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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#551

Post by JeremyNT »

keyle wrote: post #63

I don't get it. I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review. If anything, all we've changed is working at a higher level. The product is the same. But these people just keep mixing things up like "wow I got a ferrari now, watch it fly off the road!" Yeah so you got a tools upgrade; it's faster, it's more powerful. Keep it on the road or give up driving! We went from auto completing keywords, t…

> I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review.

Even if you "think just as hard" the act of physically writing things down is known to improve recall, so you're skipping a crucial step in understanding.

And when I review code, it's a different process than writing code.

These tradeoffs may be worth it, because we can ask the tools to analyze things for us just as easily as we can ask them to create things for us, but your own knowledge and understanding of the system is absolutely being degraded when working this way.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#552

Post by pelasaco »

I do every day.

I dont write just code, i do as well network engineering, network architecture. There is stuff that, at least until now, i cannot vibe.

I have a pet project where I dont use AI. It moves slowly but, to code, is my hobby.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#554

Post by dudewhocodes »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #324
nunez wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the entire flippin' problem. People are being forced to use these tools professionally at a stagering rate. It's like the industry is in its "training your replacement" era.

you don't like it? Find a place that doesn't enforce it. Can't find it? Then either build it or accept that you want a horse carriage while people want taxi.

How can you be so sure to think you're not replaceable? Because when you use the tools, you're giving data to companies to eventually get even you.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#556

Post by darkwater »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #518
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…

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.

It's not strictly soul-crushing for me, but I definitely don't like to waste time in non-productive meetings where everyone bullshits everyone else. Do you like that? Do you find it a good use of your time and brain attention capacity?

Re: I miss thinking hard

#557

Post by freudenschade »

electsaudit0q wrote: post #449

[dead]

I literally just went through this yesterday. Had a few failing tests in an unfamiliar domain. Took a cursory look, couldn't figure it out. Pasted the error messages into Claude to see if it could speed things up for me. We went back and forth for a while, pulling on different threads and trying various things. In the end, it gave up and essentially relaxed the test's assertions to make it pass.

I wasn't happy with that outcome, so I decided to invest some time in debugging through the test, tracing the flow of data, looking at the state of the stack frames and finally figured out what was wrong -- the solution was so simple and so obvious that had I just given the effort up front, it would have saved me some time and tokens.

It's a valuable lesson to take to heart. I think it's better to go from tinkering and trying it out yourself, than to go straight to AI and then giving it a go independently.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#558

Post by delbronski »

My favorite part of programming is thinking about the whole system before I write a single line of code. How will my data be structured? What does the UI look like? How do I structure the project? What tools do I use? What do I need to take out to make this simpler? Etc.

I think hard about this with a notebook and a pencil and a coffee. And I spend weeks and sometimes months thinking about this. I go deep. And then the actual coding is just the grunt work. I don’t hate it but I don’t love it. I couldn’t care less what language is written in as long as it accomplishes my goal. So AI works great for me in this step.

I think you can still use AI and think deeply. It just depends on your mindset and how you use it.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#559

Post by heliumtera »

dropofwill wrote: post #489
heliumtera wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if he did, why would I prefer using his prompt instead of mine? "Write a gangster movie that I like", instead of "...a movie this other guy likes". But because this is not the case, we appreciate Tarantino more than we appreciate gangster movies. It is about the process.

This is exactly the process happening in the music space with Suno. Go to their subreddit, they all talk about how they only listen to ‘their’ songs, for the exact reasons you list. Its bleak out there.

It is very different with music. Music and images fall into "just shit something and I don't care what is is" category. Most people prompting for things in this category will be satisfied with anything, they might not admit, but the degrees of freedom the model has is infinite. Now when you pin the output, let's say a character you generated, and ask for modifications WHILE KEEPING lots of characteristics, you reduce the degrees of freedom from infinite to a small, very constrained, set of states. There are workarounds but natively llms can't really do this. You ask the model to rotate an image, the hair becomes blue and the sword becames an axe.

With music this is much more pronounced because most people are musically illiterate, so even the basic mistakes while dragging characteristics over diffs becomes invisible. It's an interesting phenomenon I agree, but it says more about lack of taste and illiteracy of the common individual.

But on the point of "thinking hard", with music and artistic production in general, individuals (human with soul, not npc) crave for ideas and perspective. It is the play, the relationship between ideas that are hard to vocalize and describe but can be provocative. Because we cannot describe or understand, we have no choice other than provoke into another a similar contemplation.

But make no mistake, nobody is enjoying llm slop. They have fantasies that now they can produce something of value, or delegate this production. If this becomes true, instantly they lose and everyone goes directly to the source.

Art is specifically about communicating the inconceivable, cannot be delegated. If the tool is sufficient to produce art, then the expression is of the tool itself, now they ARE.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#560

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

vaylian wrote: post #252
oceanplexian wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding is not at all like working a lump of clay unless you’re still writing assembly. You’re taking a bunch of pre-built abstractions written by other people on top of what the computer is actually doing and plugging them together like LEGOs. The artificial syntax that you use to move the bricks around is the thing you call coding. The human element of discovery is still there if a robot stacks the bricks based on a…

> You’re taking a bunch of pre-built abstractions written by other people on top of what the computer is actually doing and plugging them together like LEGOs. Correct. However, you will probably notice that your solution to the problem doesn't feel right, when the bricks that are available to you, don't compose well. The AI will just happily smash together bricks and at first glance it might seem that the task is don…

Unless you limit your scope of problem solving to only what you can do yourself, you are going to have to delegate work - your abstraction is going to be specs and delegating work to other people and ensuring it works well together and follows the specs - just like working with an LLm.
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