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I’m spending months coding the old way

miguelconner.substack.com

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Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#51

Post by moregrist »

alemwjsl wrote: post #33
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #21

This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he…

Yep and after 6 hours don't reach for LLM, instead: * Ask someone to come over and look * Come back the next day, work on something else * Add comment # KNOWN-ISSUE: ...., and move on and forget about it. But year spent days on a bug at work before ha ha!

> Come back the next day, work on something else

This is a tried and true way of working on puzzles and other hard problems.

I generally have 2-4 important things in flight, so I find myself doing this a lot when I get stuck.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#52

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

voidfunc wrote: post #42
Trasmatta wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES. I don't know how many multi WEEK sessions of debugging I've been through in my career. Frustrating, but so many valuable lessons learned in the process. LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important.

If I told someone I spent a week debugging a problem these days I think I would get laughed out of the call. Even a day might hit somw chuckles. If you cant fix the bug just slop some code over it so its more hidden. This is all gonna be fascinating in 5-10 years.

This does depend on who you are; If you're a senior with 10+ years of experience, it's a failure of your abilities to cut your losses or know when to seek help if you take far too long debugging something.

But for juniors, it's invaluable experience. And as a field we're already seeing problems resulting from the new generations of juniors being taught with modern web development, whose complexity is very obstructing of debugging.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#53

Post by LeCompteSftware »

Trasmatta wrote: post #48
encrux wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t miss multi week debugging sessions. Having a tool that instantly searches through the first 50 pages of google and comes up with a reasonable solution is just speeding up what I would have done manually anyways. Would I have learned more about (and around) the system I‘m building? Absolutely. I just prefer making my system work over anything else, so I don’t mind losing that.

The multi week debugging sessions weren't fun, but that doesn't mean they weren't valuable and important and a growth and learning opportunity that we now will no longer experience.

IMO the more salient point is that bugs requiring multiple weeks of human work aren't going away! Claude has actually not been trained on, say, a mystifying and still poorly-explained Java concurrency bug I experienced in 2012, which cost a customer $150,000. Now in 2026 we have language-side tooling that mitigates that bug and Claude can actually help a lot with the rewrite. But we certainly don't have language tooling around the mysterious (but now perfectly well-explained) bug I experienced in 2017 around daylight saving's time and power industry peak/off-peak hours. I guess I haven't asked, but I can almost guarantee Claude would be no help there whatsoever.

Just so many confusing things go wrong in real-world software, and it is asinine to think that Mythos finding a ton of convoluted memory errors in legacy native code means we've solved debugging. People should pay more attention to the conclusion of "Claude builds a C compiler" - eventually it wasn't able to make further progress, the code was too convoluted and the AI wasn't smart enough. What if that happens at your company in 2027, and all the devs are too atrophied to solve the problem themselves?

I don't think we're "doomed" like some anti-AI folks. But I think a lot of companies - potentially even Anthropic! - are going to collapse very quickly under LLM-assisted technical debt.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#54

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

hallway_monitor wrote: post #24
sho_hn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers? Serious question.

Junior developers have always been a lot less effective than senior developers. We will need new senior developers so we will need to train junior developers. Maybe we train them by forcing them to do things the hard way. The slow way. By hand. Because if we let them do things the fast way they are going to cause some serious damage.

Who's going to be doing that?

Employers were already refusing to hire juniors, even when 0.5-1 years' salary for a junior would be cheaper than spending the same on hiring a senior.

They'll never accept intentionally "slower" development for the greater good.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#55

Post by slopinthebag »

thesz wrote: post #35
lrvick wrote: post #17

I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way. What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and jus…

From what I remember, typical new C++ debugged code speed is about 20-25K lines per year, lines that are non-blank, non-comment and not completely verifiable by compiler. E.g., standalone bracket or comma or semicolon are not lines of code, function header is too not a line of code, but computation, conditions and loops are. This is from old IBM statistics, I learned about it circa 2007. If we assume that there are 5…

LOL. If you look at their comment history, they sure are typing a lot of characters for their wrists.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#56

Post by culi »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #2

This is awesome! I myself did a 12 weeks batch at RC (W1'24) and had an absolute blast. Happy coding! Stay curious.

Huge fan of RC. Have a close friend that did it. I've been so close to applying multiple times in my life but the timing just never quite works out

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#57

Post by echelon »

Trasmatta wrote: post #34
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #21

This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he…

YES. I don't know how many multi WEEK sessions of debugging I've been through in my career. Frustrating, but so many valuable lessons learned in the process. LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important.

> LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important

The time wasted thinking our craft matters more than solving real world problems?

The amount of ceremony we're giving bugs here is insane.

Paraphrasing some of y'all,

> "I don't have to spend a day stepping through with a debugger hoping to repro"

THAT IS NOT A PROBLEM!

We're turning sand into magic, making the universe come alive. It's as if we just got electricity and the internet and some of us are still reminiscing about whale blubber smells and chemical extraction of kerosene.

The job is to deliver value. Not miss how hard it used to be and how much time we wasted finding obscure cache invalidation bugs.

Only algorithms and data structures are pure. Your business logic does not deserve the same reverence. It will not live forever - it's ephemeral, to solve a problem for now. In a hundred years, we'll have all new code. So stop worrying and embrace the tools and the speed up.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#59

Post by glhaynes »

Trasmatta wrote: post #48
encrux wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t miss multi week debugging sessions. Having a tool that instantly searches through the first 50 pages of google and comes up with a reasonable solution is just speeding up what I would have done manually anyways. Would I have learned more about (and around) the system I‘m building? Absolutely. I just prefer making my system work over anything else, so I don’t mind losing that.

The multi week debugging sessions weren't fun, but that doesn't mean they weren't valuable and important and a growth and learning opportunity that we now will no longer experience.

Seems like there's a good argument to be made that we'll have plenty of opportunities for valuable growth and learning, just about different things. Just like it's always been with technology. The machine does some of the stuff I used to do so now I do some different stuff.
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