241–250 of 387 posts
This title is the most depressing thing I have read on this site
I thought Hacker News was a place where you could share your views and discuss them with different people, but your comment seems to show that it now became a Facebook comment section. Thank you for your eye-opening contribution.
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> It’s really hard How? I just open multiple terminal panes, use git tree, and then basically it’s good old software dev practices. What am I missing?
You're probably significantly underselling the value of your own "good old software dev practices."
I was asking if there was something about the “agentic” part in particular that was difficult.
I wish more was being invested in AI autocomplete workflows. That was a nice middle-ground. But yeah my hunch is "the old way" - although not sure we can even call it that - is likely still on par with an "agentic" workflow if you view it through a wider lens. You retain much better knowledge of the codebase. You improve your understanding over coding concepts (active recall is far stronger than passive recognition).
When I let an agent write too much of the structure, the code may work, but a week later every small change starts with "where did it put that?"
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thank you for picking an enjoyable architecture! scaring people away w x86 cruft right out the gate is no good for anyone :-)
Can't imagine anyone teaching x86 assembly these days, did you mean x86-64?
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I love all of this, but at least let your students use vi, it was around back then (or close). plus they don’t have to give it up when they go back in the real world, it’s an evergreen skill!
To be fair, it's mostly an evergreen skill because people don't know how to exit.
I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment. Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one. We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I…
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I can see the logic behind "manual coding" but it feels like driving across country vs taking the airplane. Once I've taken the airplane once, its so hard to go back...
I only see this being the case for throwaway code and prototypes. For production code you want to keep long term it's not so clear cut.
the old way which is about one year ago?
I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment. Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one. We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I…
A bit tangential, but I believe dynamic vs static typing works the same. I switch quite often between them, and when ever I've had a longer break from dynamic typing, coming back to it feels quite heavy. "How did I ever do this?" It feels so heavy. But a few hours (or days) in, I forget what the problem was. A part of my brain wakes up. I start thinking about what I'm passing around, I start recognizing the types fro…
My best LLM written code is where I did a prototype of the overall structure of the program and fed that structure along with the spec and the goal. It is kind of the cognitive bitter lesson, the more you think the better the outcome. Always bet on thinking.