AI doesn’t eliminate deep thinking; mediocre companies and minds do. Don't blame everything to AI and find a true company and find a way to join them.
I miss thinking hard
701–710 of 764 posts
Re: I miss thinking hard
#702I 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."
The bloodless pragmatists aided and abetted them. Those who have no apparent values. Only short-term, terminally idiotic obsession with building things, creating value, creating business value, or whatever the pragmatist posturing of the day is.
Now they can have the fruits of their labor. Nothing. But why would they even want that? It’s not about getting something out of it. Or maintaining a living. It’s about building things.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#703Earlier 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 if OP had said "I miss getting paid for (a particular type of) thinking hard" I would find it to be a lot more agreeable. But he's just saying he misses it in general. I think that's what I (and, from OP's summary, many other people) find confusing. Can't you still do it? AI is not physically preventing you from thinking hard.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#704Just 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…
So today are you doing it again? Or did you compress a week's worth of work into a few hours and the rest of the week is shot because you don't expand?
I did do it again, and spent time figuring out how to do it even more.
The cool thing though is that I could have chosen to do something else, too. I’m not at a loss for fulfilling, productive things to do. AI won’t change that.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think there's a certain kind of irony in being asked externally to enjoy the rubbish I've been given to eat. It's still rubbish.
You sit at a desk.
You get paid in the top 1% globally
You have benefits
Some hope or dreams for what to do with your future, life after work, retirement.
You get to work with other people, overseas.
Talk to those contractors sometimes. They are under tremendous pressure. They are mistreated. One wrong move, they're gone. They undergo tremendous prejudices, and soft racism everyday especially by us FTEs.
You find out that they struggle with the drudgery as well, looking for solutions, better understanding, etc.
We all feel disposable by our corporate masters, but they feel it even more so.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Bingo -- 95% of work is people problems.
The coding is the easy part.
With LLMs and advanced models, even more so.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#707Every 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…
Honestly, it's about creating guardrails, and forcing the machine to stay within them.
You create the pattern. You describe the constraints. And then make it do the gruntwork.
If it's starting from nothing, and you let it be "creative" you will hate the results.
It's just a tool like any other. Hold the power drill firmly in hand and make sure you have your safety goggles on when playing with the band saw.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends. Temperature is a variable. If you really need determinism, you could build a LLM for that. Non-determinism can be a good feature though.
How would you do that? If it's possible, it seems strange that someone hasn't done it already.
Totally possible and we can already do it ! Simply put, just set the temperature to 0 and reuse the same seed. But it's just not what people really want, and providers are reluctant because they cost up to 5x more to generate.
It's also not 100% non-deterministic, because cloud providers don't run on the same hardware, with the same conditions required for producing the same output. So, in practice, not so good, but in theory if you need it and can afford it, you can.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#709Re: I miss thinking hard
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just described the burden of outsourcing programming.
YES! AI assistance in programming is a service, not a tool. You are commissioning Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. to write the program for you.
Yes, but as with outsourcing those who are making such decisions often lack the awareness, or even skills, to properly specify the requirements and be able to evaluate the results.