"Before you read this post, ask yourself a question: When was the last time you truly thought hard?
...
a) All the time. b) Never. c) Somewhere in between."
What?
I miss thinking hard
111–120 of 764 posts
Re: I miss thinking hard
#112This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080 "Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about wha…
And when programming with agentic tools, you need to actively push for the idea to not regress to the most obvious/average version. The amount of effort you need to expend on pushing the idea that deviates from the 'norm' (because it's novel), is actually comparable to the effort it takes to type something out by hand. Just two completely different types of effort. There's an upside to this sort of effort too, though…
> need to make it crystal clear
That's not an upside in that it's unique to LLM vs human written code. When writing it yourself, you also need to make it crystal clear. You do that in the language of implementation.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#113This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080 "Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about wha…
And when programming with agentic tools, you need to actively push for the idea to not regress to the most obvious/average version. The amount of effort you need to expend on pushing the idea that deviates from the 'norm' (because it's novel), is actually comparable to the effort it takes to type something out by hand. Just two completely different types of effort. There's an upside to this sort of effort too, though…
I can't help but imagine training horses vs training cats. One of them is rewarding, a pleasure, beautiful to see, the other is frustrating, leaves you with a lot of scratches and ultimately both of you "agreeing" on a marginal compromise.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#114I don't get it. I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review. If anything, all we've changed is working at a higher level. The product is the same. But these people just keep mixing things up like "wow I got a ferrari now, watch it fly off the road!" Yeah so you got a tools upgrade; it's faster, it's more powerful. Keep it on the road or give up driving! We went from auto completing keywords, t…
I think I understand what the author is trying to say. We miss thinking "hard" about the small details. Maybe "hard" isn't the right adjective, but we all know the process of coding isn't just typing stuff while the mind wanders. We keep thinking about the code we're typing and the interactions between the new code and the existing stuff, and keep thinking about potential bugs and issues. (This may or may not be "har…
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Re: I miss thinking hard
#115I don't get it. I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review. If anything, all we've changed is working at a higher level. The product is the same. But these people just keep mixing things up like "wow I got a ferrari now, watch it fly off the road!" Yeah so you got a tools upgrade; it's faster, it's more powerful. Keep it on the road or give up driving! We went from auto completing keywords, t…
> You just fat-finger less typos today than ever before.
My typos are largely admissible.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#116[dead]
Re: I miss thinking hard
#117Dude, 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.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have their company measuring their AI usage and regularly laying people off.
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Re: I miss thinking hard
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like I said that's temporary. It's janky and wonky but it's a stepping stone. Just look at image generation. Actually factually look at it. We went from horror colours vomit with eyes all over, to 6 fingers humans, to pretty darn good now. It's only time.
Why is image generation the same as code generation?
it's not. We were able to get rid of 6 fingered hands by getting very specific, and fine tuning models with lots of hand and finger training data.
But that approach doesn't work with code, or with reasoning in general, because you would need to exponentially fine tune everything in the universe. The illusion that the AI "understands" what it is doing is lost.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#119I don't get it. I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review. If anything, all we've changed is working at a higher level. The product is the same. But these people just keep mixing things up like "wow I got a ferrari now, watch it fly off the road!" Yeah so you got a tools upgrade; it's faster, it's more powerful. Keep it on the road or give up driving! We went from auto completing keywords, t…
I think I understand what the author is trying to say. We miss thinking "hard" about the small details. Maybe "hard" isn't the right adjective, but we all know the process of coding isn't just typing stuff while the mind wanders. We keep thinking about the code we're typing and the interactions between the new code and the existing stuff, and keep thinking about potential bugs and issues. (This may or may not be "har…
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Re: I miss thinking hard
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said when cameras first hit the scene.
Source?
Art history. It's how we ended up with Impressionism, for instance.
People felt (wrongly) that traditional representational forms like portraiture were threatened by photography. Happily, instead of killing any existing genres, we got some interesting new ones.