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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#291

Post by globular-toast »

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…

There are two stages to becoming a decent programmer: first you learn to use abstraction, then you learn when not to use abstraction.

Trying to find the right level is the art. Once you learn the tools of the trade and can do abstraction, it's natural to want to abstract everything. Most programmers go through such a phase. But sometimes things really are distinct and trying to find an abstraction that does both will never be satisfactory.

When building a house there are generally a few distinct trades that do the work: bricklayers, joiners, plumbers, electricians etc. You could try to abstract them all: it's all just joining stuff together isn't it? But something would be lost. The dangers of working with electricity are completely different to working with bricks. On the other hand, if people were too specialised it wouldn't work either. You wouldn't expect a whole gang of electricians, one who can only do lighting, one who can only do sockets, one who can only do wiring etc. After centuries of experience we've found a few trades that work well together.

So, yes, it's all just abstraction, but you can go too far.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#293

Post by bodge5000 »

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…

"The muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Start alone."

That has actually been a major problem for me in the past where my core idea is too simple, and I don't give "the muse" enough time to visit because it doesn't take me long enough to build it. Anytime I have given the muse time to visit, they always have.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#294

Post by ibestvina »

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…

This makes no sense to me. There are plenty of artists out there (e.g. El Anatsui), not to mention whole professions such as architects, who do not interact directly with what they are building, and yet can have profound relationship with the final product.

Discovering the right problem to solve is not necessarily coupled to being "hands on" with the "materials you're shaping".

Re: I miss thinking hard

#295

Post by bob1029 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #228
Der_Einzige wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

High temperature seems fine for my coding uses on GPT5.2.

Code that fails to execute or compile is the default expectation for me. That's why we feed compile and runtime errors back into the model after it proposes something each time.

I'd much rather the code sometimes not work than to get stuck in infinite tool calling loops.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#296

Post by refactor_master »

Krssst wrote: post #266
socalgal2 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the code you’re writing is guard railed by your oversight, the tests you decide on and the type checking.

So whether you’re writing the spec code out by hand or ask an LLM to do it is besides the point if the code is considered a means to an end, which is what the post above yours was getting at.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#297

Post by w4yai »

roadbuster wrote: post #232
w4yai wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing new. Whenever a new layer of abstraction is added, people say it's worse and will never be as good as the old way. Though it's a totally biased opinion, we just have issues with giving up things we like as human being.

> Whenever a new layer of abstraction is added LLMs aren't a "layer of abstraction." 99% of people writing in assembly don't have to drop down into manual cobbling of machine code. People who write in C rarely drop into assembly. Java developers typically treat the JVM as "the computer." In the OSI network stack, developers writing at level 7 (application layer) almost never drop to level 5 (session layer), and virtu…

> unless you believe 99% of "software development" is about to be replaced with "vibe coding"

Probably not vibe coding, but most certainly with some AI automation

Re: I miss thinking hard

#298

Post by intended »

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")

Acceptance of mass production is only post establishment of quality control.

Skipping over that step results in a world of knock offs and product failures.

People buy Zara or H&M because they can offload the work of verifying quality to the brand.

This was a major hurdle that mass manufacturing had to overcome to achieve dominance.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#299

Post by w4yai »

duskdozer wrote: post #255
w4yai wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing new. Whenever a new layer of abstraction is added, people say it's worse and will never be as good as the old way. Though it's a totally biased opinion, we just have issues with giving up things we like as human being.

The difference is that LLM output is very nondeterministic.

It depends. Temperature is a variable. If you really need determinism, you could build a LLM for that. Non-determinism can be a good feature though.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#300

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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…

>I instead just fill my house/apartment with stuff already made and still feel like it's mine.

I'm starting to wonder if we lose something in all this convenience. Perhaps my life is better because I cook my own food, wash my own dishes, chop my own firewood, drive my own car, write my own software. Outwardly the results look better the more I outsource but inwardly I'm not so sure.

On the subject of furnishing your house the IKEA effect seems to confirm this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

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