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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#611

Post by Psillisp »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #606

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 th…

You can do all your thinking and minimal prompting.

I know Ralphs like to do all the prompting and no thinking.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#612

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

docmars wrote: post #601
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

What would I learn that I don’t already know? The exact syntax and property of Terraform and boto3 for every single one of the 150+ services that AWS offers? How to modify a React based front end written by another developer even though I haven’t and have actively stayed away from front end development for well over a decade?

Will a company pay me more for knowing those details? Will I be more affectively able to architect and design solutions that a company will pay my employer to contract me to do and my company pays me? They pay me decently not because I “codez real gud”. They pay me because I can go from empty AWS account, empty repo and ambiguous customer requirements to a working solution (after spending time talking to a customer) to a full well thought out architecture + code on time on budget and that meets requirements.

I am not bragging, I’m old those are table stakes to being able to stay in this game for 3 decades

Re: I miss thinking hard

#613

Post by eleveriven »

monch1962 wrote: post #142

As someone who's been coding for several decades now (i.e. I'm old), I find the current generation of AI tools very ... freeing. As an industry, we've been preaching the benefits of running lots of small experiments to see what works vs what doesn't, try out different approaches to implementing features, and so on. Pre-AI, lots of these ideas never got implemented because they'd take too much time for no definitive b…

I think this is the other side of the same coin, and it's a really important one. When time is scarce, especially with family and a life outside work, the ability to turn tiny, fragmented moments into forward progress is huge

Re: I miss thinking hard

#614

Post by jkkramer »

Just yesterday I noticed I was mentally EXHAUSTED after building out a feature with Claude Code.

I actually had to think really, really hard to keep up with the idiot savant as it cranked out code.

Correctness was extremely important for this feature. Claude would consistently make subtle mistakes, and I needed to catch them to keep things from going off the rails. I could have done it myself, but it would have taken MUCH longer.

I essentially compressed a week’s worth of work into a few hours, and my brain paid the price.

So yeah. You can use AI to replace your thinking, or you can use it to push yourself to your max potential.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#615

Post by ericmcer »

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…

Reminds me of all the parables about kings who "pretend to be a common man" for a day and walk among their subjects and leave with some new enlightenment.

The idea that you lose a ton of knowledge when you experience things through intermediaries is an old one.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#616

Post by Der_Einzige »

kabr wrote: post #147
adevilinyc wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you configure LLM température in coding agents, e.g. opencode?

https://opencode.ai/docs/agents/#temperature set it in your opencode.json

Note when I said "you have to hack it in", I mean you'll need to hack in support for modern LLM samplers like min_p, which enables setting temperature up to infinity (given min_p approaching 1) while maintaining coherence.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#617

Post by ericmcer »

noslenwerdna wrote: post #597
darepublic wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

How? Other then calling utility functions that C++ doesn't have you can't just like skip understanding what you are coding by using Python. If you are importing libraries that do stuff for you that wouldn't be any different than if someone wrote those libs in C++.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#619

Post by godelski »

jstummbillig wrote: post #323
alkonaut wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It's like the lumberjack working from home watching an enormous robotic forestry machine cut trees on a set of tv-screens. If he enjoyed producing lumber, then what he sees on those screens will fill him with joy. He's producing lots of lumber. He's much more efficient than with both axe and chainsaw. But if he enjoyed being in the forest, and _doesn't really care about lumber at all_ (Because it turns ou…

But now you are conflating solving problems with a personal preference of how the problem should be solved. This never bodes well (unless you always prefer picking the method best suited to solve the problem.)

A perfect solution never exists

Re: I miss thinking hard

#620

Post by CamperBob2 »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #177
CamperBob2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, and cameras changed art forever.

If you don't like change, then my recommendation is to steer clear of careers in either art or technology.
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