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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#161

Post by 16bitvoid »

IhateAI wrote: post #127

I refer to it as "Think for me SaaS", and it should be avoided like the plague. Literally, it will give your brain a disease we haven't even named yet. It's as if I woke up in a world where half of resturaunts worldwide started changing their name to McDonalds and gaslighting all their customers into thinking McDonalds is better than their "from scratch" menu. Just dont use these agentic tools, they legitimately are…

I'm with you. It scares me how quickly some of my peers' critical thinking and architectural understanding have noticeably atrophied over the last year and a half.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#162

Post by nunez »

I will never not be upset at my fellow engineers for selling out the ONE thing that made us valuable and respected in the marketplace and trying to destroy software engineering as a career because "Claude Code go brrrrrr" basically.

It's like we had the means for production and more or less collectively decided "You know what? Actually, the bourgeoisie can have it, sure."

Re: I miss thinking hard

#163

Post by sonofhans »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #79
gyomu wrote: post #32

This 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…

Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said when cameras first hit the scene.

Ironic. The frequency and predictability of this type of response — “This criticism of new technology is invalid because someone was wrong once in the past about unrelated technology” — means there might as well be an LLM posting these replies to every applicable article. It’s boring and no one learns anything.

It would be a lot more interesting to point out the differences and similarities yourself. But then if you wanted an interesting discussion you wouldn’t be posting trite flamebait in the first place, would you?

Re: I miss thinking hard

#164

Post by LoganDark »

Every time I try to use LLMs for coding, I completely lose touch with what it's doing, it does everything wrong and it can't seem to correct itself no matter how many times I explain. It's so frustrating just trying to get it to do the right thing.

I've resigned to mostly using it for "tip-of-my-tongue" style queries, i.e. "where do I look in the docs". Especially for Apple platforms where almost nothing is documented except for random WWDC video tutorials that lack associated text articles.

I don't trust LLMs at all. Everything they make, I end up rewriting from scratch anyway, because it's always garbage. Even when they give me ideas, they can't apply them properly. They have no standards, no principle. It's all just slop.

I hate this. I hate it because LLMs give so many others the impression of greatness, of speed, and of huge productivity gains. I must look like some grumpy hermit, stuck in their ways. But I just can't get over how LLMs all give me the major ick. Everything that comes out of them feels awful.

My standards must be unreasonably high. Extremely, unsustainably high. That must also be the reason I hardly finish any projects I've ever started, and why I can never seem to hit any deadlines at work. LLMs just can't reach my exacting, uncompromising standards. I'm surely expecting far too much of them. Far too much.

I guess I'll just keep doing it all myself. Anything else really just doesn't sit right.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#165

Post by saturatedfat »

I think for days at a time still.

I don’t think you can get the same satisfaction out of these tools if what you want to do is not novel.

If you are exploring the space of possibilities for which there are no clear solutions, then you have to think hard. Take on wildly more ambitious projects. Try to do something you don’t think you can do. And work with them to get there.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#168

Post by andyferris »

My solution has been to lean into harder problems - even as side projects, if they aren't available at work.

I too am an ex-physcist used to spending days thinking about things, but programming is a gold mine as it is adjacent to computer science. You can design a programming language (or improve an existing one), try to build a better database (or improve an existing one), or many other things that are quite hard.

The LLM is a good rubber duck for exploring the boundaries of human knowledge (or at least knowledge common enough to be in its training set). It can't really "research" on its own, and whenever you suggest something novel and plausable it gets sycophantic, but it can help you prototype ideas and implementation strategies quite fast, and it can help you explore how existing software works and tackles similar problems (or help you start working on an existing project).

Re: I miss thinking hard

#170

Post by cranberryturkey »

There's an irony here -- the same tools that make it easy to skim and summarize can also be used to force deeper thinking. The problem isn't the tools, it's the defaults.

I've found that the best way to actually think hard about something is to write about it, or to test yourself on it. Not re-read it. Not highlight it. Generate questions from the material and try to answer them from memory.

The research on active recall vs passive review is pretty clear: retrieval practice produces dramatically better long-term retention than re-reading. Karpicke & Blunt (2011) showed that practice testing outperformed even elaborative concept mapping.

So the question isn't whether AI summarizers are good or bad -- it's whether you use them as a crutch to avoid thinking, or as a tool to compress the boring parts so you can spend more time on the genuinely hard thinking.

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