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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#221

Post by aleph_minus_one »

boredtofears wrote: post #122
belZaah wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the problem. If the complexity of what you are solving is in the business logic or, generally low, you are absolutely right. Manually coding a signup flow #875 is not my idea of fun either. But if the complexity is in the implementation, it’s different. Doing complex cryptography, doing performance optimization or near-hardware stuff is just a different class of problems.

In my experience AI is pretty good at performance optimizations as long as you know what to ask for. Can't speak to firmware code or complex cryptography but my hunch is if it's in it's training dataset and you know enough to guide it, it's generally pretty useful.

> In my experience AI is pretty good at performance optimizations as long as you know what to ask for.

This rather tells that the kind of performance optimizations that you ask for are very "standard".

Re: I miss thinking hard

#222

Post by smy20011 »

I miss entering flow state when coding. When vibe coding, you are in constant interruption and only think very shallow. I never see anyone enter flow state when vibe coding.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#223

Post by abm53 »

nunez wrote: post #194
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.

Correct… reading code is a much more difficult and ultimately, productive, task.

I suspect those using the tools in the best way are thinking harder than ever for this reason.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#224

Post by rrvsh »

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.

We've always been doing fake thinking work since the beginning, see: puzzles

Re: I miss thinking hard

#225

Post by rvz »

leecommamichael wrote: post #87
keyle wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said that's temporary. It's janky and wonky but it's a stepping stone. Just look at image generation. Actually factually look at it. We went from horror colours vomit with eyes all over, to 6 fingers humans, to pretty darn good now. It's only time.

Why is image generation the same as code generation?

It isn't.

Code generation progression in LLMs still carries higher objective risk of failure depending on the experience on the person using it because:

1. They still do not trust if the code works (even if it has tests) thus, needs thorough human supervision and still requires on-going maintainance.

2. Hence (2) it can cost you more money than the tokens you spent building it in the first place when it goes horribly wrong in production.

Image generation progression comes with close to no operational impact, and has far less human supervision and can be safely done with none.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#227

Post by lxgr »

I've had the completely opposite experience as somebody that also likes to think more than to build: LLMs take much of the legwork of actually implementing a design, fixing trivial errors etc. away from me and let me validate theories much more quickly than I could do by myself.

More importantly, thinking and building are two very different modes of operating and it can be hard to switch at moment's notice. I've definitely noticed myself getting stuck in "non-thinking building/fixing mode" at times, only realizing that I've been making steady progress into the wrong direction an hour or two in.

This happens way less with LLMs, as they provide natural time to think while they churn away at doing.

Even when thinking, they can help: They're infinitely patient rubber ducks, and they often press all the right buttons of "somebody being wrong on the Internet" too, which can help engineers that thrive in these kinds of verbal pro/contra discussions.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#228

Post by hnlmorg »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #124
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…

Yet another example of "comments that are only sort of true because high temperature sampling isn't allowed". If you use LLMs at very high temperature with samplers which correctly keep your writing coherent (i.e. Min_p, or better like top-h, P-less decoding, etc), than "regression to the mean" literally DOES NOT HAPPEN!!!!

Have you actually tried high temperature values for coding? Because I don’t think it’s going to do what you claim it will.

LLMs don’t “reason” the same way humans do. They follow text predictions based on statistical relevance. So raising the temperature will more likely increase the likelihood of unexecutable pseudocode than it would create a valid but more esoteric implementation of a problem.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#229

Post by alkonaut »

jtrn wrote: post #195
hnfong wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 erro…

I disagree. It's like the lumberjack working from home watching an enormous robotic forestry machine cut trees on a set of tv-screens. If he enjoyed producing lumber, then what he sees on those screens will fill him with joy. He's producing lots of lumber. He's much more efficient than with both axe and chainsaw.

But if he enjoyed being in the forest, and _doesn't really care about lumber at all_ (Because it turns out, he never used or liked lumber, he merely produced it for his employer) then these screens won't give him any joy at all.

That's how I feel. I don't care about code, but I also don't really care about products. I mostly care about the craft. It's like solving sudokus. I don't collect solved sudokus. Once solved I don't care about them. Having a robot solve sudokus for me would be completely pointless.

> I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others.

And you'd be 100% right. I do this work because my employer provides me with enough sudokus. And I provide value back which is more than I'm compensated with. That is: I'm compensated with two things: intellectual challenge, and money. That's the relationship I have with my employer. If I could produce 10x more but I don't get the intellectual challenge? The employer isn't giving me what I want - and I'd stop doing the work.

I think "You do what the employer wants, produce what needs to be produced, and in return you get money" is a simplification that misses the literal forest for all the forestry.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#230

Post by lsy »

oceanplexian wrote: post #186
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…

Coding is not at all like working a lump of clay unless you’re still writing assembly. You’re taking a bunch of pre-built abstractions written by other people on top of what the computer is actually doing and plugging them together like LEGOs. The artificial syntax that you use to move the bricks around is the thing you call coding. The human element of discovery is still there if a robot stacks the bricks based on a…

I think the analogy to high level programming languages misunderstands the value of abstraction and notation. You can’t reason about the behavior of an English prompt because English is underspecified. The value of code is that it has a fairly strong semantic correlation to machine operations, and reasoning about high level code is equivalent to reasoning about machine code. That’s why even with all this advancement we continue to check in code to our repositories and leave the sloppy English in our chat history.
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