Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I’m spending months coding the old way

miguelconner.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 387 posts

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#341

Post by BrandoElFollito »

jimbokun wrote: post #303
zrobotics wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a very similar class 9 years ago, and it was honestly one of the most helpful things I got out of my CS degree. The low level and limited tooling taught me to think before I start writing. I've had other people look askanse at me, but on greenfield work I tend to start with pen and graph paper. I'm not even writing pseudocode, but diagramming a loose graph with potential functions or classes and arrows interco…

This is why whiteboards used to be so popular in many/most tech company offices. Doing this exact same process interactively with other people, and a not to NOT ERASE or later taking a picture of the whiteboard with your phone.

I have theee whiteboards in ly office, and almost all the walls of my teams space is covered with whiteboards. They are always full and it is always a drama when some space need to be made

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#342

Post by hyperhello »

zahlman wrote: post #296
hyperhello wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It bugs me that there are two kinds of languages. Parameters and variables could be typed optionally in a dynamic language; either error in the compiler or at runtime; otherwise you just haven’t made any type errors while you coded and the code is fine either way.

This is what gradual typing (such as TypeScript, or the use of Python annotations for type-checking) accomplishes. The issue is that it basically always is bolted on after the fact. I have faith that we aren't at the end of PL history, and won't be surprised if the next generation of languages integrate gradual typing more thoughtfully.

JavaScript caught on because it was the best casual language. They've been trying to weigh it down ever since with their endless workgroup functionality and build processes. If we get a next generation casual language, it'll have to come from some individual who wants it to happen.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#343

Post by lrvick »

einpoklum wrote: post #272
lrvick wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that's true, then you likely used to produce slop for code. :-( Local models are quite good now, and can jump right in to projects I coded by hand, and add new features to them in my voice and style exactly the way I would have, and with more tests than I probably would have had time to write by hand. Three months ago I thought this was not possible, but local models are getting shockingly good now. Even the bes…

> When I say from scratch, I mean from scratch. If you mean this kind of from scratch: https://www.bootstrappable.org/ then - that's both impressive and important, and I salute you!

Indeed, I do, so thanks :)

I founded https://stagex.tools

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#344

Post by badc0ffee »

t43562 wrote: post #331
badc0ffee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely situations where you can't ask for help and you can't turn your back on the bug. I worked on a project that depended on an open source but deprecated/unmaintained Linux kernel module that we used for customers running RHEL[1]. There were a number of serious bugs causing panics that we encountered, but only for certain customers with high VFS workloads. I spent days to a week+ on each one, reading…

For sure! I had a bug that crashed our system once every 14 days or so and every coredump had a different stack trace. The "star programmer" managed to shift the bug onto me, the newbie graduate, after failing. This was a long time ago and I had to sort of invent fuzz-testing (as far as I knew!) to reproduce the problem in a short enough time that it could be debugged. That bug took weeks to find and there was nobody…

[dead]

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#345

Post by elAhmo »

Hrun0 wrote: post #311
andersmurphy wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger change is those that do write by hand have stopped open sourcing their work. The age of sharing innovation for free is quickly coming to an end. I also expect a bunch of open source/open core projects to go closed source in the next few months.

YC startups still have to be open source though, right?

Where did you get that impression? Most aren’t

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#346

Post by guzfip »

imtringued wrote: post #213
sgarland wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean to reply to someone else? This seems awfully defensive for a reply to parent’s comment.

Yeah only the first two sentences were actually relevant. The rest was a humble brag that there is no application level security, which is a really weird thing to brag about. When I use SAML, I still have to check that the user has some sort of attribute that indicates that access was granted to the application. If this access rule is defined outside the application, then why bring up Claude? If it isn't then Claude…

OP is a known autist who goes around and does this between HN and Reddit

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#347

Post by usernametaken29 »

BodyCulture wrote: post #203
usernametaken29 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked in financial modelling before where you need to make sure results are correct, not approximate. One time there was a nasty bug in pandas multiindexes (admittedly we banned pandas for all new code because it just can’t do semver). Spent 9 days to debug three lines of code. Endurance and patience are learned skills and sometimes they’re the only way you can get a correct verifiable solution.

What are you using instead of pandas? Thanks!

Either nothing (a lot of functionality of pandas can be done with simple plain python) or polars for complex queries. Also look at the statistics module which has a lot of useful things in there

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#348

Post by wkjagt »

I left big tech about 5 years ago, which was an interesting timing looking back. It's not even that long ago, but man have things completely changed since then. I still code a lot, but only for fun. I've never even tried agentic coding. I'm kinda sad that "coding the old way" (as what this apparently is now) has become obsolete so quickly, but also very grateful that I was coincidentally born at the right time to have lived through a good chunk of time where people still wrote code themselves.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#349

Post by icedchai »

grebc wrote: post #239
scarface_74 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then as experience developer you would have to try one of the other tools in your toolbox. Why should someone tie a hand behind their back and not use an LLM out of some sense of nerd pride?

How do you get the experience if you always just reach for your LLM?

This is a real issue we'll face soon enough. It's less of a problem for senior+ developers that have experience and muscle memory. For people just starting in the industry, they won't develop the ability to research problems and solve them on their own.

I work with some junior level, outsourced developers that write prompts like "fix the tests." The result is, of course, bad. The consulting company charges $200+ hour for them. Garbage in, garbage out. Good thing I hit my retirement number. I can bail out anytime.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#350

Post by HappMacDonald »

hyperhello wrote: post #342
zahlman wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what gradual typing (such as TypeScript, or the use of Python annotations for type-checking) accomplishes. The issue is that it basically always is bolted on after the fact. I have faith that we aren't at the end of PL history, and won't be surprised if the next generation of languages integrate gradual typing more thoughtfully.

JavaScript caught on because it was the best casual language. They've been trying to weigh it down ever since with their endless workgroup functionality and build processes. If we get a next generation casual language, it'll have to come from some individual who wants it to happen.

No, JavaScript caught on because at the time it was the only game in town for writing web front-ends, and then people wanted it to run on the server side so that they could share code and training between front end and back end.
Post reply on HN