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Some things just take time

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: Some things just take time

#251

Post by titanomachy »

silisili wrote: post #213
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.

I agree there, but there are plenty of examples of time cost being baked into an item, regardless of status symbols. The sweater is with whatever value a single person values it as or would pay for it. Said another way, would you sell it to me for $10? 50? 100? If you said no to all three, it's worth at least $100.

Well, I did say "market value". Of course it has value to me.

Re: Some things just take time

#252

Post by ffsm8 »

msteffen wrote: post #200
nabbed wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate more quickly.

I think “iterating more quickly” is good for the company doing the building. But if you’re the customer, having a new piece of shit foisted on you twice a day so that some garbage PM can “build user empathy” gets old really fast. Before AI, I worked at a B2B open source startup, and our users were perpetually annoyed by how often we asked them to upgrade and were never on the latest version.

> Before AI, I worked at a B2B open source startup, and our users were perpetually annoyed by how often we asked them to upgrade and were never on the latest version.

And frankly, they were in point.

Especially in the B2B context stability is massively underrated by the product.

There is very little I hate more then starting my work week on a Monday morning and find out someone changed the tools I'm using for daily business again

Even if it's objectively minor like apples last pivot to the windows vista design... It just annoys me.

But I'm not the person paying the bills for the tools I'm using at work, and the person that is almost never actually uses the tools themselves and hence shiny redesigns and pointless features galore

Re: Some things just take time

#253

Post by DeathArrow »

I see that at play in economics and geopolitics. While the West wants results in weeks, months or, anyway, in less than one term, China being inspired by Confucius and Sun Tzu is calmly waiting and slowly building.

Re: Some things just take time

#254

Post by ozim »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #223
ozim wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have been there, we got pushback from users and we had to back off with releases. Users hunted product owner with pitchforks and torches. As dev team we were able to crank the speed even more and silly product people thought they are doing something good by demanding even more from us. But that was one of the instances where users were helpful :). People use dozens of apps every day to do their work. Just think about…

> Just think about how are you going to make time to give feedback to each of each. That's pretty much solved by the size of the audiences. You won't give feedback on 12 apps, but 11 other people will probably do so on 11 different apps. Of course, the issue with my domain is that there's plenty of feedback, and product owners just dismiss it. Burn down your entire portfolio to get that boosted shareholder value for…

And how do you solve that when you are one of those 11 apps when no one wants to talk to you because they have their work to do? Where you don’t have power to say that kind of thing.

Well by asking repeatedly of course but you just piss people off.

Have you ever given feedback to Atlassian, Google, Microsoft?

Re: Some things just take time

#255

Post by DrewADesign »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #180
DrewADesign wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem with people treating advanced tech like a math problem. I have a big goddamned problem with the tech world seeing things like creativity, expression, exploration, imagination, experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun, beauty, inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a goddamned math problem to be solved. It’s just so sad and most people resent it being shoved down their throats by t…

> I have a big goddamned problem with the tech world seeing things like creativity, expression, exploration, imagination, experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun, beauty, inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a goddamned math problem to be solved. Resource to be exploited. That’s worse of course.

Two sides of the same tech industry coin: engineering and commerce. The commerce side always sets the agenda, and developing new avenues for resource (or “resource”) exploitation is often the goal. Anyone working on LLM or diffusion model products or projects pretending they’re solving technical problems in a vacuum without contributing to that are, frankly, lying to themselves.

Re: Some things just take time

#256

Post by sd9 »

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…

I do the same. Code is cheap - try it, see if it works, if it doesn’t completely throw it away. LLMs and agents get into doom loops and keep making the situation worse if it’s not going well from the outset. Usually if you’re engaged you can notice this happening and change tack.

Re: Some things just take time

#257

Post by pmavrodiev »

What a beautifully expressed thought:

"I keep coming back to the trees. I’ve been maintaining Open Source projects for close to two decades now. The last startup I worked on, I spent 10 years at. That’s not because I’m particularly disciplined or virtuous. It’s because I or someone else, planted something, and then I kept showing up, and eventually the thing had roots that went deeper than my enthusiasm on any given day. That’s what time does! It turns some idea or plan into a commitment and a commitment into something that can shelter and grow other people."

Good luck _creating_ this by trying to predict the next best word in the sentence.

Re: Some things just take time

#258

Post by bluGill »

js8 wrote: post #238
gopalv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. This is a real problem when the "direction" == "good feedback" from a customer standpoint. Before we had a product person for every ~20 people generating code and now we're all product people, the machines are writing the code (not all of it, but enough of it that I will -1 a ~4000 line PR and ask someone to start…

Don't wait for feedback from "real users", become a user! This tayloristic idea (which has now reincarnated in "design thinking") that you can observe someone doing a job and then decide better than them what they need is ridiculous and should die. Good products are built by the people who use the thing themselves. Doesn't mean though that choosing good features (product design and engineering) isn't a skill in itsel…

Too often that isn't possible. There is a lot of domain knowledge in making a widget there is a lot of domain knowledge in doing a job. when e complex job needs a complex widget often there isn't enough overlap to be experts in both.

sure 'everyone' drives so you can be a domain expert in cars. However not everyone can be an astronaught - rockets are complex enough to need more people than astronaughts and so most people designing spaceships will never have the opportunity to use one.

Re: Some things just take time

#259

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

I’m sure you’re right.

I’m actually a terrible programmer. This is just how I compensate.

Of course, you are more than welcome to visit my portfolio (easily found from my HN profile), and make fun of it.

Re: Some things just take time

#260

Post by bluGill »

ozim wrote: post #93
potro wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have very similar experience. I vibecoded a foreign language practice app for myself. It works decent from functional perspective and I don’t see too many bugs. But the biggest productivity constraint I see is the time I need to spend using it in order to understand what is working and where the issues are.

My newest joke is: „I was able to vibecode those 5 apps I always wanted but never had time to code them myself … it is so different now because — I don’t have time to use them”.

That is wrong - the limit isn't time. The limit is you need to create a good ui so you don't need time. time is the limit for a fun game (see other comnents on how hard this is).

However an app needs to be a good enough ui that it does something for you and often they don't. Paper todo lists still beat all the todo apps people try to make because the ui works for paper. Paper has large limits and so it seems there must be an app out there that is better - but so far everyone has failed to create it.

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