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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#511

Post by a13o »

electsaudit0q wrote: post #449

[dead]

I’ve given these sorts of haystack search struggles completely over to the LLM. Whether it’s finding a bug in code or searching documentation for the answer, I view it as a near-obsolete skill. The past couple of decades it was important to know how to chase down documentation and zero in on the one line of config you were missing. Now it’s not.

I don’t view this as a hollowing out of my skill tree, I view it as freeing myself to focus on modern skills I need to develop. Such as learning how to steer LLM context windows towards maintainable solutions in large codebases.

I’m sure I’ll be thankful now and then that I know how to manually sift through stack traces for answers. But I expect those moments to be rarer and rarer. I basically never look at machine code, but I bet that used to be an important skill for programmers many decades ago.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#512

Post by treszkai »

satvikpendem wrote: post #277
anavat wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of compound efficiency and technological enablement. Or, risking to beat the metaphor to death, because over a span of time I'll cross many more deserts than I would have on a camel, and because I'll cross deserts that I wouldn't even try crossing on a camel.

Why does it matter how many deserts you cross if you never get to where you want to go? I similarly can take 10 flights across oceans but never end up in the city I'm trying to visit. Sounds like in your metaphor the person is just crossing desserts because they want to with no goal or destination in mind.

Maybe you wanted to visit Mexico and your dream was specifically about Cancún, but then you ended up in Veracruz and were like "oh well, it is Mexico after all, I'd rather be here and visit five other countries similarly than only a single one with my dream city."

Re: I miss thinking hard

#513

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Jagerbizzle wrote: post #491
darkwater wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, just these past two weeks. I tried to reuse an implementation I had used for another project, it took me a day to modify it (with Codex), I tried it out and it worked fine with a few hundred documents.

Then I tried to push through 50000 documents, it crashed and burned like I suspected. It took one day to go from my second more complicated but more scalable spec where I didn’t depend on an AWS managed service to working scalable code.

It would have taken me at least a week to do it myself

Re: I miss thinking hard

#514

Post by csummers »

I definitely identify with the "Thinker" described in this post, but I am routinely mulling over ideas and problems (multiple hours, days, and weeks) with the help of LLMs now.

One of the benefits of LLM usage is to figure out the boundaries of your own knowledge and that of humanity's existing knowledge--at least for the LLM's training data.

Enumerating through existing options and existing solutions to problems gets you to the knowledge boundary sooner--where the real work begins! While faster with LLMs, I don't see this process as much different than bouncing ideas off of colleagues (and critiquing your own thoughts).

However, the difference is likely human's unpredictable ability to apply creativity throughout the process...such that a new solution may arise at any point and leap-frog existing solutions/explanations. (Think Einstein taking known data from Lorentz, Michelson, Morley plus Maxwell's equations on light and coming up with special relativity.)

Re: I miss thinking hard

#516

Post by pixl97 »

dwrolvink wrote: post #175
CamperBob2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said when cameras first hit the scene.

Interesting comparison. I remember watching a video on that. Landscape paintings, portraits, etc, was an art that has taken an enormous nosedive. We, as humans, have missed out on a lot of art because of the invention of the camera. On the other hand, the benefits of the camera need no elaboration. Currently AI had a lot of foot guns though, which I don't believe the camera had. I hope AI gets to that point too.

>We, as humans, have missed out on a lot of art because of the invention of the camera.

I so severely doubt this to the point I'd say this statement is false.

As we go toward the past art was expensive and rare. Better quality landscape/portraits were exceptionally rare and really only commissioned by those with money, which again was a smaller portion of the population in the time before cameras. It's likely there are more high quality paintings now per capita than there were ever in the past, and the issue is not production, but exposure to the high quality ones. Maybe this is what you mean by 'miss out'?

In addition the general increase in wealth coupled with the cost of art supplies dropping this opens up a massive room for lower quality art to fill the gap. In the past canvas was typically more expensive so sucky pictures would get painted over.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#517

Post by duskdozer »

vict7 wrote: post #423
yurishimo wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda saw this happen in realtime on reddit yesterday. Someone asked for advice on how to deal with a team that was in over their heads shipping slop. The crux of their question was fair, but they used a different LLM to translate their original thoughts from their native language into English. The prompt was "translate this to english for a reddit post" - nothing else. The LLM adding a bunch of extra formatting to…

I saw the same post and was a bit saddened that all the comments seemed to be focused on the implied hypocrisy of the OP instead of addressing the original concern. As someone that’s a bit of a fence-sitter on the matter of AI, I feel that using it in the way that OP did is one of the less harmful or intrusive uses.

I see it as worse because you could have put just as much effort in - less even - and gotten a better result just sticking it in a machine translator and pasting that.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#518

Post by dimitrios1 »

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…

It doesn't have to be soul crushing.

Just like people more, and have better meetings.

Life is what you make it.

Enjoy yourself while you can.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#519

Post by MrDrDr »

I also recognise ‘thinking’ as a valuable and enjoyable activity - and have also obsessed about problems for days (even in my sleep)to reach a deeper understanding. But I think the issue here is the impact of AI on just that - ‘understanding’. It might be true that with AI we no longer need to have as deeper understanding in order to ‘ship’. And even if that is true I think there are plenty of other domains you can think deeply about without AI getting in the way e.g. mathematics or philosophy - where is object is often to understand in and of itself, not just the products it may generate.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#520

Post by [deleted] »

Gigachad wrote: post #263
9rx wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never felt more mental exhaustion than after a LLM coding session. I assume that is a result of it requiring me to think harder too.

In my experience it's because you switch from writing code to reviewing code someone else wrote. Which is massively more difficult than writing code yourself.

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