Just stop using AI, bro.
I miss thinking hard
691–700 of 764 posts
Re: I miss thinking hard
#692Earlier quoted context omitted.
To put it another way, a high-temperature mad-libs machine will write a very unusual story, but that isn't necessarily the same as a clever story.
So why is this "temperature" not on, like, a rotary encoder? So you can just, like, tweak it when it's working against your intent in either direction?
AFAIK there's no algorithmic reason against it, but services might not expose the controls in a convenient way, or at all.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can easily compute the worst cases. All the details are in the specs of the processor.
Assuming also that you are not running on top of an operating system, running in a VM with “noisy neighbors”… I haven’t counted cycles since programming assembly on a 65C02 where you cooks save a clock cycle by accessing memory in the first page of memory - two opcodes to do LDA $02 instead of LDA $0201
Then assumes the opposite. Build an RTOS and don’t virtualize your software on top of it.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#694It's funny to think that all this discussion would not be happening if not for naive idealism embraced by software people fo decades, which enabled sharing everything they made after working hours for free and for everyone. That all it was hijacked by a handful of rich and not very altruistic people to enslave everyone comes as a big surprise. Who would have thought. I guess we arent that smart after all
Re: I miss thinking hard
#695Every time I try to use LLMs for coding, I completely lose touch with what it's doing, it does everything wrong and it can't seem to correct itself no matter how many times I explain. It's so frustrating just trying to get it to do the right thing. I've resigned to mostly using it for "tip-of-my-tongue" style queries, i.e. "where do I look in the docs". Especially for Apple platforms where almost nothing is documente…
There's clearly a gap in how or for what LLM-enthusiasts and I would use LLMs. When I've tried it, I've found it just as frustrating as you describe, and it takes away the elements of programming that make it tolerable for me to do. I don't even think I have especially high standards - I can be pretty lazy for anything outside of work.
I don't view LLMs as a substitute for thinking; I view them as an aid to research and study, and as a translator from pseudocode to syntax. That is, instead of trawling through all the documentation myself and double-checking everything manually, an LLM can pop up a solution of some quality, and if that agrees with how my mental model assumes it should work, I'll accept it or improve on it. And if I know what I want to do but don't know some exact syntax, like has happened in Swift recently as I explore macOS development, an LLM can translate my implementation ideas into something that compiles.
More to the point of the article, though, LLM-enthusiasts do seem to view it as a substitute for thinking. They're not augmenting their application of knowledge with shortcuts and fast-paths; they're entirely trusting the LLM to engineer things on its own. LLMs are great at creating the impression that they are suitable for this; after all, they are trained on tons of perfectly reasonable engineering data, and start to show all the same signals that a naïve user would use to tell quality of engineering... just without the quality.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#696I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.
My experience is similar, but I feel I'm actually thinking way harder than I ever was before LLMs.
Before LLMs once I was done with the design choices as you mention them - risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities, ... I cooked up a plan, and with that plan, I could write the code without having to think hard. Actually writing code was relaxing for me, and I feel like I need some relax between hard thinking sessions.
Nowadays we leave the code writing to LLMs because they do it way faster than a human could, but then have to think hard to check if the code LLM wrote satisfies the requirements.
Also reviewing junior developers' PRs became harder with them using LLMs. Juniors powered by AI are more ambitious and more careless. AI often suggests complicated code the juniors themselves don't understand and they just see that it works and commit it. Sometimes it suggests new library dependencies juniors wouldn't think of themselves, and of course it's the senior's role to decide whether the dependency is warranted and worthy of being included. Average PR length also increased. And juniors are working way faster with AI so we spend more time doing PR reviews.
I feel like my whole work somehow from both sides collapsed to reviewing code = from one side the code that my AI writes, from the other side the code that juniors' AI wrote, the amount of which has increased. And even though I like reviewing code, it feels like the hardest part of my profession and I liked it more when it was balanced with tasks which required less thinking...
Re: I miss thinking hard
#697Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just have better meetings If we could I think we would be doing that...
It's going to come across very naive and dumb, but I believe we can and people just aren't aware of or they simply aren't implementing the basics. Harvard Business Review and probably hundreds of other online content providers provide some simple rules for meetings yet people don't even do these. 1. Have a purpose / objective for the meeting. I consider meetings to fall into one of three broad categories information…
Probably like most businesses issues, it's a people problem. They have to care in the first place and idk if you can make people who don't care starting caring.
I agree the info is out there about how to run effective meetings.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#698I will never not be upset at my fellow engineers for selling out the ONE thing that made us valuable and respected in the marketplace and trying to destroy software engineering as a career because "Claude Code go brrrrrr" basically. It's like we had the means for production and more or less collectively decided "You know what? Actually, the bourgeoisie can have it, sure."
Will we see growing unemployment in software development? Maybe in the short term, but the appetite for software is not finite just as the appetite for any other kind of economic tool is not finite.
What percentage of software just ceases development when it's "good enough?" Probably a tiny percentage of all software, and which is mostly internal tooling.
It's going to push software development into the front of business development precisely because it will be cheaper to develop. The companies that will benefit from AI at least early on will all be software-driven companies since the results are undeniable. If software developers lose out when all of their companies become more efficient and new companies are built because it becomes easier to build software with small teams, I will be very surprised.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#699Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I read the article, I feel the same emotions that I feel if someone were to tell me "I keep trying to ride a bike but I keep falling off". My experience with LLMs is that the "lack of thinking" is mostly a quick trough you fall into before you come out the other side understanding how to deal with LLMs better. And yes, there's nothing wrong with relating to someone's experience, but mostly I just want to tell th…
If I can 'speak' for the OP: > I keep trying to ride a bike but I keep falling off I do not think this analogy is apt. The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. The article is lamenting the disappearing of something meaningful for the OP. One can feel sad for this alone. It is not an equation to balance: X is gone b…
I think the disagreement is over what exactly will be taken away. Certainly, like any technology that came before, AI will automate something. A programmer that finds joy in the raw act of coding- thinking of how to solve a problem and crafting the resulting logic line by line will indeed have something taken away by AI.
But there is a spectrum here. AI is a cruder, less fine-grained method of producing output. But it is a very powerful tool. Instead of "chiseling" the code line by line, it transforms relatively short prompts along with "context" into an imperfect, but much larger/fully formed product. The more you ask it to do in one go, usually the more imperfect it is. But the more precise your prompts, and the "better" your context, the more you can ask it to do while still hanging on to its "form" (always battling against the entropy of AI slop).
Incidentally, those "prompts" are the thinking. The point is to operate at the edge of LLM/machine competence. And as the LLMs become more capable, your vision can grow bigger.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#700I will never not be upset at my fellow engineers for selling out the ONE thing that made us valuable and respected in the marketplace and trying to destroy software engineering as a career because "Claude Code go brrrrrr" basically. It's like we had the means for production and more or less collectively decided "You know what? Actually, the bourgeoisie can have it, sure."
so AI can actually replace software engineers? It's relatively unusual to see someone who "believes in AI", but is "anti-AI", at least among the HN crowd.
Also, I find this view very selfish. Yes, let's gatekeep a ground-breaking technology because it will hurt my specific profession. That's literally what technological progress is- it always (at least temporarily) disadvantages a particular sector of workers that specialized in that skill for the benefit of society. It's just funny because usually it's the blue collar workers who have to worry about this and the white collar workers who sanctimoniously tell them to suck it up or learn to code.
Also, I can't help but chuckle slightly at the irony here. The entire purpose of software engineering and computers is automation, and the lost jobs in other sectors due to SWEs is massive. To spend one's entire life in pursuit of this and be morally opposed to the "ultimate" automation (automating this process of automation itself) is a bit rich.