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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#531

Post by boredtofears »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #221
boredtofears wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience AI is pretty good at performance optimizations as long as you know what to ask for. Can't speak to firmware code or complex cryptography but my hunch is if it's in it's training dataset and you know enough to guide it, it's generally pretty useful.

> In my experience AI is pretty good at performance optimizations as long as you know what to ask for. This rather tells that the kind of performance optimizations that you ask for are very "standard".

As most are

Re: I miss thinking hard

#532

Post by rsyring »

tcgv wrote: post #523
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…

I get what he's pointing at: building teaches you things the spec can't, and iteration often reveals the real problem. That said, the framing feels a bit too poetic for engineering. Software isn't only craft, it's also operations, risk, time, budget, compliance, incident response, and maintenance by people who weren't in the room for the "lump of clay" moment. Those constraints don't make the work less human; they ju…

> That said, the framing feels a bit too poetic for engineering.

I wholeheartedly disagree but I tend to believe that's going to be highly dependent on what type of developer a person is. One who leans towards the craftsmanship side or one who leans towards the deliverables side. It will also be impacted by the type of development they are exposed to. Are they in an environment where they can even have a "lump of clay" moment or is all their time spent on systems that are too old/archaic/complex/whatever to ever really absorb the essence of the problem the code is addressing?

The OP's quote is exactly how I feel about software. I often don't know exactly what I'm going to build. I start with a general idea and it morphs towards excellence by the iteration. My idea changes, and is sharpened, as it repeatedly runs into reality. And by that I mean, it's sharpened as I write and refactor the code.

I personally don't have the same ability to do that with code review because the amount of time I spend reviewing/absorbing the solution isn't sufficient to really get to know the problem space or the code.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#533

Post by d-us-vb »

dns_snek wrote: post #240
abm53 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct… reading code is a much more difficult and ultimately, productive, task. I suspect those using the tools in the best way are thinking harder than ever for this reason.

> reading code is a much more difficult Not inherently, no. Reading it and getting a cursory understanding is easy, truly understanding what it does well, what it does poorly, what the unintended side effects might be, that's the difficult part. In real life I've witnessed quite a few intelligent and experienced people who truly believe that they're thinking "really hard" and putting out work that's just as good as t…

It depends on the language, paradigm (or lack thereof), quality/accuracy of the names.

My work’s codebase is 30 years of never-refactored C++. It takes an exceptional amount of focus and thinking to get even a cursory understanding of anything a particular method or class does or why it’s there.

But for languages like C, I agree with you (as long as function pointers aren’t used abused).

Re: I miss thinking hard

#534

Post by lelanthran »

phamilton wrote: post #77

I think harder because of AI. I have to think more rigorously. I have to find ways to tie up loose ends, to verify the result efficiently, to create efficient feedback loops and define categorical success criteria. I've thought harder about problems this last year than I have in a long time.

> I have to find ways to tie up loose ends, to verify the result efficiently, to create efficient feedback loops and define categorical success criteria.

So... you didn't have to do that prior to using agents?

Re: I miss thinking hard

#535

Post by d-us-vb »

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.

“can” has multiple meanings in English. It can express both epistemic (describing the world accurately as is) and dynamic (describing the capabilities and attributes of an object) modes. If used epistemically, then parent’s phraseology makes perfect sense since his epistemology makes no claim about an object’s variability across time.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#537

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

The best analogy I think is, if you just take Stack Overflow code solutions, smoosh over your code and hit compile / build, and move on without ever looking at "why it works" you're really not using your skills to the best of your ability, and it could introduce bugs you didn't expect, or completely unnecessary dependencies. With Stack Overflow you can have other people pointing out the issues with the accepted answer and giving you better options.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#538

Post by boredtofears »

skydhash wrote: post #434
belZaah wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the problem. If the complexity of what you are solving is in the business logic or, generally low, you are absolutely right. Manually coding a signup flow #875 is not my idea of fun either. But if the complexity is in the implementation, it’s different. Doing complex cryptography, doing performance optimization or near-hardware stuff is just a different class of problems.

Coding signup flow #875 should as easy as using a snippet tool or a code generator. Everyone that explains why using an LLM is a good idea always sound like living in the stone age of programming. There are already industrial level tools to get things done faster. Often so fast that I feel time being wasted describing it in english.

Of course I use code generation. Why would that be mutually exclusive from AI usage? Claude will take full advantage of it with proper instruction.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#540

Post by sodapopcan »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #537
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…

The best analogy I think is, if you just take Stack Overflow code solutions, smoosh over your code and hit compile / build, and move on without ever looking at "why it works" you're really not using your skills to the best of your ability, and it could introduce bugs you didn't expect, or completely unnecessary dependencies. With Stack Overflow you can have other people pointing out the issues with the accepted answe…

This keeps coming up again and again and again, but like how many times were you able to copy paste SO solution wholesale and just have it work? Other than for THE most simple cases (usually CSS) there would always have to be some understanding involved. Of course you don't always learn deeply every time, but the whole "copy paste off of stackoverflow" was always an exaggeration that is being used in seeming earnest.
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