Cognitive skills are just like any other - use them and they will grow, do not and they will decline. Oddly enough, the more one increases their software engineering cognition, the less the distance between "The Builder" and "The Thinker" becomes.
I miss thinking hard
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Re: I miss thinking hard
#22Dude, I know you touched on this but seriously. Just don't use AI then. It's not hard, it's your choice to use it or not. It's not even making you faster, so the pragmatism argument doesn't really work well! This is a totally self inflicted problem that you can undo any time you want.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have their company measuring their AI usage and regularly laying people off.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#23I really don't believe AI allows you to think less hard. If it did, it would be amazing, but the current AI hasn't got to that capability. It forces you to think about different things at best.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#24I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.
I use Claude Code a lot, and it always lets me know the moment I stopped thinking hard, because it will build something completely asinine. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say...
Re: I miss thinking hard
#25I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.
I echo this sentiment. Even though I'm having Claude Code write 100% of the code for a personal project as an experiment, the need for thinking hard is very present. In fact, since I don't need to do low-thinking tasks like writing boilerplate or repetitive tests, I find my thinking ratio is actually higher than when I write code normally.
I'm with you, thinking about architecture is generally still a big part of my mental effort. But for me most architectural problems are solve in short periods of thought and a lot of iteration. Maybe its an skill issue, but not now nor in the pre-LLM era I've been able to pre-solve all the architecture with pure thinking.
That said architectural problems have been also been less difficult, just for the simple fact that research and prototyping has become faster and cheaper.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#26At the day job there was a problem with performance loading data in an app.
7 months later waffling on it on and off with and without ai I finally cracked it.
Author is not wrong though, the number of times i hit this isnt as often since ai. I do miss the feeling though
Re: I miss thinking hard
#27I think this problem existed before AI. At least in my current job, there is constant, unrelenting demand for fast results. “Multi-day deep thinking” sounds like an outrageous luxury, at least in my current job.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#28I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.
I very much think its possible to use LLMs as a tool in this way. However a lot of folks are not. I see people, both personally and professionally, give it a problem and expect it to both design and implement a solution, then hold it as a gold standard.
I find the best uses, for at least my self, are smaller parts of my workflow where I'm not going to learn anything from doing it: - build one to throw away: give me a quick prototype to get stakeholder feedback - straightforward helper functions: I have the design and parameters planned, just need an implementation that I can review - tab-completion code-gen - If I want leads for looking into something (libraries, tools) and Googling isn't cutting it
Re: I miss thinking hard
#29I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.
I'd go as far as to say I think harder now – or at least quicker. I'm not wasting cycles on chores; I can focus on the bigger picture.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#30I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.
I echo this sentiment. Even though I'm having Claude Code write 100% of the code for a personal project as an experiment, the need for thinking hard is very present. In fact, since I don't need to do low-thinking tasks like writing boilerplate or repetitive tests, I find my thinking ratio is actually higher than when I write code normally.
And thinking of how to convey all of that to Claude without having to write whole books :)