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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#341

Post by jurgenaut23 »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #337

I feel tired working with AI much faster than I did when I used to code, dunno if it's just that I don't really need to think much at all other than keep in mind the broad plan and have an eye out if a red flag of the wrong direction shows in the transcript, don't even bother reading the code anymore since Opus 4.5 I haven't felt the need to. Manually coding engaged my brain much more and somehow was less exhausting,…

Something that people underestimate a lot is that we aren’t “brains in a jar” and the elevated states of consciousness, such as “flow”, require a deep involvement of the body. As such manual coding is much more likely to bring you into the zone than irregular interactions with an LLM.

I actually believe that there are much better ways to incorporate AI into software development than any of the mechanisms we’ve seen so far. For instance, it would make a lot more sense that you actually write the software manually and get the usual autocomplete suggestions, along with some on the fly reviews, an extension proposals, such as writing the body of a function that you’re calling from the core function you’re writing now.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#342

Post by charcircuit »

globular-toast wrote: post #308
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?

Just because we know the best way to add 2 ints together that doesn't mean it's pointless to do addition with ints. We don't need people trying to spend a lot of extra time to come up with alternate ways to do it. The right function using addition may be valuable to a certain population.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#343

Post by zkmon »

soanvig wrote: post #192
zkmon wrote: post #146

When people missed working hard, they turned to fake physical work (gyms). So people now need some fake thinking work. Except for eating and sleeping, all other human activities are fake now.

you forget about fake sleeping being loaded with fake dopamine hits before sleep AND broken sleep schedules; and eating fake ultraprocessed food instead of wholefoods.

Thanks for correcting. That completes the fake life pattern.

So, people fake things to get a fake life. Reminds me a Russian joke about factory workers. "They pretend to pay, and we pretend to work".

Re: I miss thinking hard

#344

Post by balamatom »

Terr_ wrote: post #289
hnlmorg wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To put it another way, a high-temperature mad-libs machine will write a very unusual story, but that isn't necessarily the same as a clever story.

So why is this "temperature" not on, like, a rotary encoder?

So you can just, like, tweak it when it's working against your intent in either direction?

Re: I miss thinking hard

#345

Post by lelanthran »

topspin wrote: post #8

I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.

> I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.

Okay, for you that is new - post-LLM.

For me, pre-LLM I thought about all those things as well as the code itself.

IOW, I thought about even more things. Now you (if I understand your claim correctly) think only about those higher level things, unencumbered by stuff like implementation misalignments, etc. By definition alone, you are thinking less hard.

------------------------

[1] Many times the thinking about code itself acted as a feedback mechanism for all those things. If thinking about the code itself never acted as a feedback mechanism to your higher thought processes then ... well, maybe you weren't doing it the way I was.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#347

Post by Cuervo_ »

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…

I personally have found success with an approach that's the inverse of how agents are being used generally.

I don't allow my agent to write any code. I ask it for guidance on algorithms, and to supply the domain knowledge that I might be missing. When using it for game dev for example, I ask it to explain in general terms how to apply noise algorithms for procedural generation, how to do UV mapping etc, but the actual implementation in my language of choice is all by hand.

Honestly, I think this is a sweet spot. The amount of time I save getting explanations of concepts that would otherwise get a bit of digging to get is huge, but I'm still entirely in control of my codebase.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#348

Post by pferde »

agumonkey wrote: post #191
fallous wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described the burden of outsourcing programming.

We need a new word for on-premise offshoring. On-shoring ;

Corporate has been using the term "best-shoring" for a couple of years now. To my best guess, it means "off-shoring or on-shoring, whichever of the two is cheaper".

Re: I miss thinking hard

#349

Post by lambdaone »

GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #113
helloplanets wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when programming with agentic tools, you need to actively push for the idea to not regress to the most obvious/average version. The amount of effort you need to expend on pushing the idea that deviates from the 'norm' (because it's novel), is actually comparable to the effort it takes to type something out by hand. Just two completely different types of effort. There's an upside to this sort of effort too, though…

I can't help but imagine training horses vs training cats. One of them is rewarding, a pleasure, beautiful to see, the other is frustrating, leaves you with a lot of scratches and ultimately both of you "agreeing" on a marginal compromise.

Right now vibe coding is more like training cats. You are constantly pushing against the model's tendency to produce its default outputs regardless of your directions. When those default outputs are what you want - which they are in many simple cases of effectively English-to-code translation with memorized lookup - it's great. When they are not, you might as well write the code yourself and at least be able to understand the code you've generated.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#350

Post by darkwater »

Terr_ wrote: post #288
darkwater wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the basic and enormous difference that the feedback loop is 100 or even 1000x faster. Which changes the type of game completely, although other issues will probably arise as we try this new path.

That embeds an assumption that the outsourced human workers are incapable of thought, and experience/create zero feedback loops of their own. Frustrated rants about deliverables aside, I don't think that's the case.

No. It just means the harsh reality: what's really soul crushing in outsourced work is having endless meetings to pass down / get back information, having to wait days/weeks/months to get some "deliverable" back on which iterate etc. Yes, outsourced human workers are totally capable of creative thinking that makes sense, but their incentive will always be throughput over quality, since their bosses usually give closed prices (at least in what I lived personally).

If you are outsourcing to an LLM in this case YOU are still in charge of the creative thought. You can just judge the output and tune the prompts or go deep in more technical details and tradeoffs. You are "just" not writing the actual code anymore, because another layer of abstraction has been added.

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