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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#261

Post by socalgal2 »

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…

To me it's all abstraction. I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them but I'm happy to work on the new thing that uses what's already there.

This is no different than many things. I could grow a tree and cut it into wood but I don't. I could buy wood and nails and brackets and make furniture but I don't. I instead just fill my house/apartment with stuff already made and still feel like it's mine. I made it. I decided what's in it. I didn't have to make it all from scratch.

For me, lots of programming is the same. I just want to assemble the pieces

> When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make

No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens. Popular and highly acclaimed games not at crap because they didn't write their own physics engine (Zelda uses Havok) or their own game engine (Plenty of great games use Unreal or Unity)

Re: I miss thinking hard

#262

Post by fuomag9 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #202
monch1962 wrote: post #142

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.

Completely agree, there’s so many small projects I’d never been able to even start in my free time, because I’m NOT a full-stack dev and I’d rather not spend all my evenings fixing or working around all the small changes and quirks of the $currentjsframework

Re: I miss thinking hard

#263

Post by Gigachad »

9rx wrote: post #34
gkoberger wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go as far as to say I think harder now – or at least quicker. I'm not wasting cycles on chores; I can focus on the bigger picture.

I've never felt more mental exhaustion than after a LLM coding session. I assume that is a result of it requiring me to think harder too.

In my experience it's because you switch from writing code to reviewing code someone else wrote. Which is massively more difficult than writing code yourself.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#264

Post by tomquirk »

The answer to this is to shift left into product/design.

Sure, I'm doing less technical thinking these days. But all the hard thinking is happening on feature design.

Good feature design is hard for AI. There's a lot of hidden context: customer conversations, unwritten roadmaps, understanding your users and their behaviour, and even an understanding of your existing feature set and how this new one fits in.

It's a different style of thinking, but it is hard, and a new challenge we gotta embrace imo.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#266

Post by Krssst »

socalgal2 wrote: post #261
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…

To me it's all abstraction. I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them but I'm happy to work on the new thing that uses what's already there. This is no different than many things. I could grow a tree and cut it into wood but I don't. I could buy wood and nails and brackets and make furniture but I don't. I instead just fill my ho…

OS and compilers have a deterministic public interface. They obey a specification developers know, so you they can be relied on to write correct software that depends on them even without knowing the internal behavior. Generative AI does not have those properties.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#267

Post by pinkgolem »

nielsbot wrote: post #257
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…

While there is still a market for artisanal furniture, dishes and clothes most people buy mass-produced dishes, clothes and furniture. I wonder if software creation will be in a similar place. There still might be a small market for handmade software but the majority of it will be mass produced. (That is, by LLM or even software itself will mostly go away and people will get their work done via LLM instead of "apps")

I would argue the opposite..

What you get right now is mass replicated software, just another copy of sap/office/Spotify/whatever

That software is not made individually for you, you get a copy like millions of other people and there is nearly no market anymore for individual software.

Llms might change that, we have a bunch of internal apps now for small annoying things..

They all have there quirks, but are only accessible internally and make life a little bit easier for people working for us.

Most of them are one shot llms things, throw away if you do not need it anymore or just one shoot again

Re: I miss thinking hard

#268

Post by Cthulhu_ »

nielsbot wrote: post #257
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…

While there is still a market for artisanal furniture, dishes and clothes most people buy mass-produced dishes, clothes and furniture. I wonder if software creation will be in a similar place. There still might be a small market for handmade software but the majority of it will be mass produced. (That is, by LLM or even software itself will mostly go away and people will get their work done via LLM instead of "apps")

As with furniture, it's supply vs demand, and it's a discussion that goes back decades at this point.

Very few people (even before LLM coding tools) actually did low level "artisanal" coding; I'd argue the vast majority of software development goes into implementing features in b2b / b2c software, building screens, logins, overviews, detail pages, etc. That requires (required?) software engineers too, and skill / experience / etc, but it was more assembling existing parts and connecting them.

Years ago there was already a feeling that a lot of software development boiled down to taping libraries together.

Or from another perspective, replace "LLM" with "outsourcing".

Re: I miss thinking hard

#269

Post by anavat »

satvikpendem wrote: post #189
anavat wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is simple. Continuing your metaphor, I have a choice of getting exactly where I want on a camel in 3 days, or getting to a random location somewhere on the other side of the desert on a helicopter in few hours. And being a reasonable person I, just like the author, choose the helicopter. That's it, that's the whole problem.

Why is that the reasonable choice if it doesn't get you to your destination? I too did a lot of AI coding but when I saw the spaghetti it made, I went back to regular coding, with ask mode not agent mode as a search engine.

Because of compound efficiency and technological enablement.

Or, risking to beat the metaphor to death, because over a span of time I'll cross many more deserts than I would have on a camel, and because I'll cross deserts that I wouldn't even try crossing on a camel.

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