Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 764 posts

Re: I miss thinking hard

#401

Post by kimixa »

lambdaone wrote: post #349
GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but imagine training horses vs training cats. One of them is rewarding, a pleasure, beautiful to see, the other is frustrating, leaves you with a lot of scratches and ultimately both of you "agreeing" on a marginal compromise.

Right now vibe coding is more like training cats. You are constantly pushing against the model's tendency to produce its default outputs regardless of your directions. When those default outputs are what you want - which they are in many simple cases of effectively English-to-code translation with memorized lookup - it's great. When they are not, you might as well write the code yourself and at least be able to under…

Yup - I've related it to working with Juniors, often smart and have good understandings and "book knowledge" of many of the languages and tools involved, but you often have to step back and correct things regularly - normally around local details and project specifics. But then the "junior" you work with every day changes, so you have to start again from scratch.

I think there needs to be a sea change in the current LLM tech to make that no longer the case - either massively increased context sizes, so they can contain near a career worth of learning (without the tendency to start ignoring that context, as the larger end of the current still-way-too-small-for-this context windows available today), or even allow continuous training passes to allow direct integration of these "learnings" into the weights themselves - which might be theoretically possible today, but is many orders of magnitude higher in compute requirements than available today even if you ignore cost.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#402

Post by keiferski »

This title and the first half of the post (before the AI discussion) just makes me miss the intellectual environment of college.

So I’m tempted to say that this is just a part of the economic system in general, and isn’t specifically linked to AI. Unless you’re lucky enough to grab a job that requires deep intellectual work, your day job will probably not challenge your mental abilities as much as a difficult college course does.

Sad but true, but unfortunately I don’t think any companies are paying people to think deeply about metaphysics (my personal favorite “thinking hard subject” from college.)

Re: I miss thinking hard

#403

Post by hackable_sand »

sonofhans wrote: post #163
CamperBob2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said when cameras first hit the scene.

Ironic. The frequency and predictability of this type of response — “This criticism of new technology is invalid because someone was wrong once in the past about unrelated technology” — means there might as well be an LLM posting these replies to every applicable article. It’s boring and no one learns anything. It would be a lot more interesting to point out the differences and similarities yourself. But then if you…

Note that we still have not solved cameras or even cars.

The biggest lesson I am learning recently is that technologists will bend over backwards to gaslight the public to excuse their own myopia.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#404

Post by Draiken »

keyle wrote: post #91
tired-turtle wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're all Linus Torvalds now. So...where's your OS and SCM? I get your point that wetware stills matter, but I think it's a bit much to contend that more than a handful of people (or everyone) is on the level of Linus Torvalds now that we have LLMs.

I should have been clearer. It was a pun, a take, a joke. I was referring to his day-to-day activity now, where he merges code, doesn't write hardly any code for the linux kernel. I didn't imply most of use can do half the thing he's done. That's not right.

Even disregarding what he has done, this is utterly absurd. I almost spit my coffee reading that.

You are going to tell me that the vibe coders care and read the code they merge with the same attention to detail and care that Linus has? Come on...

That's the key for me. People are churning out "full features" or even apps claiming they are dealing with a new abstraction level, but they don't give a fuck about the quality of that shit. They don't care if it breaks in 3 weeks/months/years or if that code's even needed or not.

Someone will surely come say "I read all the code I generate" and then I'll say either you're not getting these BS productivity boost people claim or you're lying.

I've seen people pushing out 40k lines of code in a single PR and have the audacity to tell me they've reviewed the code. It's preposterous. People skim over it and YOLO merge.

Or if you do review everything, then it's not gonna be much faster than writing it yourself unless it's extremely simple CRUD stuff that's been done a billion times over. If you're only using AI for these tasks maybe you're a bit more efficient, but nothing close to the claims I keep reading.

I wish people cared about what code they wrote/merged like Linus does, because we'd have a hell of a lot less issues.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#407

Post by aleph_minus_one »

charcircuit wrote: post #281
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my experience AI is pretty good at performance optimizations as long as you know what to ask for. This rather tells that the kind of performance optimizations that you ask for are very "standard".

Most optimizations are making sure you do not do work that is unnecessary or that you use the hardware effectively. The standard techniques are all you need 99% of the time you are doing performance work. The hard part about performance is dedicating the time towards it and not letting it regress as you scale the team. With AI you can have agents constantly profiling the codebase identifying and optimizing hotspots a…

> Most optimizations are making sure you [...] use the hardware effectively.

If you really care about using the hardware effectively, optimizing the code is so much more than what you describe.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#408

Post by amelius »

satvikpendem wrote: post #189
anavat wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is simple. Continuing your metaphor, I have a choice of getting exactly where I want on a camel in 3 days, or getting to a random location somewhere on the other side of the desert on a helicopter in few hours. And being a reasonable person I, just like the author, choose the helicopter. That's it, that's the whole problem.

Why is that the reasonable choice if it doesn't get you to your destination? I too did a lot of AI coding but when I saw the spaghetti it made, I went back to regular coding, with ask mode not agent mode as a search engine.

Because taking a rental camel from the airport is faster.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#409

Post by mohsen1 »

keyle wrote: post #63

I don't get it. I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review. If anything, all we've changed is working at a higher level. The product is the same. But these people just keep mixing things up like "wow I got a ferrari now, watch it fly off the road!" Yeah so you got a tools upgrade; it's faster, it's more powerful. Keep it on the road or give up driving! We went from auto completing keywords, t…

I agree! It's a lot more pleasant than being stuck over figuring out how to use awk properly for hours. I knew what I needed to do then, and I know what I need to do now too. The difference is I get to results faster. Sometimes I even learn that awk was not even the right tool in my situation and learn about a new way of doing things while AI is "thinking" for me

Re: I miss thinking hard

#410

Post by moorebob »

My mindset last year: I am now a mentor to a junior developer

My mindset this year: I am an engineering manager to a team of developers

If the pace of AI improvement continues, my mindset next year will need to be: I am CEO and CTO.

I never enjoyed the IC -> EM transition in the workplace because of all the tedious political issues, people management issues and repetitive admin. I actually went back to being an IC because of this.

However, with a team of AI agents, there's less BS, and less holding me back. So I'm seeing the positives - I can achieve vastly more, and I can set the engineering standards, improve quality (by training and tuning the AI) and get plenty of satisfaction from "The Builder" role, as defined in the article.

Likewise I'm sure I would hate the CEO/CTO role in real life. However, I am adapting my mindset to the 2030s reality, and imagining being a CEO/CTO to an infinitely scalable team of Agentic EMs who can deliver the work of hundreds of real people, in any direction I choose.

How much space is there in the marketplace if all HN readers become CEOs and try to launch their own products and services? Who knows... but I do know that this is the option available to me, and it's probably wise to get ahead of it.

Post reply on HN