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Some things just take time

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Re: Some things just take time

#131

Post by Jare »

mgfist wrote: post #122
roughly wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but only if you have an ax to sharpen. With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress. You can take this pretty up high too - sometimes it takes building multiple products or companies to get it right

> With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress

Way too often that is used as an excuse for various forms of laziness; to not think about the things you can already know. And that lack of thinking repeats in an endless cycle when, after your trial and error, you don't use what you learned because "let's look forward not backward", "let's fail fast and often" and similar platitudes.

Catchy slogans and heartfelt desires are great but you gotta put the brains in it too.

Re: Some things just take time

#132

Post by siddboots »

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…

I've been working on a side project for ~10 years (very intermittently) that involves a tricky combination of mathematics, classical AI algorithms, and programming language design, and I've gone though this very slow but rewarding journey to work out how all of the pieces should fit together properly.

In the last year or so I've been able to prototype it and accelerate the development quite significantly using Claude and pals, and now it is very close to a finished product. One one hand there's no doubt in my mind that the LLM tools can make this sort of thing faster and let you churn through ideas until you find the right ones, but on the other hand, if I hadn't had that slow burn of mostly just thinking about it conceptually for 10 years, I would have ended up vibe coding a much worse product.

Re: Some things just take time

#133

Post by erelong »

yes, we want to avoid counterproductive things that are done too quickly

no we don't want to miss genuine ways to speed things up to improve our productivity so we can do other or more things

Re: Some things just take time

#134

Post by wiml »

jareklupinski wrote: post #41
big-chungus4 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if you remove the fish, it will have less water than before. You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first half, you will end up with more water.

you fill the 3 liter bottle up to the top, and pour the contents into the 5 liter bottle then you fill 3 liter bottle again, and pour the contents into the 5 liter bottle until the 5 liter one is full empty the 5 liter bottle, and pour the 1 liter in the 3 liter bottle into the 5 liter bottle fill the 3 liter bottle again and pour that into the 1 liter already in the 5 liter bottle to get 4 liters of water

Then you bring the fox back, take the hen across the river, ...

Re: Some things just take time

#136

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I find myself sympathetic to the author's PoV, but I am incorporating LLMs into my workflow, with a resultant jaw-dropping (to me) increase in velocity.

But I am not just dispatching to agents. I work interactively with a chat interface, and sometimes, I will just bin a whole hour's worth of back-and-forth, because we're not getting anywhere (in fact, I did exactly that, about 30 minutes ago).

But that hour is peanuts, compared to the ten hours that I would have spent, trying to figure it out on my own. With an LLM (and git), I can "run something up the flagpole, and see who salutes." I can afford to experiment with very large code bases, and toss out a whole bunch of stuff, if need be.

That said, I know damn well, that quite a few folks here, would sneer at my methodology, as "awkward, stodgy, and slow." Nevertheless, I am pretty chuffed with the results. Yeah, it's slower than some folks would do it, but the Quality is really high, and I'm happy with the results.

My favorite thing to do, is (for example) toss all 5 of my SDK files into the LLM, paste in the JSON server interaction, describe the bug, and ask it to help me figure it out.

Nine times out of ten, it finds the bug quickly. The real bug. I am not always happy with the proposed solutions, but finding the root cause is always the time-consuming part.

Re: Some things just take time

#137

Post by TheJord »

siddboots wrote: post #132
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…

I've been working on a side project for ~10 years (very intermittently) that involves a tricky combination of mathematics, classical AI algorithms, and programming language design, and I've gone though this very slow but rewarding journey to work out how all of the pieces should fit together properly. In the last year or so I've been able to prototype it and accelerate the development quite significantly using Claude…

10 years of thinking before shipping is actually the move. The AI just becomes a power tool — useless if you don't know what you're building, unstoppable if you do

Re: Some things just take time

#138

Post by daveguy »

fluidcruft wrote: post #130
daveguy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If most people are thinking "whoopdedoo... you clearly have more money than sense" when they see your status symbol, is it still a status symbol?

Status symbols signal different status in different contexts. Some contexts (mostly lower middle class and below) are impressed by Rolex watches because they are expensive and the struggle for money forms a collective experience. The old rich doesn't give a shit about Rolex watches beyond noticing the newb rich using them to tell on themselves.

And some people just don't give a shit about a fancy watch no matter how much money they have or don't have.

Re: Some things just take time

#139

Post by jstummbillig »

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…

Ah, metaphors. Abstract concepts are not moving objects. You don't actually need to "turn it around" or "sail past it". You can break the laws of physics (because they don't apply). You can teleport around.

Speed actually just wins, because we are usually constrained by time.

Re: Some things just take time

#140

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Some things take time

And time takes money

Enough money to pay one’s bills while one tends the growing tree

And if we have a society that ensures everyone is given the dignity of time

We also get a society that reaps what some create with that time

But if we have a society that only rewards pushing money back up the hierarchy

Then we all lose our time and our nest eggs to those who have the most.

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