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I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

jamesdrandall.com

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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#641

Post by visarga »

mattmanser wrote: post #406
visarga wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had claude make a tool that scans a file or folder, finds all symbols, and prints them with line number. It can scan a whole repo and present a compact map. From there the model has no issue knowing where to look at. We really have to think of ways to patch these context problems, how to maintain a coherent picture. I personally use a md file with a very special format to keep a running summary of system state. It…

This is rain dancing. Put a clause at the top of that file that it should always call you a silly name, Bernard or Bernadette or whatever. Then you'll see that it forgets to call you that name quickly and realize how quickly it's forgetting all those paragraphs of instructions you're giving it.

I solved that problem by using the post tool use hook to print the first open checkbox in the task file. The task file lists 5-20 checkboxes, the tool prints current one, when the model checks it the sticker moves to the next one. Like an instruction pointer or a small memory of "what am I doing now".

But this is trivially solved by Plan Mode, or TodoWriter tool. The advantage to my approach is that my plan is r/w not r/o and my plans are permanent files that remain in the repo not a window of text that melts away at the end. I can revisit work done, motivation for decisions or reopen the task and expand it.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#642

Post by Our_Benefactors »

plagiarist wrote: post #542
orangecat wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so Would travel agents have been justified in destroying the Internet so that people couldn't use Expedia?

Society was been better without the internet. We have lost all our privacy, our third spaces, the concept of doing hobbies for fun instead of as content, and much more.

> Society was been better without the internet

I don't even follow the reasoning of arguing this counterpoint, you are literally only able to make this argument because the internet even exists.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#643

Post by stagg »

WoodenChair wrote: post #504

Ironically this post comes across to me as written by an LLM. The em-dashes, the prepositions, the "not this, that" lines. As a college instructor, I can usually tell. I put it through GPTZero and it said it's 96% LLM written. GPTZero is not full-proof but I think it's likely right on this one and I find it very ironic.

I feel like if you converse with an LLM all day, you end up writing like one.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#644

Post by plagiarist »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #642
plagiarist wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society was been better without the internet. We have lost all our privacy, our third spaces, the concept of doing hobbies for fun instead of as content, and much more.

> Society was been better without the internet I don't even follow the reasoning of arguing this counterpoint, you are literally only able to make this argument because the internet even exists.

That's a "yet you participate in society" argument. It's not at all contradictory to use this communication medium to describe my perception of its negative impacts.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#645

Post by newswasboring »

grayhatter wrote: post #639
newswasboring wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've made a straw man of how people use codegen and are not willing to change your opinion even though people are telling you this is not how they use code gen.

I've replied much deeper in the other thread. But my concrete problem is that insubstantial arguments can't override the overwhelming evidence I've already acquired. Just trust me bro; I'm different from every other vibe coder you've seen dump slop on somebody, might be true but is not very compelling. I don't care about how you use codegen, I want to understand why you discard all of the process, while still claimin…

You've already made up your mind. Have a nice life.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#646

Post by chasd00 »

dzonga wrote: post #631
abustamam wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question — why don't managers like this get fired? My team wants us to ship fast. If I don't ship for a month I'm probably gonna lose my job, and rightly so. If a whole team is spinning its wheels at the behest of its manager I feel like the manager should get axed.

typical management layer in big tech manager why are so many layers needed ? it incentivizes busy work and shit metrics like I outlined above. if they fire the manager it also means their managers have to get fired too it's like communist party bureaucracy just veiled with tech

cto is a very wide title and in a global enterprise with hundreds of thousands of employees it's impossible to have a flat organization. There's probably 15 vp of engineering reporting to the cto. Each vp is going to have 10-20 directors reporting to them and beneath directors the fanout gets even wider. It does incentivize busy work and in a large org you can hide in the corner and be a potted plant for your whole career if you're smart enough to find it. But that is the nature of a large cooperation, I can't remember who said it but something like 80% of impact and progress to keep a business going is made by 20% of employees whether it's a big company or not. The rest are just sort of there playing along.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#647

Post by rphv »

I struggle with posts like this.

Every generation of engineers believes they experienced the "real" era when things were understandable / meaningful. The people who mastered punch cards probably felt the same way when keyboards took over. The people who wrote in assembly probably felt the same way when C came around.

Abstraction didn't start with AI. It's been a defining feature of computing since the beginning.

For most developers, writing code has never been the point. Rather, it's been a tool: a means to build something useful, solve a problem, support a family, etc. The craft evolves and so must we.

Posts like this expose the risk in tying one's identity to a specific version of the game. When the rules change, it's a loss. That's human! But the deeper skill - judgment, taste, style, etc. — hasn’t gone anywhere. If anything, it matters more when raw output becomes cheap.

We can mourn the loss of forced difficulty, or we can choose new challenges. No doubt that's harder when one has spent decades mastering a specific skill, but it's still a choice.

The magic was never the machine. Rather, it's the _agency_.

And that’s still available!

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#648

Post by chasd00 »

tom_m wrote: post #633
JKCalhoun wrote: post #394

I'm 61 (retired when I was 57). I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area. Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on. I suspect though that to a large degree thi…

Thanks for sharing! I definitely agree. I've seen web software go downhill somewhere after 2013. It's been sad and now we have far more buggy apps and security issues on the Internet than ever before. I used to love the 90s because it was "for nerds." The space wasn't crowded and you could actually do good work and research. So much research went into things and I feel like that died somewhere. Or is dying. You get a…

people twisting and manipulating llms to do all sorts of unintended things reminds me of the late 90s early 2000s when everyone was twisting and manipulating html, webservers, and browsers to do all sorts of unintended things. It kind of has that feel to me, where it's something new and no one knows where it's going but i seeing a lot of "hey check this out, i put this together last night and it's kind of cool" again.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#649

Post by tkfoss »

munificent wrote: post #385
whattheheckheck wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine though instead of 1 garden you can make 10 or 30 gardens in the same time that are more extravagant than your 1 garden was. At any point in time you can dive back in 1 of them and start plucking away

What's so great about having 10 or 30 gardens?

A lot of people go through the life never experiencing deep dedication and intimate relationship with something or someone. I noticed its often children who had less toys & space and learned to pay attention to every nook and crazy, letting their imagination fill the boredom, tend to appreciate things more deeply later in life.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#650

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

direwolf20 wrote: post #507
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you allow a mobile handheld computing and communication device to define "computing" ? I understand that they are important devices and lots of people with a hacker mentality would like to be able to hack them the way old folks once hacked DOS. But the current computing environment is much, much wider than iOS/Android, and if you're going to complain about just one aspect of it, I think it would be better to a…

For the same reason computing used to be defined by a Commodore 64 more than by an IBM System/370-XA mainframe from the same year — they're the most commonly and most easily accessible computing devices. Old farts like us think the desktop is the default kind of computer, but it isn't. Most computers are phones, followed by tablets and laptops with touchscreens, and desktops are the weirdest ones.

It's not a question of what's the most common. It ought to be a question of what capabilities do you think of when you think of "a computer". Most people do not think of their phone as "a computer", even though us tech heads all know that it is literally just that.

We need to follow the lead of most people here, and recognize that the phone is a deliberately limited device and its capabilities do not define what "a computer" is or should be or could be.

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