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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#591

Post by sanderjd »

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 relate to this. But also, isn't it just that every human endeavor goes through an evolution from craft to commodity, which is sad for the craftsmen but good for everyone else, and that we happen to be the ones living through that for software?

For instance, I think about the pervasive interstate overpass bridge. There was a time long ago when building bridges was a craft. But now I see like ten of these bridges every day, each of which is better - in the sense of how much load they can support and durability and reliability - than the best that those craftsmen of yore could make.

This doesn't mean I'm in any way immune to nostalgia. But I try to keep perspective, that things can be both sad and ultimately good.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#592

Post by docmars »

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.

I think there's a certain kind of irony in being asked externally to enjoy the rubbish I've been given to eat. It's still rubbish.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#593

Post by convolvatron »

sanderjd wrote: post #591
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 relate to this. But also, isn't it just that every human endeavor goes through an evolution from craft to commodity, which is sad for the craftsmen but good for everyone else, and that we happen to be the ones living through that for software? For instance, I think about the pervasive interstate overpass bridge. There was a time long ago when building bridges was a craft. But now I see like ten of these bridges eve…

there is a presumption that the models we are using today are 'good enough'. by models I mean thinks like linkers and package managers, micro services and cluster management tools.

I personally think that we're not done evolving really, and to call it quits today would leave alot of efficiency and productivity on the table

Re: I miss thinking hard

#594

Post by FeteCommuniste »

tbmtbmtbmtbmtbm wrote: post #33

Make sure you start every day with the type of confidence that would allow you to refer to yourself as an intellectual one-percenter

He specifically wrote that his intellect was not in the "top 1%" of people who seemed to solve problems easily. His "1% status" was in the bullheadedness needed to pound away at a problem for days to find a solution.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#595

Post by socalgal2 »

Hendrikto wrote: post #375
socalgal2 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it's all abstraction. I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them but I'm happy to work on the new thing that uses what's already there. This is no different than many things. I could grow a tree and cut it into wood but I don't. I could buy wood and nails and brackets and make furniture but I don't. I instead just fill my ho…

> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens. But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if Tarantino just typed “Write a gangster movie.” into a prompt field.

Pulp Fiction, like many Tarantino movies, also gets much of its effect from using existing songs rather than using an all new soundtrack

Re: I miss thinking hard

#596

Post by saarraz1 »

sfn42 wrote: post #388
jstanley wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can move a layer up. Instead of pouring all of your efforts into making one single static object with no moving parts, you can simply specify the individual parts, have the machine make them for you, and pour your heart and soul into making a machine that is composed of thousands of parts, that you could never hope to make if you had to craft each one by hand from clay. We used to have a way to do this before…

It's more like the chess.com vs lichess example in my mind. On the one hand you have a big org, dozens of devs, on the other you have one guy doing a better job. It's amazing what one competent developer can do, and it's amazing how little a hundred devs end up actually doing when weighed down by beaurocracy. And lets not pretend even half of them qualify as competent, not to mention they probably don't care either.…

Agreed. Most people don't do anything and this might actually get them to produce code at an acceptable rate. I find that I often know what I need to do and just hitting the LLM until it does what I want is more work than writing the damn code (the latter also being a better way to be convinced that it works, since you actually know what it does and how). People are very bad code reviewers, especially those people who don't do anything, so making them full time code reviewers always seemed very odd to me.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#597

Post by noslenwerdna »

darepublic wrote: post #321
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…

>You can still jump on a camel and cross the desert in 3 days. Have at it, you risk dying, but enjoy. Or you can just rent a helicopter and fly over the damn thing in a few hours. Your choice. Don't let people tell you it isn't travelling. its obviously not wrong to fly over the desert in a helicopter. its a means to an end and can be completely preferable. I mean myself I'd prefer to be in a passenger jet even highe…

I felt the same way about python when I was switching from C++ to python for data analysis

Re: I miss thinking hard

#598

Post by WorldMaker »

oceanplexian wrote: post #186
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…

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…

Lego boxes include a set of instructions that implies there's only one way to assemble the contents, but that's sometimes an injustice to the creative space that Legos are built to provide. There can be a joy in algorithmically building the thing some other designers worked to make look nice, but there's a creative space outside the instructions, too.

The risk of LLMs laying more of these bricks isn't just loss of authenticity and less human elements of discovery and creation, it's further down the path of "there's only one instruction manual in the Lego box, and that's all the robots know and build for you". It's an increased commodification of a few legacy designers' worth of work over a larger creative space than at first seems apparent.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#599

Post by docmars »

dahart wrote: post #550
sgarland wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The higher-ups at my company are, like most places, breathlessly talking about how AI has changed the profession - how we no longer need to code, but merely describe the desired outcome. They say this as though it’s a good thing. They’re destroying the only thing I like about my job - figuring problems out. I have a fundamental impedance mismatch with my company’s desires, because if someone hands me a weird…

FWIW, when a problem truly is weird, AI & vibe coding tends to not be able to solve it. Maybe you can use AI to help you spend more time working on the weird problems. When I play sudoku with an app, I like to turn on auto-fill numbers, and auto-erase numbers, and highlighting of the current number. This is so that I can go directly to the crux of the puzzle and work on that. It helps me practice working on the hard…

You touch on an aspect of AI-driven development that I don't think enough people realize: choosing to use AI isn't all or nothing.

The hard problems should be solved with our own brains, and it behooves us to take that route so we can not only benefit from the learnings, but assemble something novel so the business can differentiate itself better in the market.

For all the other tedium, AI seems perfectly acceptable to use.

Where the sticking point comes in is when CEOs, product teams, or engineering leadership put too much pressure on using AI for "everything", in that all solutions to a problem should be AI-first, even if it isn't appropriate—because velocity is too often prioritized over innovation.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#600

Post by docmars »

WorldMaker wrote: post #584
sgarland wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The higher-ups at my company are, like most places, breathlessly talking about how AI has changed the profession - how we no longer need to code, but merely describe the desired outcome. They say this as though it’s a good thing. They’re destroying the only thing I like about my job - figuring problems out. I have a fundamental impedance mismatch with my company’s desires, because if someone hands me a weird…

Though it is not like management roles have ever appreciated the creative aspects of the job, including problem solving. Management has always wished to just describe the desired outcome and get magic back. They don't like acknowledging that problems and complications exist in the first place. Management likes to think that they are the true creatives for company vision and don't like software developers finding solu…

Agreed. I hate to say it, but if anyone thought this train of thought in management was bad now, it's going to get much worse, and unfortunately burnout is going to sweep the industry as tech workers feel evermore underappreciated and invisible to their leaders.

And worse: with few opportunities to grow their skills from rigorous thinking as this blog post describes. Tech workers will be relegated to cleaning up after sloppy AI codebases.

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