Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Some things just take time

lucumr.pocoo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 295 posts

Re: Some things just take time

#241

Post by jstummbillig »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #226
jstummbillig wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You learn more quickly that you are producing the wrong thing.

This implies that 1) a lot of shallow, orthogonal directions is better than 1 deep, careful approach 2) There's no social aspect to churning out a bunch of slop that will affect the perception of potential "right things" later. My domain can be particularly grudgeful in this regard.

1) If there is uncertainty, that seems to be correct, yes. (If there is no uncertainty, then the question and the essay become moot: You already know what to do. Things take as long as they must. Worst case, you are wrong.)

2) I read that part twice and could not figure out what it is you are trying to say.

Re: Some things just take time

#242

Post by johnnyanmac »

w10-1 wrote: post #94

What's faster now are the time-dependent factors of production - product development, go-to market, etc. What's slower now are threats to production - even minor regulations take years or decades, and often appear only when workarounds have surfaced. So what changed in the last 40+ years are the many tools for businesses to shape the conditions of their business -the downstream market, upstream suppliers, and regulat…

evolution towards a dystopia, perhaps. No regulations means no worker protections, which means society goes into its next depression.

Re: Some things just take time

#243

Post by johnnyanmac »

ghurtado wrote: post #25
QuadrupleA wrote: post #13

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?

> I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up Here's the thing: we never had a remotely sane way to measure productivity of a software engineer for reasons that we all understand, and we don't have it now. Even if we had it, it's not the sort of thing that management would even use: they decide how productive you are based on completely unrelated criteria, like willingness to work long hours and kee…

>"Productivity" became a poisoned word the moment that the suits realized what a useful weapon it was, and that it was impossible to challenge.

Not impossible to challenge. But most people don't have the legal funds to do so. Those that do tend to get a cushy severance bribe to stay quiet and they move on elsewhere.

That's also why it's a long process to "fire" someone but easy to "lay off" instead. layoffs are never about productivity (so it doesn't matter anyway), and the US is doing absolutely nothing to protect against it like most of the world.

Re: Some things just take time

#244

Post by johnnyanmac »

timacles wrote: post #168
smj-edison wrote: post #149

Earlier 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?"

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

>Shouldn’t have to baby step through the basics when the author is clearly not interested in learning himself

Okay. Whip up your favorite model and report back to us with your prompts. I'm pretty anti-AI, but you're going to attract more bees with honey than smoke.

Re: Some things just take time

#245

Post by johnnyanmac »

smj-edison wrote: post #165
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

>I decided if I was going to evaluate it fairly though, I would need to try a paid product.

Okay. Get me a job and I'll pay for any model of your choosing. Until then, finances are very slim.

Re: Some things just take time

#247

Post by marcta »

titanomachy wrote: post #6

> We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to zero.

Maybe their point is that the brands themselves have a lot of time embedded in them. Generally, status symbols (whatever they are) aren't things that are recently established.

Re: Some things just take time

#249

Post by deadbabe »

samiv wrote: post #231

Now that everyones running faster than ever and trying to outrun the competition by slapping more code on than they do you can only brace for the results. I expect these tools will quickly let people to ramp up several orders of magnitude of more complexity and lines of code to any software project. The your 100kloc JS electron app will become a 10m loc JS electron app running on a 500m loc browser runtime. Repeat th…

But how do you make the case for thoughtful less bloated software to people who just value writing less code themselves, even if the output produces more lines of code? Seems to me like people don’t care about LOC, they care about how much effort they have to spend writing the lines.

Re: Some things just take time

#250

Post by girvo »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #227
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #136

I find myself sympathetic to the author's PoV, but I am incorporating LLMs into my workflow, with a resultant jaw-dropping (to me) increase in velocity. But I am not just dispatching to agents. I work interactively with a chat interface, and sometimes, I will just bin a whole hour's worth of back-and-forth, because we're not getting anywhere (in fact, I did exactly that, about 30 minutes ago). But that hour is peanut…

> the Quality is really high, and I'm happy with the results. >toss all 5 of my SDK files into the LLM, paste in the JSON server interaction, describe the bug, and ask it to help me figure it out. I wonder if this "quality" code wouldn't have that many bugs to dive into if it was more carefully considered and produced up front? This harkens back to a study in 2024 were senior devs were actually less productive with L…

> were senior devs were actually less productive with LLMS but they felt more productive

I'm certain this is true for me. The only thing LLMs do get me is the ability to make forward progress on tasks while I'm in meetings, which is a net positive at least.

Post reply on HN