have dreamed of doing it that way" - I have learned A LOT in a looooong SWE career from that...

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#112

Post by whattheheckheck »

bdangubic wrote: post #89
gdubs wrote: post #48

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and it goes: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” There's such a wide divergence of experience with these tools. Often times people will say that anyone finding incredible value in them must not be very good. Or that they fall down when you get deep enough into a project. I think the reality is th…

This reminds of talking to my nephew at Thanksgiving years ago. He was studying for an exam after the holidays and I was looking at his screen open to a Google Doc which looked like his study notes except - they were being edited as I was watching - by someone else. I asked about it and he goes “we have a single Google Doc where all students collaborate on the study notes.” My mind was blown, I was also using Google…

Collective cognition is effectively what all knowledge work is. The programmers are the dunces that can't keep it all in their heads and need explicit type systems and databases to manage state unlike the genius business analysts and SMEs

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#113

Post by bravetraveler »

gdubs wrote: post #98
bsoles wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the last 25 years of building commercial software, but being a programming enthusiast since I was 15 years old, I came to the conclusion that self-improvement (in the sense of gaining real expertise in a field, building a philosophy of things, and doing the right things) is in direct opposition to creating "value" in the corporate/commercial sense of today. Using AI/LLMs, you perhaps will create more commercial…

Why are you so certain that LLMs/AI can't be used as a tool to learn and grow? Like Herbie Hancock once said, a computer is a tool, like an axe. It can be used for terrible things, or it can be used to build a house for your neighbor. It's up to people how we choose to use these tools.

Just putting it out there, not really interested in exercising the metaphor. I tend to be able to own my tools, these are closer to services.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#114

Post by AndreasMoeller »

adam_arthur wrote: post #51

LLMs have clearly accelerated development for the most skilled developers. Particularly when the human acts as the router/architect. However, I've found Claude Code and Co only really work well for bootstrapping projects. If you largely accept their edits unchanged, your codebase will accrue massive technical debt over time and ultimately slow you down vs semi-automatic LLM use. It will probably change once the appro…

The most interesting thing for me is that I am sure it does.

I have been coding for 20+ years and I have used AI agents for coding a lot, especially for the last month and a half. I can't say for sure they make me faster.They definitely do for some tasks, but over all? I can solve some tasks really quickly, but at the same time my understanding of the code is not as good as it was before. I am much less confident that is is correct.

LLMs clearly make junior and mid level engineers faster, but it is much harder to say for Senior.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#115

Post by AndreasMoeller »

gdubs wrote: post #48

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and it goes: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” There's such a wide divergence of experience with these tools. Often times people will say that anyone finding incredible value in them must not be very good. Or that they fall down when you get deep enough into a project. I think the reality is th…

At the same time I see experience engineers pretend that everything they have learned about software development is no longer true.

3 years ago the idea of measuring productivity in lines of code would have been ridiculous. After AI, it is the norm.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#116

Post by pixl97 »

bsoles wrote: post #105
gdubs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so certain that LLMs/AI can't be used as a tool to learn and grow? Like Herbie Hancock once said, a computer is a tool, like an axe. It can be used for terrible things, or it can be used to build a house for your neighbor. It's up to people how we choose to use these tools.

> Why are you so certain that LLMs/AI can't be used as a tool to learn and grow? Because every other post in here, for example, starts with "I vibe coded..." and not with "I learned something new today on ChatGPT".

Maybe people that learn stuff from AI aren't the type to enthusiastically make posts about it?

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#117

Post by pixl97 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #70
gdubs wrote: post #48

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and it goes: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” There's such a wide divergence of experience with these tools. Often times people will say that anyone finding incredible value in them must not be very good. Or that they fall down when you get deep enough into a project. I think the reality is th…

... and the biggest problem is that the people who _do_ know how hard it is to build software are the ones whose input on the matter is most likely to be discounted as "sour grapes"/"fear of obsolescence".

Then become a consultant that fixes broken AI generated apps for outrageous fees.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#118

Post by AuthAuth »

bdangubic wrote: post #111
AuthAuth wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All students collaborating on notes kind of defeats the point no? As I see it study notes are reminders to link you back to when you were reviewing the material. If you never wrote the notes you wont get that connection back to the material.

The shared study notes represent shared understanding of the topics at hand. Different people grasp concepts in different way and seeing how other people think/understand/deduce/... (at least for me) makes a world of difference. Like seeing a PR and going "holy s**, would never have dreamed of doing it that way" - I have learned A LOT in a looooong SWE career from that...

I agree that collectively they understand but they dont sit the exam collectively. If it works, it works I guess.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#119

Post by anonymous344 »

Jensson wrote: post #44
anonymous344 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not the making part, it's the making a competitive end-result. in 2000 only needed to make something and it was good enough. now you need marketing budget of 10 000$ and skills for that also

> in 2000 only needed to make something and it was good enough. now you need marketing budget of 10 000$ and skills for that also You needed much more marketing budget in 2000 than today, I think you have that reversed. There is a reason indie basically wasn't a thing until steam could do marketing for you.

just made some app in the nokia store or something and it sold globally without marketing made a website / webshop with valid html and people found it and became customers

now you can't even post in any social media without paying, they won't show your posts almost to no-one, even if you have the followers. not to mention apple store and google play, every category and nice already has 20 000 apps and games in them.

Post reply on HN