This reads like mourning the loss of _forced_ difficulty instead of taking responsibility for seeking _chosen_ difficulty.
Chosen difficulty is a huge part of being human (music, art, athletics, games, etc.). AI hasn't taken that away.
I miss thinking hard
711–720 of 764 posts
Re: I miss thinking hard
#712Listen... I'm just not going to use AI. This is a choice you can make kind of easily. I don't know why we have ten threads per day about AI angst. Just don't use it.
"But I will be left behind!" No you won't. A top 20 percentile dev is not being left behind by the 80% with AI. You'll drop to average, worst case. Unironically just get good.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#713Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not as much upfront. I had plenty of opportunities to adjust and correct along the way. With AI, the cost of not thinking upfront is high and the cost of being wrong in upfront decisions is low, so we bias towards that. But beyond that, I have been thinking deeply about AI itself, which has all sorts of new problems. Permissions, verification, etc.
> With AI, the cost of not thinking upfront is high and the cost of being wrong in upfront decisions is low, so we bias towards that. I don't really understand what that means: 1. If the cost of not thinking upfront is high, that means you need to think upfront. 2. If the cost of being wrong upfront is low, that means you don't need to think upfront. To me, it looks like those assertions contradict each other.
Maybe I expressed that clumsily.
With historical development, investing in hypotheticals can be wasteful. Make the fewest assumptions until you get real user feedback.
With AI, we make more decisions upfront. Being wrong about those decisions has a low cost because the investment in implementation is cheap. We are less worried about building the wrong things because we can just try again quickly. It's cheap to be wrong.
The more decisions we make upfront, the more hands-off we can be. A shallow set of decisions might stall out earlier than a deeper set of decisions could. So we need to think through things more deeply. So we need to think more.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#714"Oh no, I am using a thing that no one is forcing me to use, and now I am sad". Just don't use AI. The idea that you have ship ship ship 10X ship is an illusion and a fraud. We don't really need more software
Corollary: you don't really need more software engineers.
Who decides what we "need"? Software provides value, and if we want to keep providing value moving forward there will be more software
Re: I miss thinking hard
#715This 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…
[deleted]
Re: I miss thinking hard
#716Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 8 minutes to kick off the next chunk of my one-person project development via my phone, review the results, then kick off the next chunk of development. How are you doing this via your phone?
Termius + tailscale + tmux is a common setup for mobile coding sessions.
Exactly this setup
Re: I miss thinking hard
#717Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me it's all abstraction. I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them but I'm happy to work on the new thing that uses what's already there. This is no different than many things. I could grow a tree and cut it into wood but I don't. I could buy wood and nails and brackets and make furniture but I don't. I instead just fill my ho…
> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens. One of the reasons Barry Lyndon is over 50 years old and still looks like no other movie today is because Kubrick tracked down a few lenses originally designed for NASA and had custom mounts built for them to use with cinema cameras. https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa... > Popular and highly acclaimed gam…
Great comment. One of the best in the thread. I do hope we can get over this endless derivative phase and see some people digging deeper again.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#718Before I started using AI, I was already used to thinking abstractly. When I first got into AI, that way of thinking, combined with interacting with these models, really brought out the best in both. Honestly, I haven’t felt that “peak” in a while
Re: I miss thinking hard
#719Re: I miss thinking hard
#720This is less of a lament that software engineering was replaced by AI, and more that the challenging work has been cooped by large corporations. Mainly through weaponized bloat of platforms