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I’m spending months coding the old way

miguelconner.substack.com

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Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#351

Post by lstodd »

seanw444 wrote: post #44
voidfunc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I told someone I spent a week debugging a problem these days I think I would get laughed out of the call. Even a day might hit somw chuckles. If you cant fix the bug just slop some code over it so its more hidden. This is all gonna be fascinating in 5-10 years.

This really does feel like a mass hysteria event. Bizarre to have to live through it.

It's third major on my memory: first, cagw/global warming, then covid, and now this.

Many minor happened along, like crypto+nft stuff or renaming master branches and adding codes of conduct. I think it's just human nature. Fascinating nevertheless.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#352

Post by Izkata »

daneel_w wrote: post #75

Depressing. It's like reading has-been actors' stories about how they went to wellness retreats to "reconnect with themselves" to try get back on the job. I can't wait for the day when the same type of people as the author - or indeed, the author himself - start labeling plain regular programming as "artisanal" and "craft".

It's not very common but people have been using "artisanal" for months.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#353

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

icedchai wrote: post #349
grebc wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Outsourced staff aug contractors have always been mediocre.

From the contracting side, I’ve worked as a staff Aug contractor for six weeks when I was between jobs in 2012 and it was so bad I just walked off with no job lined up within four weeks.

For context staff Aug vs consulting is about who owns the project

Consulting = the customer gives you high level requirements and statement of work and you control the project (or your company)

Staff Aug = the client controls the project and you are a warm disposable body.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#354

Post by hackable_sand »

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.

In my opinion you should immediately erase after solving the problem on the whiteboard, never taking a picture.

Same with notes that you will never see again. Done in pen, on random pages.

That process is bulletproof, for me.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#355

Post by hackable_sand »

dehrmann wrote: post #315
spockz wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favourite experiences coming up as an engineer was working with a very senior engineer right in the beginning. Whenever he had a task or problem, he would start out thinking, maybe doodling a bit on paper, go for a walk, and only then sit down at his computer and start typing. He would type in one go only compiling in the end, and it would work. (Even typos were rare.) All this to say that it is extremely u…

I see some of the value in planning, but experimentation is so cheap, there's also a lot of value in trying it, seeing what works, and learning from it. The main drawback I see from experimentation is failing to understand why something worked.

The cheapest option in all of software development is to develop the program in your head

That includes experimentation.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#356

Post by ofjcihen »

Anecdotally I found that it was very easy to just throw everything at the LLM. That was fine until I realized once I got stuck that I was basically lost. It only took 2 weeks for years of knowledge to feel very “foreign”.

Recently I’ve been trying to combat this by learning things “deeper” IE. yes I can secure and respond to container based threats but how do containers actually work deep down?

So far I think it’s working well and as an odd plus it’s actually helping me use AI more efficiently when I need to.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#357

Post by bdangubic »

hackable_sand wrote: post #354
jimbokun wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my opinion you should immediately erase after solving the problem on the whiteboard, never taking a picture. Same with notes that you will never see again. Done in pen, on random pages. That process is bulletproof, for me.

exactly the same for me, 30 years and counting…

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#358

Post by bdangubic »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #353
icedchai wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Outsourced staff aug contractors have always been mediocre. From the contracting side, I’ve worked as a staff Aug contractor for six weeks when I was between jobs in 2012 and it was so bad I just walked off with no job lined up within four weeks. For context staff Aug vs consulting is about who owns the project Consulting = the customer gives you high level requirements and statement of work and you control the proje…

hm I don’t disagree with you in principle but there is sooooo much outsourcing (America First and all that jazz people eat up during election cycles lol) that there are many places (worked in two such places just in the last year) where staff aug has been around for decade+ (started with team of 2, now 48). client controls everything, staff hacks shit and does amazing job. from my experience there is a ton of this and work of often anything but mediocre

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#359

Post by scarface_74 »

guzfip wrote: post #346
imtringued wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have no idea what you are talking about but I just checked the scarface_74 user on Reddit (he not I) last posted 8 years ago and mostly on the r/bitcoin thread.

https://www.reddit.com/user/Scarface_74/

And I have no idea what TREZOR is…

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#360

Post by AlotOfReading »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #291
ggerules wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming in an assembly language is a very zenith like experience for me.

I love having a relationship with the lowest levels of our craft. Access to an electron microscope and decapping chips to make my own reimplementions (in software) is next on my bucket list. If chip lithograph wasn't so prohibitively expensive I'd also try my hand at that...

If you have a couple hundred dollars, you can get a chip made through tiny tapeout [0].

[0] https://tinytapeout.com/

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