Live data from Hacker News

I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

201–210 of 764 posts

Re: I miss thinking hard

#201
post #198
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,…

If you can't rebuke code today. You can't rebuke code tomorrow.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#202

As 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 b…

Totally agree. I can spend an afternoon trying out an approach to a problem or product (usually while taking meetings and writing emails as well). If it doesn't work, then that's a useful result from my time. If it does work, I can then double-down on review, tests, quality, security, etc and make sure it's all tickety-boo.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#203
I can relate to this. Coding satisifies my urge to build and ship and have an impact on the world. But it doesn't make me think hard. Two things which I've recently gravitated to outside of coding which make me think: blogging and playing chess.

Maybe I subconsciously picked these up because my Thinker side was starved for attention. Nice post.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#204
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…

except the thing does not work as expected and it just makes you worse not better

That's your opinion and you can not use those tools.

People are paying for it because it helps them. Who are you to whine about it?

Re: I miss thinking hard

#205
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 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

This is exactly the right analogy here.

FSD is very very good most of the time. It's so good (well, v14 is, anyway), it makes it easy to get lulled into thinking that it works all the time. So you check your watch here, check your phone there, and attend to other things, and it's all good until the car decides to turn into a curb (which almost happened to me the other day) or swerve hard into a tree (which happened to someone else).

Funny enough, much like AI, Tesla is shoving FSD down people's throats by gating Autopilot 2, a lane keeping solution that worked extremely well and is much friendlier to people who want limited autonomy here and there, behind the $99/mo FSD sub (and removing the option to pay for the package out of pocket).

Re: I miss thinking hard

#206
post #53
post #8

I'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.

Yeah, but thinking with an LLM is different. The article says: > By “thinking hard,” I mean encountering a specific, difficult problem and spending multiple days just sitting with it to overcome it. The "thinking hard" I do with an LLM is more like management thinking. Its chaotic and full of conversations and context switches. Its tiring, sure. But I'm not spending multiple days contemplating a single idea. The "thi…

There are a lot of hard problems to solve in orchestration. We've barely scratched the surface on this.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#207
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Plot twist. The comment you love is the cynical one, responding to someone who clearly embraces the new by rising above caution and concern. Your GPT addition has missed the context, but at least you've provided a nice little paradox.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except the thing does not work as expected and it just makes you worse not better

That's your opinion and you can not use those tools. People are paying for it because it helps them. Who are you to whine about it?

But that's the entire flippin' problem. People are being forced to use these tools professionally at a stagering rate. It's like the industry is in its "training your replacement" era.
Post reply on HN