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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#481

Post by resters »

gyomu wrote: post #32

This 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…

It's very similar now, you have to surf a swell of selective ignorance that is (feels?) less reliable than the ignorance that one adopts when using a dependency one hasn't read and understood the source code for.

One must be conversant in abstractions that are themselves ephemeral and half hallucinated. It's a question of what to cling to, what to elevate beyond possible hallucinated rubbish. At some level it's a much faster version of the meastspace process and it can be extermely emotionally uncomfortable and anarchic to many.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#483

Post by qwertox »

AI is way less of a problem in regards to thinking than digital media consumption is.

I used to think about my projects when in bed, now i listen to podcasts or watch youtube videos before sleeping.

I think it has a much bigger impact than using our "programming calculator" as an assistant.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#484

Post by szundi »

croes wrote: post #427
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really what it’s about. As someone that started with Machine Code, I'm grateful for compiled -even interpreted- languages. I can’t imagine doing the kind of work that I do, nowadays, in Machine Code. I’m finding it quite interesting, using LLM-assisted development. I still need to keep an eye on things (for example, the LLM tends to suggest crazy complex solutions, like writing an entire control from scratch,…

But we become watchers instead of makers. There is a difference between cooking and putting a ready meal into the microwave. Both satisfy your hunger but only one can give some kind of pride.

[dead]

Re: I miss thinking hard

#485

Post by nasretdinov »

m0rc wrote: post #253

I think the article has a point. There seem to be two reactions among senior engineers atound me these days. On one side, there are people who have become a bit more productive. They are certainly not "10x," but they definitely deliver more code. However, I do not observe a substantial difference in the end-to-end delivery of production-ready software. This might be on me and my lack of capacity to exploit the tools…

> This might be on me and my lack of capacity to exploit the tools to their full extent. But, iterating over customer requirements, CI/CD, peer reviews, and business validation takes time (and time from the most experienced people, not from the AI).

Yeah, you're certainly not the only one. For me the implementation part has always been a breeze compared to all the "communication overhead" so to speak. And in any mature system it easily takes 90% of all time or more.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#486

Post by DaanDL »

"I still encounter those occasionally, but the number of problems requiring deep creative solutions feels like it is diminishing rapidly."

Just let it try and solve an issue with your advanced SQLAlchemy query and see it burn. xD

Re: I miss thinking hard

#487

Post by [deleted] »

tmtvl wrote: post #469
keyle wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't rebuke code today. You can't rebuke code tomorrow.

By induction that means either nobody can rebuke code or someone who can rebuke code can do that from the day they're born.

[deleted]

Re: I miss thinking hard

#488

Post by jatora »

gyomu wrote: post #32

This 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…

Yeah? And then you continue prompting and developing, and go through a very similar iterative process, except now it's faster and you get to tackle more abstract, higher level problems.

"Most developers don't know the assembly code of what they're creating. When you skip assembly you trade the very thing you could have learned to fully understand the application you were trying to make. The end result is a sad simulacrum of the memory efficiency you could have had."

This level of purity-testing is shallow and boring.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#489

Post by dropofwill »

heliumtera wrote: post #430
Hendrikto wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens. But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if Tarantino just typed “Write a gangster movie.” into a prompt field.

And if he did, why would I prefer using his prompt instead of mine? "Write a gangster movie that I like", instead of "...a movie this other guy likes". But because this is not the case, we appreciate Tarantino more than we appreciate gangster movies. It is about the process.

This is exactly the process happening in the music space with Suno. Go to their subreddit, they all talk about how they only listen to ‘their’ songs, for the exact reasons you list.

Its bleak out there.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#490

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #286
helloplanets wrote: post #64

Earlier 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…

Fair enough but I am a programmer because I like programming. If I wanted to be a product manager I could have made that transition with or without LLMs.

I’m a programmer (well half my job) because I was a short (still short) fat (I got better) kid with a computer in the 80s.

Now, the only reason I code and have been since the week I graduated from college was to support my insatiable addictions to food and shelter.

While I like seeing my ideas come to fruition, over the last decade my ideas were a lot larger than I could reasonably do over 40 hours without having other people working on projects I lead. Until the last year and a half where I could do it myself using LLMs.

Seeing my carefully designed spec that includes all of the cloud architecture get done in a couple of days - with my hands on the wheel - that would have taken at least a week with me doing some work while juggling dealing with a couple of other people - is life changing

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