Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 764 posts

Re: I miss thinking hard

#671

Post by noslenwerdna »

ericmcer wrote: post #617
noslenwerdna wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++.

Are you saying I was incorrect for feeling that way?

The reason is that you no longer really know what's going on. (And yes, that feeling would be the same if C++ had as rich a library of packages as python for numerical analysis.)

If you are doing something that requires precision you need to know everything that is happening in that library. Also IIRC, I think not knowing what type something is bothered me at the time.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#672

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

croes wrote: post #655
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing happens if you are the head cook in a restaurant. If you are a cook wanting to open a restaurant, you will be delegating, the same thing with AI. If you are fine only doing what your hands can possibly do in the time allotted, go ahead and cook in your kitchen. But I need to make money to be able to trade for the food I eat.

You will make money but the others are the artists. That’s the whole point. You become a customer of an AI service, you get what you want but it wasn’t done by you. You get money but not the feeling of accomplishment from cracking a problem. Like playing a video game following a solution or solving a crossword puzzle with google.

Check this out: https://imgur.com/a/aVxryBf

It's a carved wooden dragon that my dad got from Indonesia (probably about 50 years ago).

It's hard to appreciate, if you aren't holding it, but it weighs a lot, and is intricately carved, all over.

I guarantee that the carver used a Dremel.

I still have a huge amount of respect for their work. That wood is like rock. I would not want to carve it with hand tools.

There's just some heights we can't reach, without a ladder.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#673

Post by wtetzner »

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…

If you're only building things that have been built before, then sure, though I'd argue we already had solutions for that before LLMs.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#674

Post by wtetzner »

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…

> plugging them together like LEGOs

Aren't Legos known for their ability to enable creativity and endless possibilities? It doesn't feel that different from the clay analogy, except a bit coarser grained.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#675

Post by wtetzner »

jatora wrote: post #488
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…

Yeah? And then you continue prompting and developing, and go through a very similar iterative process, except now it's faster and you get to tackle more abstract, higher level problems. "Most developers don't know the assembly code of what they're creating. When you skip assembly you trade the very thing you could have learned to fully understand the application you were trying to make. The end result is a sad simula…

I don't think this comparison holds up. With a higher-level language, the material you're building with is a formal description of the software, which can be fed back into a compiler to get a deterministic outcome.

With an LLM, you put in a high-level description, and then check in the "machine code" (generated code).

Re: I miss thinking hard

#676

Post by wtetzner »

boredtofears wrote: post #76
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 dunno, when you've made about 10,000 clay pots its kinda nice to skip to the end result, you're probably not going to learn a ton with clay pot #10,001. You can probably come up with some pretty interesting ideas for what you want the end result to look like from the onset. I find myself being able to reach for the things that my normal pragmatist code monkey self would consider out of scope - these are often not u…

> you're probably not going to learn a ton with clay pot #10,001

Why not just use a library at that point? We already have support for abstractions in programming.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#677

Post by skydhash »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #648
skydhash wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? There can be. But you’d have to map the libraries to opcodes and then count the cycles. That’s what people do when they care about that particular optimization. They measure and make guaranties.

That’s not realistic with any processor that does branch prediction, cache hits vs cache misses etc

You can easily compute the worst cases. All the details are in the specs of the processor.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#678

Post by washadjeffmad »

hnfong wrote: post #94
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 I understand what the author is trying to say. We miss thinking "hard" about the small details. Maybe "hard" isn't the right adjective, but we all know the process of coding isn't just typing stuff while the mind wanders. We keep thinking about the code we're typing and the interactions between the new code and the existing stuff, and keep thinking about potential bugs and issues. (This may or may not be "har…

I work with a lot of artists, and selling them on (not totally rejecting) AI has largely been unsuccessful until they both understand the analogies and the specifics of what different tools do.

AI makes you the manager. The models are like GRAs or contract workers, maybe new to their fields but with tireless energy, and you need to be able to instruct them correctly and evaluate their outputs. None of them can do everything, and you'll need to carefully hire the ones you want based on the work you need, which means breaking workflows into batchable parts. If you've managed projects before, you've done this.

Right now, my focus is improving pipelines in composition and arrangement based on an artist's corpus. A lot of them just want to be more productive, and it's a slog to write, then break into parts, etc using modern notation software.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#679

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

croes wrote: post #669
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good is a “feeling of accomplishment” as I am on the street homeless, hungry and naked?

Pretty B/W view. The feeling of accomplishment is the part that makes a job interesting, if it’s just about money it becomes dull. And don’t forget, it’s more likely to find someone cheaper who can write the same prompts as you than people with the same kind of experience in cracking problems.

To tackle the second part first, do you think creating finely crafted bespoke code is going to save a mid level ticket taker (not referring to you of course) who can take well defined requirements and create code is going to save anyone’s job - ie “a human LLM”?

Those types of developers on the enterprise dev side - where most developers work - were becoming a commodity a decade ago and wages have been basically stagnant. Now those types of developers are finding it hard to stand out and get noticed.

The trick is to move “up the stack” and closer to the customer whether that be an internal customer or external customer and be able to work at a higher level of scope, impact and ambiguity.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

It’s been well over a decade and 6 jobs ago that I had to do a coding interview to prove I was able “to codez real gud”, every job I’ve had since then has been more concerned with whether I was “smart and get things done”. That could mean coding, leading teams, working with “the business”, being on Zoom calls with customers, flying out to the customers site, or telling a PE backed company with low margins that they didn’t need a team of developers, they needed to outsource complete implementations to other companies.

I’ve always seen coding as grunt work. But the only way to go from requirements -> architectural vision -> result and therefore getting money in my pocket.

My vision was based on what I could do myself in the allotted time at first and then what I could do with myself + leading a team. Now it’s back to what I can do by myself + Claude Code and Codex.

As far as the first question, my “fun” during my adult life has come from teaching fitness classes until I was 35 and running with friends in charity races on the weekend, and just hanging out, spending time with my (now grown) stepsons after that and for the past few years just spending time with my wife and traveling, concerts, some “digital nomadding” etc

Re: I miss thinking hard

#680

Post by hirvi74 »

docmars wrote: post #599
dahart wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> choosing to use AI isn't all or nothing.

That's how I have been using AI the entire time. I do not use Claude Code or Codex. I just use AI to ask questions instead of parsing the increasingly poor Google search results.

I just use the chat options in the web applications with manual copy/pasting back and forth if/when necessary. It's been wonderful because I feel quite productive, and I do not really have much of an AI dependency. I am still doing all of my work, but I can get a quicker answer to simple questions than parsing through a handful of outdated blogs and StackOverflow answers.

If I have learned one thing about programming computers in my career, it is that not all documentation (even official documentation) was created equally.

Post reply on HN