In most research areas, if a few days thinking is good enough to reach a worthwhile conclusion, it's not "thinking hard". It's "low-hanging fruit".
I miss thinking hard
431–440 of 764 posts
Re: I miss thinking hard
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see why his involvement, explaining to his team how exactly to build a piece, is any different from a developer explaining to an LLM how to build a certain feature, when it comes to the level of "being hands on". Obviously I am not comparing his final product with my code, I am simply pointing out how this metaphor is flawed. Having "workers" shape the material according to your plans does not reduce your age…
> I don't see why his involvement, explaining to his team how exactly to build a piece, is any different from a developer explaining to an LLM Because everyone under him knows that a mistake big enough is a quick way to unemployment or legal actions. So the whole team is pretty much aligned. A developer using an LLM may as well try to herd cats.
First, that's quite a sad view of incentives structures. Second, you can't be serious in thinking that "worker worried they might be fired" puts the person in charge closer to the "materials" and more "hands on" with the project.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#433Then think hard? Have a level of self discipline and don’t consistently turn to AI to solve your problems. Go to a library if you have to! People act like victims to the machine when it comes to building their thinking muscles and AI and it confuses me.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno, when you've made about 10,000 clay pots its kinda nice to skip to the end result, you're probably not going to learn a ton with clay pot #10,001. You can probably come up with some pretty interesting ideas for what you want the end result to look like from the onset. I find myself being able to reach for the things that my normal pragmatist code monkey self would consider out of scope - these are often not u…
Depends on the problem. If the complexity of what you are solving is in the business logic or, generally low, you are absolutely right. Manually coding a signup flow #875 is not my idea of fun either. But if the complexity is in the implementation, it’s different. Doing complex cryptography, doing performance optimization or near-hardware stuff is just a different class of problems.
Coding signup flow #875 should as easy as using a snippet tool or a code generator. Everyone that explains why using an LLM is a good idea always sound like living in the stone age of programming. There are already industrial level tools to get things done faster. Often so fast that I feel time being wasted describing it in english.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#435The crowd that counterpoints with "just don't use it then" miss the point: The general population lacks the ability to judge when should use it and when they shouldn't. The average person will always lean towards the less effortful option, without awareness of the long term consequences.
On top of that, the business settings/environments will always lean towards the option that provides the largest productivity gains, without awareness of the long term consequences for the worker. At that environment, not using it is not an option, unless you want to be unemployed.
Where does that leave us? Are we supposed to find the figurative "gym for problem solving" the same way office workers workout after work? Because that's the only solution I can think of: Trading off my output for problem solving outside of work settings, so that I can improve my output with the tool at work.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: I miss thinking hard
#437This 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…
And therein lies the crux: some people love to craft each part themselves, whereas others love to orchestrate but not manufacture each part.
With LLMs and engineers often being forced by management to use them, everyone is pushed to become like the second group, even though it goes against their nature. The former group see the part as a means, whereas the latter view it as the end.
Some people love the craft itself and that is either taken away or hollowed out.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#438I did competitive programming seriously between '17 and '24, then kept on coaching people
As a beginner I often thought about a problem for days before finding a solution, but this happened less and less as I improved
I got better at exploiting the things I knew, to the point where I could be pretty confident that if I couldn't solve a problem in a few hours it was because I was missing some important piece of theory
I think spending days "sitting with" a problem just points at your own weakness in solving some class of problems.
If you are making no articulable progress whatsoever, there is a pathology in your process.
Even when working on my thesis, where I would often "get stuck" because the problem was far beyond what I could solve in one sitting, I was still making progress in some direction every time.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#439I did competitive programming seriously between '17 and '24, then kept on coaching people As a beginner I often thought about a problem for days before finding a solution, but this happened less and less as I improved I got better at exploiting the things I knew, to the point where I could be pretty confident that if I couldn't solve a problem in a few hours it was because I was missing some important piece of theory…
Do you mean that sitting with the problem for days is a weakness that you should fix since you're wasting time making no progress? Or that it is a necessary practice in order to understand your weaknesses?
Re: I miss thinking hard
#440This 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…
To me it feels a bit like literate programming, it forces you to form a much more accurate idea of your project before your start. Not a bad thing, but can be wasteful also when eventually you realise after the fact that the idea was actually not that good :)