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

I’m spending months coding the old way

miguelconner.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 387 posts

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#111

Post by j1elo »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #21

This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he…

I just grabbed an Android remaster of "Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars", a 90's point-and-click adventure that has been added a hints system which pops up automatically after a timeout of the player not progressing.

This can be set as far as 1h of being stuck. Can also be 5 minutes. But by default it is 30 seconds.

My inner kid was screaming "that's cheating!" :-D but on second thought it is a very cool feature for us busy adults, however it's sad the extremes that gamedevs have to go in order to appease the short-term mindless consumers of today's tik-toks.

But more seriously, where's the joy of generating long-standing memories of being stuck for a while on a puzzle that will make you remember that scene for 30 years? An iconic experience that separates this genre from just being an animated movie with more steps.

I couldn't imagine "Monkey Island II but every 30 seconds we push you forward". Gimme that monkey wrench.

TFA and this comment just made me have this thought about today's pace of consumption, work, and even gaming.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#112

Post by calvinmorrison »

alemwjsl wrote: post #33
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #21

This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he…

Yep and after 6 hours don't reach for LLM, instead: * Ask someone to come over and look * Come back the next day, work on something else * Add comment # KNOWN-ISSUE: ...., and move on and forget about it. But year spent days on a bug at work before ha ha!

so many eureka moments of mine were simply sitty on the MTA

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#113

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #69
Trasmatta wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The time wasted thinking our craft matters more than solving real world problems? This is both a strawman and a false dichotomy.

I mean to cause a stir! Let me invoke every logical fallacy and dirty rhetorical device I can if it draws attention. Too many of our engineering conversations are dominated by veneration of the old. Let me be hyperbolic so that I can interrupt your train of thought and say this: We're starting to live in the future. Let go of your old assumptions. Maybe they still matter, but it's also likely some of them will change…

[deleted]

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#114

Post by [deleted] »

derangedHorse wrote: post #82

> We don’t have teachers or a curriculum, and there’s very little required structure beyond making a full-time commitment during your retreat I saw this quote when looking at the Recurse Center website. How does one usually go about something like this if they work full time? Does this mainly target those who are just entering the industry or between jobs? I know the article is mostly about what the author built at t…

[deleted]

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#115

Post by ACS_Solver »

birdfood wrote: post #85

Getting to spend 3 months on a self learning journey sounds wonderful. My hunch is that these deep skills will be valuable long term and that this new abstraction is not the same as moving from assembly to c, but I am not completely sure. Lately most of my code has been llm generated and I can’t say I feel any sense of enjoyment, accomplishment, or satisfaction at the end of a work day. But I’ve also come to realise…

I think it's possible that the current shift will be similar to the "assembly to compiled language" shift.

Once upon a time we wrote code in assembly language. Then we moved to C or other compiled languages. Assembly programming remained a very useful but niche skill. You compile your code and trust the compiler. You can examine the compiler output and that is at times necessary, but that's not something most developers know how to do.

We may be looking at something similar. Most development work moving to the LLM abstraction level, with the skills being writing good prompts, managing the context window, agents, memories and so on. Some developers will be able to examine LLM generated code and spot problems there, but most will not have that skill.

I'm not sure how to feel about it. Since ChatGPT showed up and until a couple months ago, I was firmly skeptical of LLM programming. We had new models every few weeks and I felt like each new model is just a different twist on the same low quality slop output. But recently the models seem to have crossed some threshold where their capabilities really improved and I have now used Claude - still using it sparingly - to implement features in much less time than I'd need myself or to locate a bug based on just log output. I don't yet buy the "coding is solved" hype but we're at least looking at the biggest change to programming since the adoption of high-level programming languages.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#116

Post by ignoramous »

moregrist wrote: post #51
alemwjsl wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep and after 6 hours don't reach for LLM, instead: * Ask someone to come over and look * Come back the next day, work on something else * Add comment # KNOWN-ISSUE: ...., and move on and forget about it. But year spent days on a bug at work before ha ha!

> Come back the next day, work on something else This is a tried and true way of working on puzzles and other hard problems. I generally have 2-4 important things in flight, so I find myself doing this a lot when I get stuck.

> This is a tried and true way of working on puzzles and other hard problems ... generally have 2-4 important things in flight

Just a note that, for chronic procrastinators, having 2 to 4 important things going on is a trigger & they'd rather not complete anything.

I wonder, for such folks, if SoTA LLMs help with procrastination?

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#119

Post by sayYayToLife »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #74
dang wrote: post #118

[stub for offtopicness] (I swapped the title for the subtitle earlier because I thought it was more informative. What I missed was the flamebaity effect that "the old way" would have. Obvious in hindsight!)

> "coding the old way" You mean the way that the majority of code is still written by professionals?

[dead]
Post reply on HN