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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#191

Post by agumonkey »

fallous wrote: post #106
helloplanets wrote: post #64

Earlier 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.

We need a new word for on-premise offshoring.

On-shoring ;

Re: I miss thinking hard

#192

Post by soanvig »

zkmon wrote: post #146

When 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.

you forget about fake sleeping being loaded with fake dopamine hits before sleep AND broken sleep schedules; and eating fake ultraprocessed food instead of wholefoods.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#193

Post by marcus_holmes »

I think it's just another abstraction layer, and moves the thinking process from "how do I solve this problem in code?" to "how do I solve this problem in orchestration?".

I recently used the analogy of when compilers were invented. Old-school coders wrote machine code, and handled the intricacies of memory and storage and everything themselves. Then compilers took over, we all moved up an abstraction layer and started using high-level languages to code in. There was a generation of programmers who hated compilers because they wrote bad, inelegant, inefficient, programs. And for years they were right.

The hard problems now are "how can I get a set of non-deterministic, fault-prone, LLM agents to build this feature or product with as few errors as possible, with as little oversight as possible?". There's a few generic solutions, a few good approaches coming out, but plenty of scope for some hard thought in there. And a generic approach may not work for your specific project.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#194

Post by nunez »

keyle wrote: post #63

I 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…

You _think_ you're thinking as hard. Reading code != writing it. Just like watching someone do a thing isn't the same as actually doing it.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#195

Post by jtrn »

hnfong wrote: post #94
keyle wrote: post #63

I 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 I understand what the author is trying to say. We miss thinking "hard" about the small details. Maybe "hard" isn't the right adjective, but we all know the process of coding isn't just typing stuff while the mind wanders. We keep thinking about the code we're typing and the interactions between the new code and the existing stuff, and keep thinking about potential bugs and issues. (This may or may not be "har…

Spot on. It’s the lumberjack mourning the axe while holding a chainsaw. The work is still hard. it’s just different. The friction comes from developers who prioritize the 'craft' of syntax over delivering value. It results in massive motivated reasoning. We see people suddenly becoming activists about energy usage or copyright solely to justify not using a tool they dislike. They will hunt for a single AI syntax error while ignoring the history of bugs caused by human fatigue. It's not about the tech. it's about the loss of the old way of working.

And it's also somewhat egotistical it seems to me. I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#196

Post by mightymosquito »

While I see where you are coming from but I think what has really gone for a toss is the utility of thinking hard.

Thinking hard has never been easier.

I think AI for an autodidact is a boon. Now I suddenly have a teacher who is always accessible and will teach me whatever I want for as long as I want exactly the way I want and I don;t have to worry about my social anxiety kicking in.

Learn advanced cryptography? AI, figure out formal verification - AI etc.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#198

Post by rvz »

keyle wrote: post #63

I 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…

> We're all Linus Torvalds now. We review, we merge, we send back. And if you had no idea what you were doing before, you'll still have no idea what you're doing today. You just fat-finger less typos today than ever before.

Except Linus understands the code that is being reviewed / merged in since he already built the kernel and git by hand. You only see him vibe-coding toys but not vibe-coding in the kernel.

Today, we are going to see a gradual skill atrophy with developers over-relying on AI and once something like Claude goes down, they can't do any work at all.

The most accurate representation is that AI is going to rapidly make lots of so-called 'senior engineers' who are over-reliant and unable to detect bad AI code like juniors and interns.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#199

Post by ceuk »

lkey wrote: post #145
CamperBob2 wrote: post #128

Earlier 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.

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 won…

Thank you for brightening my morning with a brief moment of romantic idealism in a black ocean of cynicism

Re: I miss thinking hard

#200

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

throwerxyz wrote: post #155
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #19

I haven't reduced my thinking! Today I asked AI to debug an issue. It came with a solution that it was clearly correct, but it didn't explain why the code was in that state. I kept steering AI (which just wanted to fix) toward figuring out the why and it digged through git and github issue at some point,in a very cool way. And finally it pulled out something that made sense. It was defensive programming introduced to…

>I haven't reduced my thinking! You just detailed an example of where you did in fact reduce your thinking. Managers who tell people what to get done do not think about the problem.

I think my message is doing a disservice to explaining what actually happened because a lot of it happens in my head.

    1. I received the ticket, as soon as I read it I had a hunch it was related to some querying ignoring a field that should be filtered by every query (thinking)
    2. I give this hunch to the AI which goes search in the codebase in the areas I suggested the problem could be and that's when it find the issue and provide a fix
    3. I think the problem could be spread given there is a method that removes the query filter, it could have been used in multiple places, so I ask AI to find other usages of it (thinking, this is my definition of "steering" in this context)
    4. AI reports 3 more occurrences and suggests that 2 have the same bug, but one is ok
    5. I go in, review the code and understand it and I agree, it doesn't have the bug (thinking)
    6. AI provide the fix for all the right spots, but I said "wait, something is fishy here, there is a commit that explicitly say it was added to remove the filter, why is that?" (thinking), so I ask AI to figure out why the commit says that
    7. AI proceeds to run a bunch of git-history related commands, finds some commit and then does some correlation to find another commit. This other commit introduced the change at the same time to defend from a bug in a different place
   8. I understand what's going on now, I'm happy with the fix, the history suggests I am not breaking stuff. I ask AI to write a commit with detailed information about the bug and the fix based on the conversation
There is a lot of thinking involved. What's reduced is search tooling. I can be way more fuzzy, rather than `rg 'whatever'` I now say "find this and similar patterns"
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