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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#361

Post by crystal_revenge »

badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

> What are you building?

I think AI really pushes this higher up the abstraction layer:

> What problem are you solving?

I've spent a good amount of my careering using engineering and math to solve specific problems, I'm usually adjacent to software teams.

What I've seen happen with agentic coding is that traditional software engineers keep focusing on using it to build software, while ignoring the problem they're trying to solve.

Meanwhile I've seen junior data analysts start interfacing with applications and tools they never dreamed of before, and delivering results to stakeholders in record times. Things that were previously blocked by engineering no longer are.

But many engineers today are not really problem solvers, they're software builders. The idea that solving the end users problem is the goal, not building them software, is incomprehensible.

And so they continue to struggle to use AI effectively because they're trying to build software with it. Which it's not terrible at, but it's really the wrong tool for that job.

Sometimes software is necessary to solve a problem, a few years ago, software was necessary for a fairly large problem surface area (though, to your point, even then a lot of software was not really built to solve those problems). Today that surface area is shrinking, and as economic constraints loom on the horizon, I believe it will increasingly be people who are solving problems (with or without AI) that will be the ones surviving.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#362

Post by d4lt4 »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #334
mingyeow wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far.” Curious on this - why?

AI Agents can write and modify base Python / C++ / Rust / whatever pretty well, and thus users aren't limited by "sorry the building blocks only go together in this one particular manner". It's like the difference between an EZ-Bake oven and a fully furnished kitchen. The EZ-Bake oven can get some stuff done but its limits are much more severely obvious than the kitchen's, and the kitchen's first limiting factor in w…

There is a paper [0] that shows that LLMs, in fact, cannot write and modify ‘whatever’ pretty well.

[0] A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3747588

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#363

Post by cookiengineer »

badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

I am just using Go at this point and stopped caring about my own opinions.

I live in the happy place in negligence. Go software has almost zero maintenance costs and it will continue to build my programs in 10 years with zero changes to my codebase being necessary.

I probably will never touch C++ again, even though CGo is the most painful FFI/ABI implementation I've dealt with.

Just today I tried to build a project that's using bergamoth and a shitload of broken C++ dependencies and decided to not give a damn after 5 hours of trying to fix crappy code that changed for whatever reasons between c++14 and c++15, well, or the dependencies are broken, or the dependency versions are broken, or the maintainer's code never compiled in the first place... I just don't care.

My hopes were higher during the conan peak days, but now the ecosystem is just so broken even with jinja and whatever build framework the new kids are using.

I guess I just really hate the C++ ecosystem, and the lack of self reflection in there about the self inflicted pain that shouldn't be necessary in 2026.

In regards to agentic coding: I am toying around with codestral:22b right now and xiaomi's mimo models, and am building my own local dev environment which makes this kinda nice.

It's local and I like it, sometimes need to use claude still but it's getting there. But I am delegating only the gruntwork, not decisions, so I use temperature usually below 0.3. My approach is to make this sandboxed per folder I run it in and that agents are only allowed to communicate via notes or tasks, so that they are forced to use better documentation. Specific roles don't have write access to certain things, e.g. coder can't touch tests, and tester can't touch code.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#364

Post by econ »

jimbokun wrote: post #202
perrygeo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to sha…

In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and project…

> the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime,

Except from. You know, books. And all the websites die pretty fast. At an insane rate.

> the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text,

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jimbokun

No contact info, intentionally.

>* the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two,

You can buy the same things from a thousand stores with 99% asking many times what it costs.

>* the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and projects, with no need for centralized offices for most knowledge work.

Again, in theory yes. I wish it was all true, and it should be. But it isn't, sadly.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#365

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

throwanem wrote: post #170
_dwt wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature…

One would as sensibly dismiss the concept of an assembly line as "how to build a car if you cannot." Dijkstra was a mathematician. It is a necessary discipline. If it alone were sufficient, then the "program correctness" fans would have simply and inarguably outdone everyone else forty years ago at the peak of their efforts, instead of having resorted to eloquently whiny, but still whiny, thinkpieces (such as the 198…

There is no liability or penalty for software defects and therefore no incentive for program correctness. Arguably, Dijkstra didn't fail; society has foolishly decided not to hold developers accountable for their bad code.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#367

Post by LoganDark »

jimbokun wrote: post #202
perrygeo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to sha…

In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and project…

> So it's difficult to see the value of LLMs that can generate even more software even faster. What value is left to provide for users?

In the past two or three days I generated an interactive disk usage crawler tailored to my operating system and my needs. I have audited essentially none of the code, merely providing vision and detailed explanations of the user experience and algorithms that I want, and yet got back an interactive TUI application that does what I want with tons of tests and room to easily expand. I plan to audit the code more deeply soon to get it into a shape I'd be more comfortable open-sourcing. One thing agents suck at is meaningful DRY.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#368

Post by ElFitz »

jimbokun wrote: post #202
perrygeo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to sha…

In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and project…

> What value is left to provide for users?

Everything and anything people actually want or need, whether it’s every day or just for five minutes, that nobody else could be bothered to make.

Today most won’t know what to do with it, just like they didn’t know what to do with a web browser.

But that won’t last.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#369

Post by 6510 »

kubanczyk wrote: post #304
6510 wrote: post #226

I keep returning to this thought: Assuming our abstraction architecture is missing something fundamental, what is it? My gut says something simple is missing that makes all of the difference. One thought I had was that our problem lives between all the things taking something in and spitting something out. Perhaps 90% of the work writing a "function" should be to formally register it as taking in data type foo 1.54.3…

> My gut says something simple is missing that makes all of the difference. We have too much code - languages to program machines. We need a new different language now. A plan.md, written in what... legalese English? Really? Am I back in 1897? People committing that to vcs, sheesh...

yes, that is exactly the vibe. The feeling is there but it's hard to put your finger on.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#370

Post by einr »

abletonlive wrote: post #283
einr wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All signs point to you being a doomer that is excellent at moving the goal post. All signs point to it being really easy for you to dismiss "doomers" as wrong and "scientists" as right retroactively. If someone was wrong about the direction of the climate crisis 20 years ago they were a doomer. If they were right they were a scientist. Easy! You can apply this to anything that went to shit with the world in the pas…

> If someone predicted the financial crisis of 2008, they were not a doomer, they were a particularly savvy financial analyst. Zoom out buddy, the 2008 financial crisis is a blip. The world's financial system is almost exactly the same as it was pre-2008. Hardly the collapse that made the world stop spinning that doomers have a fetish for. That's not a good example to support your argument. You fundamentally cannot g…

Doomerism is observing that first order effect and trying to assert that we should change behavior at a societal level

I don’t think this is as universal a definition of ”doomer” as you think. To pick up on one of your examples I’ve seen people being called ”AI doomers” for holding every position between ”all of these huge investments might not pay off” to ”it will exterminate mankind and make paperclips out of the universe”. Where is the line for Real Doomerism? Be careful when you draw it lest you end up on the wrong side of history.

I think your point about mankind’s adaptability is fair but you’re working with a definition of the word ”doomer” that makes it extremely easy for you to prove your point. ”Every time the end of the world has been predicted it has been wrong because we’re still living in a world” is true but not a particularly clever or interesting argument.

Also you need to chill with the ”YOU’RE using as a doomer” and ”YOU fundamentally cannot grasp” stuff. Lol, ”buddy”, you have literally no idea who’s on the other side of that screen of yours or what they can ”fundamentally grasp”.

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