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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#601

Post by docmars »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #490
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough but I am a programmer because I like programming. If I wanted to be a product manager I could have made that transition with or without LLMs.

I’m a programmer (well half my job) because I was a short (still short) fat (I got better) kid with a computer in the 80s. Now, the only reason I code and have been since the week I graduated from college was to support my insatiable addictions to food and shelter. While I like seeing my ideas come to fruition, over the last decade my ideas were a lot larger than I could reasonably do over 40 hours without having oth…

Not sure why this is getting downvoted, but you're right — being able to crank out ideas on our own is the "killer app" of AI so to speak.

Granted, you would learn a lot more if you had pieced your ideas together manually, but it all depends on your own priorities. The difference is, you're not stuck cleaning up after someone else's bad AI code. That's the side to the AI coin that I think a lot of tech workers are struggling with, eventually leading to rampant burnout.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#603

Post by tayo42 »

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.

Just have better meetings

If we could I think we would be doing that...

Re: I miss thinking hard

#604

Post by WorldMaker »

skydhash wrote: post #413
lsy wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the analogy to high level programming languages misunderstands the value of abstraction and notation. You can’t reason about the behavior of an English prompt because English is underspecified. The value of code is that it has a fairly strong semantic correlation to machine operations, and reasoning about high level code is equivalent to reasoning about machine code. That’s why even with all this advancement…

Yep. Any statement in python or others can be mapped to something that the machine will do. And it will be the same thing every single time (concurrency and race issue aside). There’s no english sentence that can be as clear. We’ve created formal notation to shorten writing. And computation is formal notation that is actually useful. Why write pages of specs when I could write a few lines of code?

There's also creative space inside the formal notation. It's not just "these are the known abstractions, please lego them together", the formal syntax and notation is just one part of the whole. The syntax and notation define the forms of poetry (here's the meter, here's the rhyme scheme, here's how the whitespace works), but as software developers we're still filling in the words that fit that meter and rhyme scheme and whitespace. We're adding the flowery metaphors in the way we choose variable names and the comments we choose to add and the order we define things or choose to use them.

Software developers can use the exact same "lego block" abstractions ("this code just multiplies two numbers") and tell very different stories with it ("this code is the formula for force power", "this code computes a probability of two events occurring", "this code gives us our progress bar state as the combination of two sub-processes", etc).

LLMs have only so many "stories" they are trained on, and so many ways of thinking about the "why" of a piece of code rather than mechanical "what".

Re: I miss thinking hard

#605

Post by bachittle »

The friction didn't disappear with AI tools. It just shifted. It's now more so about knowing when to trust an AI system versus when to dig into things yourself. The key insight is this: don't devalue learning things on your own. AI is a tool, but if the tool messes up, you need other tools in your toolbox. If you've only ever leaned on the AI, you're in trouble the moment it fails on something subtle.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#606

Post by yomismoaqui »

One of the best programmers I know is a self declared thinker that also is loving this new wave of agentic coding.

What he told me is that he loves thinking about the design of the code in his head, picking the best piece for each part of "the machine" and assembling it design in his head.

After doing that he loathed the act of translating that pure design into code. He told me it felt like pushing all that design through a thin tube through sheer force against syntax, wrong library versions, compiler errors, complex IDEs...

So for him, this is the best scenario possible.

I'm more a of a builder but after talking with him and reading the OP post maybe thinkers come in various shapes.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#607

Post by eleveriven »

AI doesn't remove difficulty so much as it removes friction, and friction was often what forced me into deeper conceptual understanding. When the path of least resistance is always "ask the model", my brain never has to build the scaffolding it used to

Re: I miss thinking hard

#608

Post by ericmcer »

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 don't have a strong mental model after agentic coding something in my experience.

It isn't an abstraction like assembly -> C. If you code something like: extract the raw audio data from an audio container, it doesn't matter if you write it in assembly, C, Javascript, whatever. You will be able to visualize how the data is structured when you are done. If you had an agent generate the code the data would just be an abstraction.

It just isn't worth it to me. If I am working with audio and I get a strong mental model for what different audio formats/containers/codecs look like who knows what creative idea that will trigger down the line. If I have an agent just fix it then my brain will never even know how to think in that way. And it takes like... a day...

So I get it as a optimized search engine, but I will never just let it replace understanding every line I commit.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#609

Post by ge96 »

Last weekend, was struggling with traversing nested trees/recursion was funny. I did eventually solve it but probably shows my tier as a dev, not FAANG tier for sure.
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