Guy complains about self vibe coding.. stop doing it then!! Do you really think it's practical? Your job must be really easy if it is.
I miss thinking hard
141–150 of 764 posts
Re: I miss thinking hard
#142As someone who's been coding for several decades now (i.e. I'm old), I find the current generation of AI tools very ... freeing.
As an industry, we've been preaching the benefits of running lots of small experiments to see what works vs what doesn't, try out different approaches to implementing features, and so on. Pre-AI, lots of these ideas never got implemented because they'd take too much time for no definitive benefit.
You might spend hours thinking up cool/interesting ideas, but not have the time available to try them out.
Now, I can quickly kick off a coding agent to try out any hare-brained ideas I might come up with. The cost of doing so is very low (in terms of time and $$$), so I get to try out far more and weirder approaches than before when the costs were higher. If those ideas don't play out, fine, but I have a good enough success rate with left-field ideas to make it far more justifiable than before.
Also, it makes playing around with one-person projects a lot practical. Like most people with partner & kids, my down time is pretty precious, and tends to come in small chunks that are largely unplannable. For example, last night I spent 10 minutes waiting in a drive-through queue - that gave me about 8 minutes to kick off the next chunk of my one-person project development via my phone, review the results, then kick off the next chunk of development. Absolutely useful to me personally, whereas last year I would've simply sat there annoyed waiting to be serviced.
I know some people have an "outsourcing Lego" type mentality when it comes to AI coding - it's like buying a cool Lego kit, then watching someone else assemble it for you, removing 99% of the enjoyment in the process. I get that, but I prefer to think of it in terms of being able to achieve orders of magnitude more in the time I have available, at close to zero extra cost.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference. You wouldn't have known that, going by all the bellyaching and whining from the artists of the day. Guess what, they got over it. You will too.
>> Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference. > You wouldn't have known that, going by all the bellyaching and whining from the artists of the day. > Guess what, they got over it. You conveniently omitted my next sentence, which contradicts your position and reads thusly: Instead, they serve only to be an additional medium for the same concerns quoted ... > You will too. This statement is as…
Username checks out, at least.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You just described the burden of outsourcing programming.
100%! There is significant analogy between the two!
Re: I miss thinking hard
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said when cameras first hit the scene. This is a non sequitur. Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference. Instead, they serve only to be an additional medium for the same concerns quoted: The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not a…
Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference. You wouldn't have known that, going by all the bellyaching and whining from the artists of the day. Guess what, they got over it. You will too.
What stole the joy you must have felt, fleetingly, as a child that beheld the world with fresh eyes, full of wonder?
Did you imagine yourself then, as your are now, hunched over a glowing rectangle. Demanding imperiously that the world share your contempt for the sublime. Share your jaundiced view of those that pour the whole of themselves into the act of creation, so that everyone might once again be graced with wonder anew.
I hope you can find a work of art that breaks you free of your resentment.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#146When people missed working hard, they turned to fake physical work (gyms). So people now need some fake thinking work.
Except for eating and sleeping, all other human activities are fake now.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet another example of "comments that are only sort of true because high temperature sampling isn't allowed". If you use LLMs at very high temperature with samplers which correctly keep your writing coherent (i.e. Min_p, or better like top-h, P-less decoding, etc), than "regression to the mean" literally DOES NOT HAPPEN!!!!
How do you configure LLM température in coding agents, e.g. opencode?
https://opencode.ai/docs/agents/#temperature
set it in your opencode.json
Re: I miss thinking hard
#148This 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…
I dunno, when you've made about 10,000 clay pots its kinda nice to skip to the end result, you're probably not going to learn a ton with clay pot #10,001. You can probably come up with some pretty interesting ideas for what you want the end result to look like from the onset. I find myself being able to reach for the things that my normal pragmatist code monkey self would consider out of scope - these are often not u…
import claypot
trillion dollar industry boys
Re: I miss thinking hard
#149I 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 the more apt analog isn't a faster car, a la Ferrari, it's more akin to someone who likes to drive and now has to sit and monitor the self-driving car steer and navigate. Comparing to the Ferrari is incorrect since it still takes a similar level of agency from the driver versus a
Re: I miss thinking hard
#150What OP wants to say is that they miss the process of thinking hard for days and weeks and one day this brilliant idea popping up on their bed before sleep. I lost my "thinking hard" process again too today at work against my pragmatism, or more precisely my job.