I miss hard thinking people.
I miss thinking hard
411–420 of 764 posts
Re: I miss thinking hard
#412Skill issue
Re: I miss thinking hard
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coding is not at all like working a lump of clay unless you’re still writing assembly. You’re taking a bunch of pre-built abstractions written by other people on top of what the computer is actually doing and plugging them together like LEGOs. The artificial syntax that you use to move the bricks around is the thing you call coding. The human element of discovery is still there if a robot stacks the bricks based on a…
I think the analogy to high level programming languages misunderstands the value of abstraction and notation. You can’t reason about the behavior of an English prompt because English is underspecified. The value of code is that it has a fairly strong semantic correlation to machine operations, and reasoning about high level code is equivalent to reasoning about machine code. That’s why even with all this advancement…
Yep. Any statement in python or others can be mapped to something that the machine will do. And it will be the same thing every single time (concurrency and race issue aside). There’s no english sentence that can be as clear.
We’ve created formal notation to shorten writing. And computation is formal notation that is actually useful. Why write pages of specs when I could write a few lines of code?
Re: I miss thinking hard
#414If you miss challenge, the world has plenty more. Maybe it's not all your comfort zone, but if you try being a little ambitious and maybe use AI to understand a field you're not already deeply familiar with, you can continue to grow.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#415This 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…
Sometimes you want an artistic vase that captures some essential element of beauty, culture, or emotion.
Sometimes you want a utilitarian teapot to reliably pour a cup of tea.
The materials and rough process for each can be very similar. One takes a master craftsman and a lot of time to make and costs a lot of money. The other can be made on a production line and the cost is tiny.
Both have are desirable, for different people, for different purposes.
With software, it's similar. A true master knows when to get it done quick and dirty and when to take the time to ponder and think.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#416Re: I miss thinking hard
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather have a laptop made from AliExpress components than only have a single artisanal hand-crafted resistor.
Yes, the point is that only if you're willing to accept crappy results then you can use AI to build bigger things.
To me that seems like a spurious (maybe even false) dichotomy. You can have crappy results without AI. And you can have great results with AI.
Your contrast is an either or, that - in the real world - does not exist.
Take content written by AI, prompted by a human. A lot of it is slop and crap. And there will be more slop and crap with AI than before. But that was the case, when the medium changed from hand writen to printed books. And when paper and printing became cheap, we had slop like those 10 Cent Western or Romance novellas.
We also still had Goethe, still had Kleist, still had Grass (sorry, very German centric here).
We also have Inception vs. the latest sequel of any Marvel franchise.
I have seen AI writen, but human prompted short stories, that made people well up and find ideas presented in a light not seen before. And I have seen AI generated stories that one wants to purge from my brain.
It isn't the tool - it is the one yielding it.
Question: Did photoshop kill photography? Because honestly, this AI discussion to me sounds very much like the discussion back then.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#418You are doing something wrong. Ai has not taken away thinking hard
Re: I miss thinking hard
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
I've never seen horse that scratches you.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I understand what the author is trying to say. We miss thinking "hard" about the small details. Maybe "hard" isn't the right adjective, but we all know the process of coding isn't just typing stuff while the mind wanders. We keep thinking about the code we're typing and the interactions between the new code and the existing stuff, and keep thinking about potential bugs and issues. (This may or may not be "har…
Spot on. It’s the lumberjack mourning the axe while holding a chainsaw. The work is still hard. it’s just different. The friction comes from developers who prioritize the 'craft' of syntax over delivering value. It results in massive motivated reasoning. We see people suddenly becoming activists about energy usage or copyright solely to justify not using a tool they dislike. They will hunt for a single AI syntax erro…
> And it's also somewhat egotistical it seems to me. I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others.
I use LLMs a lot. They're ridiculously cool and useful.
But I don't think it's fair to categorize anybody as "egotistical". I enjoy programming for the fun puzzley bits. The big puzzles, and even often the small tedious puzzles. I like wiring all the chunks up together. I like thinking about the best way to expose a component's API with the perfect generic types. That's the part I like.
I don't always like "delivering value" because usually that value is "achieve 1.5% higher SMM (silly marketing metric) by the end of the quarter, because the private equity firm that owns our company is selling it next year and they want to get a good return".