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Some things just take time
161–170 of 295 posts
Re: Some things just take time
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say that wearing a sweater knitted by one's grandmother is its own kind of status symbol. I'm more impressed by that (someone having a grandmother willing to invest that much effort in a gift for them) than someone spending $1000 on an item of clothing. The fact that those items took a long time to make is part of what makes them status symbols though, because if you pay a lot of money for something that took…
> status symbol. This sort of thing was done at a time when everybody did it, and now that it's not done, nobody does it No kid ever said "did you see the sweater that Timmy's grandma knitted for him? That kid is so cool! " Mostly because they all had grams sweaters as well. I don't know what term you were looking for, but a handmade present for someone dear is about the furthest thing from a "status symbol" that I c…
Very often kids are un-knowing participants in status signalling by adults.
Parents want to signal "this child is looked after and we have a lot of capacity". Clothes, lunches, a lot of things are quietly like this.
A good hand-made gift demonstrates the status of the giver and provides proof-of-work for their regard of the recipient.
Re: Some things just take time
#163The part about open source projects needing years of sustained work rings true for sure, but it kind of skips over why a lot (most?) projects die. Sometimes the author gets bored, sure, but maintaining something used by strangers is a completely different job than building something for yourself, and nobody warns you about that transition.
Re: Some things just take time
#164With 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…
> Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. This is a real problem when the "direction" == "good feedback" from a customer standpoint. Before we had a product person for every ~20 people generating code and now we're all product people, the machines are writing the code (not all of it, but enough of it that I will -1 a ~4000 line PR and ask someone to start…
Have been there, we got pushback from users and we had to back off with releases. Users hunted product owner with pitchforks and torches.
As dev team we were able to crank the speed even more and silly product people thought they are doing something good by demanding even more from us. But that was one of the instances where users were helpful :).
People use dozens of apps every day to do their work. Just think about how are you going to make time to give feedback to each of each.
Re: Some things just take time
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
tbh that's not a helpful thing to say. I think a more productive thing would be to ask "What model are you using?" "Are you using it in chat mode or as a dedicated agent?" "Do you have an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md?" I've also been underwhelmed with its ability to iterate, as it tends to pile on hacks. So another useful question is "did you try having it write again with what you/it learned?"
> I think a more productive thing would be to ask "What model are you using?" "Are you using it in chat mode or as a dedicated agent?" "Do you have an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md?" In my case I'd have to say "Don't know, whatever VS Code's bot uses", and "no idea what those are or why I have to care".
> Don't know, whatever VS Code's bot uses
The reason I ask about what model is I initially dismissed AI generated code because I was not impressed with the models I was trying. I decided if I was going to evaluate it fairly though, I would need to try a paid product. I ended up using Claude Sonnet 4.5, which is much better than the quick-n-cheap models. I still don't use Claude for large stuff, but it's pretty good at one-off scripts and providing advice. Chances are VS Code is using a crappy model by default.
> no idea what those are or why I have to care
For the difference between chat mode and agent mode, chat mode is the online interface where you can ask it questions, but you have to copy the code back and forth. Agent mode is where it's running an interface layer on your computer, so the LLM can view files, run commands, save files, etc. I use Claude in agent mode via Claude Code, though I still check and approve every command it runs. It also won't change any files without your permission by default.
AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md are pretty much a file that the LLM agent reads every time it starts up. It's where you put your style guide in, and also where you have suggestions to correct things it consistently messes up on. It's not as important at the beginning, but it's helpful for me to have it be consistent about its style (well, as consistent as I can get it). Here's an example from a project I'm currently working on: https://github.com/smj-edison/zicl/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
I know there's lots of other things you can do, like create custom tools, things to run every time, subagents, plan mode, etc. I haven't ever really tried using them, because chances are a lot of them will be obsolete/not useful, and I'd rather get stuff done.
I'm still not convinced they speed up most tasks, but it's been really useful to have it track down memory leaks and silly bugs.
Re: Some things just take time
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hate to pull the skill issue card here, but that is a trivial problem that can be one shotted with almost any model with
Okay, tell you what then. Help me learn. The problem is that I want something that listens on a TCP connection for GD92 packets, and when they arrive send appropriate handshaking to the other end and parse them into Go structs that can be stuffed into a channel to be dealt with elsewhere. And, of course, something to encode them and send them again. How would I do that with whatever AI you choose? I'm pretty certain…
GD92 packets?
No idea what you’re talking about but if it has a spec then it doesn’t matter if it’s trained on it. Break the problem down into small enough chunks. Give it examples of expected input and output then any llm can reason about it. Use a planning mode and keep the context small and focused on each segment of the process.
You’re describing a basic tcp exchange, learn more about the domain and how packets are structured and the problem will become easier by itself. Llms struggle with large code bases which pollute the context not straightforward apps like this
Re: Some things just take time
#167My current project is the culmination 15 years of software development. I started out building a full stack framework like Meteor framework (though I started before Meteor framework was created in 2012 and long before Next.js). Then I ported it to to Node.js because I saw an advantage to having the same language on the frontend and backend. Then I noticed that developers like to mix and match different libraries/modu…
You've been working on this for 15 years and you only have 4 stars on github?
Re: Some things just take time
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hate to pull the skill issue card here, but that is a trivial problem that can be one shotted with almost any model with
tbh that's not a helpful thing to say. I think a more productive thing would be to ask "What model are you using?" "Are you using it in chat mode or as a dedicated agent?" "Do you have an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md?" I've also been underwhelmed with its ability to iterate, as it tends to pile on hacks. So another useful question is "did you try having it write again with what you/it learned?"
Agreed was a bit rough. Yes they are not great at iterating and keeping long contexts, but you look at what he’s describing and you have to agree that’s exactly the type of problem llm excel at
Shouldn’t have to baby step through the basics when the author is clearly not interested in learning himself
Re: Some things just take time
#169Re: Some things just take time
#170Earlier 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 write a metaphore in a comment, you remove half of it, you add another one in the middle, you add the half of the first one, and… nobody understands anything.
Is it the ultimate result of LLM use? People internalising the idea that writing is about stringing words together like a Markov chain without realising they're not saying anything of substance?