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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#361

Post by moron4hire »

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 have no idea who this guy is (I guess he's a fantasy novelist?) but this video came up in my YouTube feed recently and feels like it matches closely with the themes you're expressing. https://youtu.be/mb3uK-_QkOo?si=FK9YnawwxHLdfATv

Re: I miss thinking hard

#362

Post by fragmede »

smy20011 wrote: post #222

I miss entering flow state when coding. When vibe coding, you are in constant interruption and only think very shallow. I never see anyone enter flow state when vibe coding.

The two ways I get into flow state these days are in setting up agentic loops, so I can get out of the way by letting AI check the results for itself, and by doing more things. I've got ~4 Claude Code instances working on problems, per project, and I've got multiple projects I'm working on at the same time.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#363

Post by pikzel »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #359
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 i…

It's all individual. That's like saying writing only happens when you know exactly the story to tell. I love open a blank project with a vague idea of what I want to do, and then just start exploring while I'm coding.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#364

Post by fragmede »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #311
monch1962 wrote: post #142

As someone who's been coding for several decades now (i.e. I'm old), I find the current generation of AI tools very ... freeing. As an industry, we've been preaching the benefits of running lots of small experiments to see what works vs what doesn't, try out different approaches to implementing features, and so on. Pre-AI, lots of these ideas never got implemented because they'd take too much time for no definitive b…

> 8 minutes to kick off the next chunk of my one-person project development via my phone, review the results, then kick off the next chunk of development. How are you doing this via your phone?

The (iOS) Claude phone app has a Claude code feature which runs "in the cloud". It's pretty handy for getting things done on the bus.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#365

Post by jstanley »

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…

But you can move a layer up.

Instead of pouring all of your efforts into making one single static object with no moving parts, you can simply specify the individual parts, have the machine make them for you, and pour your heart and soul into making a machine that is composed of thousands of parts, that you could never hope to make if you had to craft each one by hand from clay.

We used to have a way to do this before LLMs, of course: we had companies that employed many people, so that the top level of the company could simply specify what they wanted, and the lower levels only had to focus on making individual parts.

Even the person making an object from clay is (probably) not refining his own clay or making his own oven.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#366

Post by samusiam »

abhgh wrote: post #174
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 is an amazing quote - thank you. This is also my argument for why I can't use LLMs for writing (proofreading is OK) - what I write is not produced as a side-effect of thinking through a problem, writing is how I think through a problem.

Writing is how I think through a problem too, but that also applies to writing and communicating with an AI coding agent. I don't need to write the code per se to do the thinking.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#367

Post by jstanley »

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…

> 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

Maybe, but beware assuming you could do something you haven't actually tried to do.

Everything is easy in the abstract.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#368

Post by fflluuxx »

helloplanets wrote: post #64
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…

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…

This is why people thinkless of artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons because their hands have never once touched the art. They have no connection to the effort. To the process. To the trail and error. To the suffer. They’ve out sourced it, monetized it, and make it as efficient as possible. It’s also soulless.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#369

Post by amelius »

jstanley wrote: post #365
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…

But you can move a layer up. Instead of pouring all of your efforts into making one single static object with no moving parts, you can simply specify the individual parts, have the machine make them for you, and pour your heart and soul into making a machine that is composed of thousands of parts, that you could never hope to make if you had to craft each one by hand from clay. We used to have a way to do this before…

Yes, but bad ingredients do not make a yummy pudding.

Or, it's like trying to make a MacBook Pro by buying electronics boards from AliExpress and wiring them together.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#370

Post by leftbehinds »

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…

reminds of arguments for - hosting a server vs running stuff in cloud - vps vs containers
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