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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#491

Post by Jagerbizzle »

darkwater wrote: post #350
Terr_ wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That embeds an assumption that the outsourced human workers are incapable of thought, and experience/create zero feedback loops of their own. Frustrated rants about deliverables aside, I don't think that's the case.

No. It just means the harsh reality: what's really soul crushing in outsourced work is having endless meetings to pass down / get back information, having to wait days/weeks/months to get some "deliverable" back on which iterate etc. Yes, outsourced human workers are totally capable of creative thinking that makes sense, but their incentive will always be throughput over quality, since their bosses usually give close…

Also, with an LLM you can tell it to throw away everything and start over whenever you want.

When you do this with an outsourced team, it can happen at most once per sprint, and with significant pushback, because there's a desire for them to get paid for their deliverable even if it's not what you wanted or suffers some other fundamental flaw.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#492

Post by abcde666777 »

Well, for programming work which is essentially repetition (e.g. making another website not unlike thousands of others), it's no surprise that AI programming can work wonders - you're essentially using a sophisticated form of copy paste.

But there's still a lot of programming out there which requires originality.

Speaking personally, I never was nor ever will be too interested in the former variety.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#493

Post by postit »

I usually think hard. I correlate subjects with different areas to find similarities.

What I miss is having other people who likes to think and not always pushing for shallow results

Re: I miss thinking hard

#494

Post by anymouse123456 »

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…

Having a background in fine art (and also knew Aral many years ago!), this prose resonates heavily with me.

Most of the OP article also resonated with me as I bounce back and forth between learning (consuming, thinking, pulling, integrating new information) to building (creating, planning, doing) every few weeks or months. I find that when I'm feeling distressed or unhappy, I've lingered in one mode or the other a little too long. Unlike the OP, I haven't found these modes to be disrupted by AI at all, in fact it feels like AI is supporting both in ways that I find exhilarating.

I'm not sure OP is missing anything because of AI per se, it might just be that they are ready to move their focus to broader or different problem domains that are separate from typing code into an IDE?

For me, AI has allowed me to probe into areas that I would have shied away from in the past. I feel like I'm being pulled upward into domains that were previously inaccessible.

I use Claude on a daily basis, but still find myself frequently hand-writing code as Claude just doesn't deliver the same results when creating out of whole cloth.

Claude does tend to make my coarse implementations tighter and more robust.

I admittedly did make the transition from software only to robotics ~6 years ago, so the breadth of my ignorance is still quite thrilling.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#495

Post by signatoremo »

Krssst wrote: post #266
socalgal2 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it's all abstraction. I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them but I'm happy to work on the new thing that uses what's already there. This is no different than many things. I could grow a tree and cut it into wood but I don't. I could buy wood and nails and brackets and make furniture but I don't. I instead just fill my ho…

OS and compilers have a deterministic public interface. They obey a specification developers know, so you they can be relied on to write correct software that depends on them even without knowing the internal behavior. Generative AI does not have those properties.

> They obey a specification developers know

Which spec? Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? You can’t even know that for sure if you roll your own code, with no 3rd party libraries.

Bugs are by definition issues arise when developers expect they code to do one thing, but it does another thing, because of unforeseen combination of factors. Yet we all are ok with that. That’s why we accept AI code. They work well enough.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#496

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Krssst wrote: post #266
socalgal2 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it's all abstraction. I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them but I'm happy to work on the new thing that uses what's already there. This is no different than many things. I could grow a tree and cut it into wood but I don't. I could buy wood and nails and brackets and make furniture but I don't. I instead just fill my ho…

OS and compilers have a deterministic public interface. They obey a specification developers know, so you they can be relied on to write correct software that depends on them even without knowing the internal behavior. Generative AI does not have those properties.

Yes but developers don’t have a deterministic interface. I still had to be careful about writing out my specs and make sure they were followed. At least I don’t have to watch my tone when my two mid level ticket taking developers - Claude and Codex - do something stupid. They also do it a lot faster

Re: I miss thinking hard

#497

Post by dwaite »

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…

Supposedly when Michelangelo was asked about how he created the statue of David, he said "I just chipped away everything that wasn’t David.”

Your work is influenced by the medium by which you work. I used to be able to tell very quickly if a website was developed in Ruby on Rails, because some approaches to solve a problem are easy and some contain dragons.

If you are coding in clay, the problem is getting turned into a problem solvable in clay.

The challenge if you are directing others (people or agents) to do the work is that you don't know if they are taking into account the properties of the clay. That may be the difference between clean code - and something which barely works and is unmaintainable.

I'd say in both cases of delegation, you are responsible for making sure the work is done correctly. And, in both cases, if you do not have personal experiences in the medium you may not be prepared to judge the work.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#498

Post by throwthrowuknow »

kimixa wrote: post #401
lambdaone wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Try writing more documentation. If your project is bigger than a one man team then you need it anyways and with LLM coding you effectively have an infinite man team.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#499

Post by rune-dev »

nunez wrote: post #162

I will never not be upset at my fellow engineers for selling out the ONE thing that made us valuable and respected in the marketplace and trying to destroy software engineering as a career because "Claude Code go brrrrrr" basically. It's like we had the means for production and more or less collectively decided "You know what? Actually, the bourgeoisie can have it, sure."

I find it fascinating how the “true believers” of AI and AGI, have essentially been manipulated by capitalists to undermine the value of their own labor.
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