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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#371

Post by ElFitz »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #295
mikestorrent wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible…

The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes? When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely . But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediatel…

Our sales and marketing have started making their own tools for themselves. This week. They actually launched a terminal.

They hit a wall with deployment, for now, but it’s amusing to watch.

And since I wouldn’t trust their stuff (or Claude’s) with a 10-mile long stick I strongly suggested we put it on Cloudflare behind eight layers of Access / Zero Trust. Easy deployment, and "solves" (if we can call it that) many of the security issues (or not; maybe I’m wrong).

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#372

Post by emmitska »

"Do me a SOLID, YAGNI, give me a DRY KISS" — that's been my coding philosophy for 20 years. So when I came back to building after a long detour, I couldn't stomach watching agents confidently generate 400 lines where 40 would do. What I found is that the discipline was the feature, not the obstacle. I ended up pair programming closely — not because I distrusted the agent, but because I couldn't let go of the architecture. The internet kept telling me to stop going into the weeds. Your article explained why that instinct was right. Everyone else is happy grinding in third the whole race. I went 1, 2, 3 — and because I didn't bury myself getting out of the driveway, I still get to shift into fourth.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#373

Post by casey2 »

People always talk about velocity and speed debating slowing down and speeding up. But the wider tech industry hasn't solved any real problems in a decades, even in mobile things are pretty much the same. We are well into the optimization stage.

AI is the only growth industry of the last decade, and it's the only thing people talk about, we've been so long without growth that people are scared of it now.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#374

Post by emmitska »

blargey wrote: post #200
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…

> I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering. Feels like there’s a counter to the frequent citation of Jevon’s Paradox in there somewhere, in the context of LLM impact on the software dev market. Overestimation of external demand for software, or at least…

Amen. Now with all the agents and bots, I often pause and wonder — how much code is there left to write that we need AI as our saving grace? How many unsolved problems, underserved customers, unanswered questions actually justify the volume? Where did we all go wrong?

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#375

Post by NateEag »

throwanem wrote: post #277
PaulHoule wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I was thinking about how stupid little things in the Javascript ecosystem where you have to change your configuration file "just because" are a real billion-dollar mistake and speculating that I could sue some of the developers in small claims court. Right away I scoffed when I heard people had 20 agents running in parallel because I've been at my share of startups with 20 person teams that tend to brea…

> Seems folks have forgotten that Yegge used to blog that he owed all his success in software development to chronic cannabis use, like if wasn't for all that weed there wouldn't be any Google today. I remember a lot of Steve Yegge's impressive claims from back when he and Zed Shaw were what I would call "fringe contemporaries" in the early 2010s - like all the time he spent gassing on about his unmaintainable, barel…

The most obvious one is this brilliant piece on complexity:

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legal...

It doesn't match OP's description, but it certainly fits talk about his pot use.

There may be others.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#376

Post by Towaway69 »

Aurornis wrote: post #300
Towaway69 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oil is a finite resource that comes out of the ground Yes but the chips, hardware, copper cables, silicon and all the rest of the components that make up a server are finite. Unless these magically appear from outer space, we'll face the same resource constraints as everything else that is pulled out of the ground. These components are also far more fragile to source, see COVID and the collapse of global supply cha…

> Yes but the chips, hardware, copper cables, silicon and all the rest of the components that make up a server are finite. Unless these magically appear from outer space, we'll face the same resource constraints as everything else that is pulled out of the ground. Raw material cost is not a driver of datacenter GPU costs. > Over supply makes price come down but if supply is kept artificially low, then prices stay hig…

> Where are you getting "supply kept artificially low"

If a resource is controlled by a small group of coordinated folks (for example, large US controlled corporations who have/are these datacenters), the resource may be limited artificially because access to these resources are controlled by said corporations.

Exploding datacenters and AI companies yes, but true competition probably not. Most AI companies are using the datacenters from said corporations, if those corporations decide that compute costs one cent more, then all AI providers will become more expensive.

What we should learn from OPEC and oil is that not resource amounts that define the price, it is access to the resource that defines the price.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#377

Post by driftnode »

andai wrote: post #182

It occurred to me on my walk today that a program is not the only output of programming. The other, arguably far more important output, is the programmer. The mental model that you, the programmer, build by writing the program. And -- here's the million dollar question -- can we get away with removing our hands from the equation? You may know that knowledge lives deeper than "thought-level" -- much of it lives in mus…

The phone number muscle memory example is perfect. There is a whole category of knowledge you only have if your hands did the work.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#378

Post by driftnode »

convexly wrote: post #326

I started writing down any of the technical decisions I needed to make before implementing them, usually just a sentence or two on what I'm choosing and why. I I looked back after 6 months and the pattern was embarrassing. I spent days agonizing over choices that turned out to be totally reversible and made quick decisions on things that actually mattered.

The pattern you found between reversible and irreversible decisions is interesting. Did writing them down change how you made decisions going forward or did you just keep making the same mistakes with better documentation? Asking because I have tried something similar and found that knowing my pattern did not actually fix it. I still agonize over the wrong things.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#379

Post by chr15m »

emmitska wrote: post #372

"Do me a SOLID, YAGNI, give me a DRY KISS" — that's been my coding philosophy for 20 years. So when I came back to building after a long detour, I couldn't stomach watching agents confidently generate 400 lines where 40 would do. What I found is that the discipline was the feature, not the obstacle. I ended up pair programming closely — not because I distrusted the agent, but because I couldn't let go of the architec…

As well as pair programming with the AI, you can explicitly put those principles in AGENTS.md and the stochastic code generator will pay attention and be less verbose.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#380

Post by akmarinov »

andai wrote: post #302
simonw wrote: post #27

Useful context here is that the author wrote Pi, which is the coding agent framework used by OpenClaw and is one of the most popular open source coding agent frameworks generally.

For reference, the creator of OpenClaw has roughly the opposite philosophy: https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed

He reXed the author’s X post, so he might agree
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