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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#301

Post by yason »

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…

The creative process is not dependent on the abstraction.

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

How did those pieces came to be? By someone assembling other pieces or by someone crafting them together out of nowhere because nobody else had written them by the time?

Of course you reuse other parts and abstractions to do whatever things that you're not working on but each time you do something that hasn't been done before you can't but engage the creative process, even if you're sitting on top of 50 years worth of abstractions.

In other words, what a programmer essentially has is a playfield. And whether the playfield is a stack of transistors or coding agents, when you program you create something new even if it's defined and built in terms of the playfield.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#302

Post by freshbreath »

"I don't want to have to write this for the umpteenth time" -- Don't let it even reach a -teenth. Automate it on the 2nd iteration. Or even the 1st if you know you'll need it again. LLMs can help with this.

Software engineers are lazy. The good ones are, anyway.

LLMs are extremely dangerous for us because it can easily become a "be lazy button". Press it whenever you want and get that dopamine hit -- you don't even have to dive into the weeds and get dirty!

There's a fine line between "smart autocomplete" and "be lazy button". Use it to generate a boilerplate class, sure. But save some tokens and fill that class in yourself. Especially if you don't want to (at your own discretion; deadlines are a thing). But get back in those weeds, get dirty, remember the pain.

We need to constantly remind ourselves of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Failing that, we forget the how, and eventually even the why. We become the reverse centaur.

And I don't think LLMs are the next layer of abstraction -- if anything, they're preventing it. But I think LLMs can help build that next layer... it just won't look anything like the weekly "here's the greatest `.claude/.skills/AGENTS.md` setup".

If you have to write a ton of boilerplate code, then abstract away the boilerplate in code (nondeterminism is so 2025). And then reuse that abstraction. Make it robust and thoroughly tested. Put it on github. Let others join in on the fun. Iterate on it. Improve it. Maybe it'll become part of the layers of abstraction for the next generation.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#303

Post by hennell »

oceanplexian wrote: post #186
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…

Coding is not at all like working a lump of clay unless you’re still writing assembly. You’re taking a bunch of pre-built abstractions written by other people on top of what the computer is actually doing and plugging them together like LEGOs. The artificial syntax that you use to move the bricks around is the thing you call coding. The human element of discovery is still there if a robot stacks the bricks based on a…

It depends what you're doing not really what you do it with.

I can do some crud apps where it's just data input to data store to output with little shaping needed. Or I can do apps where there's lots of filters, actions and logic to happen based on what's inputted that require some thought to ensure actually solve the problem it's proposed for.

"Shaping the clay" isn't about the clay, it's about the shaping. If you have to make a ball of clay and also have to make a bridge of Lego a 175kg human can stand on, you'll learn more about Lego and building it than you will about clay.

Get someone to give you a Lego instruction sheet and you'll learn far less, because you're not shaping anymore.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#304

Post by darepublic »

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…

Thanks for the quote, it definitely resonates. Distressing to see many people who can't relate to this, taking it literally and arguing that there is nothing lost the more removed they are from the process.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#305

Post by darepublic »

ibestvina wrote: post #294
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".

you think El Anatsui would concur that they didn't interact directly with what they were building? "hands on", "material you're shaping" is a metaphor

Re: I miss thinking hard

#307

Post by tevli »

Exactly what I've been thinking. outsourcing tasks and thinking of problems to AI just seems easier these days; and you still get to feel in charge because you're the one still giving instructions.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#308

Post by globular-toast »

charcircuit wrote: post #272

If you are thinking hard I think you are software engineering wrong. Even before AI. As an industry all the different ways of doing things have already played out. Even doing big reactors or performance optimizations often can not be 100% predicted in their effectiveness. You will want to just go ahead and implement these things over spending more time thinking. And as AI gets stronger the just try a bunch of approac…

Why do anything at all then? It's all been done before. This line of thinking sounds like depression to me. Why decorate my house? I know I could do it, but it's all been done before, why bother?

Re: I miss thinking hard

#309

Post by kovkol »

I mean I spent most of my career been being pressured to move from type 3 to any one of the other 2 so I don't blame AI for this (it doesn't help, though, especially if you delegate to much to it).

Re: I miss thinking hard

#310

Post by zepesm »

That's why i'm still pushing bytes on C64 demoscene (and recommend such a niche as a hobby to anyone). It's great for the sanity in modern ai-driven dev-world ;)
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