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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#351

Post by balamatom »

Jensson wrote: post #244
oceanplexian wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Coding is not at all like working a lump of clay unless you’re still writing assembly. Isn't the analogy apt? You can't make a working car using a lump of clay, just a car statue, a lump of clay is already an abstraction of objects you can make in reality.

Bingo.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#352

Post by nubinetwork »

> the number of times I truly ponder a problem for more than a couple of hours has decreased tremendously

Isn't that a good thing? If you're stuck on the same problem forever, then you're not going to get past it and never move on to the next thing... /shrug

Re: I miss thinking hard

#354

Post by balamatom »

kuerbel wrote: post #184
lkey wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stole the joy you must have felt, fleetingly, as a child that beheld the world with fresh eyes, full of wonder? Did you imagine yourself then, as your are now, hunched over a glowing rectangle. Demanding imperiously that the world share your contempt for the sublime. Share your jaundiced view of those that pour the whole of themselves into the act of creation, so that everyone might once again be graced with won…

[flagged]

Thank you for the AI warning, so I didn't have to read that.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#355

Post by phist_mcgee »

booleandilemma wrote: post #219
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my message is doing a disservice to explaining what actually happened because a lot of it happens in my head. 1. I received the ticket, as soon as I read it I had a hunch it was related to some querying ignoring a field that should be filtered by every query (thinking) 2. I give this hunch to the AI which goes search in the codebase in the areas I suggested the problem could be and that's when it find the iss…

Did you use your AI to create that list for you?

That's not very nice. Be nice.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#356

Post by alkonaut »

jstummbillig wrote: post #323
alkonaut wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It's like the lumberjack working from home watching an enormous robotic forestry machine cut trees on a set of tv-screens. If he enjoyed producing lumber, then what he sees on those screens will fill him with joy. He's producing lots of lumber. He's much more efficient than with both axe and chainsaw. But if he enjoyed being in the forest, and _doesn't really care about lumber at all_ (Because it turns ou…

But now you are conflating solving problems with a personal preference of how the problem should be solved. This never bodes well (unless you always prefer picking the method best suited to solve the problem.)

Well as I said, I consider myself compensated with intellectual challenge/stimulus as part of my compensation. It's _why_ I do the work to begin with. Or to put it another way: it's either done in a way I like, or it's probably not done at all.

I'm replaceable after all. If there is someone who is better and more effective at solving problems in some objectively good way - they should have my job. The only reason I still have it is because it seems this is hard to find. Employers are stuck with people who solve problems in the way they like for varying personal reasons and not the objectively best way of solving problems.

The hard part in keeping employees happy is that you can't just throw more money at them to make them effective. Keeping them stimulated is the difficult part. Some times you must accept that you must perhaps solve a problem that isn't the most critical one to address, or perhaps a bad call business wise, to keep employees happy, or keep them at all. I think a lot of the "Big rewrites" are in this category, for example. Not really a good idea compared to maintenance/improvement, but if the alternative is maintaining the old one _and_ lose the staff who could do that?

Re: I miss thinking hard

#357

Post by enthus1ast_ »

When I wrote nimja's template inheritance. I thought about it multiple days, until, during a train commute, it made click and I had to get out my notebook and write it, directly in the train. Then some month later I found out, I had the same bug that jinja2 had fixed years ago. So I felt kinda like a brothers in hard thinking :)

Re: I miss thinking hard

#358

Post by margorczynski »

tomquirk wrote: post #264

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 di…

> Good feature design is hard for AI

For now. Go back a year and take a look how the AI/LLM coding tools looked and worked back then.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#359

Post by CraigJPerry »

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 like

That description is NOT coding, coding is a subset of that.

Coding comes once you know what you need to build, coding is the process of you expressing that in a programming language and as you do so you apply all your knowledge, experience and crucially your taste, to arrive at an implementation which does what's required (functionally and non-functionally) AND is open to the possibility of change in future.

Someone else here wrote a great comment about this the other day and it was along the lines of if you take that week of work described in the GP's comment, and on the friday afternoon you delete all the code checked in. Coding is the part to recreate the check in, which would take a lot less than a week!

All the other time was spent turning you into the developer who could understand why to write that code in the first place.

These tools do not allow you to skip the process of creation. They allow you to skip aspects of coding - if you choose to, they can also elide your tastes but that's not a requirement of using them, they do respond well to examples of code and other directions to guide them in your tastes. The functional and non-functional parts they're pretty good at without much steering now but i always steer for my tastes because, e.g. opus 4.5 defaults to a more verbose style than i care for.

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