501–510 of 764 posts
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Money. It's always money. It was always money.
Couldn't agree more. AI as it's designed today is very heavy on the "f u; got mine" vibe.
I still love the work, but to say I’m disillusioned by the industry is an understatement.
i was working for months on an entity resolution system at work. i inherited the basic algo of it: Locality Sensitive Hashing. Basically breaking up a word into little chunks and comparing the chunk fingerprints to see which strings matched(ish). But it was slow, blew up memory constraints, and full of false negatives (didn't find matches).
of course i had claude seek through this looking to help me and it would find things. and would have solutions super fast to things that I couldn't immediately comprehend how it got there in its diff.
but here's a few things that helped me get on top of lazy mode. Basically, use Claude in slow mode. Not lazy mode:
1. everyone wants one shot solutions. but instead do the opposite. just focus on fixing one small step at a time. so you have time to grok what the frig just happened. 2. instead of asking claude for code immediately, ask for more architectural thoughts. not claude "plans". but choices. "claude, this sql model is slow. and grows out of our memory box. what options are on the table to fix this." and now go back and forth getting the pros and cons of the fixes. don't just ask "make this faster". Of course this is the slower way to work with Claude. But it will get you to a solution you more deeply understand and avoid the hallucinations where it decides "oh just add where 1!=1 to your sql and it will be super fast". 3. sign yourself up to explain what you just built. not just get through a code review. but now you are going to have a lunch and learn to teach others how these algorithms or code you just wrote work. you better believe you are going to force yourself to internalize the stuff claude came up with easily. i gave multiple presentations all over our company and to our acquirers how this complicated thing worked. I HAD TO UNDERSTAND. There's no way I could show up and be like "i have no idea why we wrote that algorithm that way". 4. get claude to teach it to you over and over and over again. if you spot a thing you don't really know yet, like what the hell is is this algorithm doing. make it show you in agonizingly slow detail how the concept works. didn't sink in, do it again. and again. ask it for the 5 year old explanation. yes, we have a super smart, over confident and naive engineer here, but we also have a teacher we can berate with questions who never tires of trying to teach us something, not matter how stupid we can be or sound.
Were there some lazy moments where I felt like I wasn't thinking. Yes. But using Claude in slow mode I've learned the space of entity resolution faster and more thoroughly than I could have without it and feel like I actually, personally invented here within it.
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…
But at that point, will I even have the ability to distinguish a good solution from a bad one? How would I know, if I’ve been relying on AI to evaluate if ideas are good or not? I’d just be pushing mediocre solutions off as my own, without even realising that they’re mediocre.
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While there is still a market for artisanal furniture, dishes and clothes most people buy mass-produced dishes, clothes and furniture. I wonder if software creation will be in a similar place. There still might be a small market for handmade software but the majority of it will be mass produced. (That is, by LLM or even software itself will mostly go away and people will get their work done via LLM instead of "apps")
Acceptance of mass production is only post establishment of quality control. Skipping over that step results in a world of knock offs and product failures. People buy Zara or H&M because they can offload the work of verifying quality to the brand. This was a major hurdle that mass manufacturing had to overcome to achieve dominance.
Hence why a lot of software development is gluing libraries together these days.
You know, I was expecting what the post would say and was prepared to dunk on it and just tell them to stop using ai then, but the builder/thinker division they presented got me thinking. How ai/vibe coding fulfills the builder, not the thinker, made me realize that I'm basically 100% thinker, 0% builder, and that's why I don't really care at all about ai for coding. I'll spend years working on a from scratch OS kern…
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>> Coding is like That description is NOT coding, coding is a subset of that. Coding comes once you know what you need to build, coding is the process of you expressing that in a programming language and as you do so you apply all your knowledge, experience and crucially your taste, to arrive at an implementation which does what's required (functionally and non-functionally) AND is open to the possibility of change i…
It's all individual. That's like saying writing only happens when you know exactly the story to tell. I love open a blank project with a vague idea of what I want to do, and then just start exploring while I'm coding.
I think perhaps moving the goal posts to demand better quality and performance might force people who rely on AI to "think hard". Like your app works fine, now make it load in under a second on any platform.
I'm not sure how you live and work in the US, but here in Sweden, in my experience, it's more focused on results than sitting at your desk 9-5.
So AI does enable me to take more free time, be outside more when the sun is out, because I finish my tasks faster.
I'm just afraid that managers will start demanding more, demand that we increase our output instead of our work life balance. But in that case I at least have the seniority to protest.
I was a software and systems developer on cool shit, but I realized I enjoyed solving hard problems more than how I solved them. That led me to a role that is about solving hard problems. Sometimes I still use coding to do it, but that's just one tool of many.