721–730 of 870 posts
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That’s why you need to write code to learn it. No-one has ever learned skill just by reading/observing
"No-one has ever learned skill just by reading/observing" - Except of course all of those people in Cosmology who, you know, observe.
I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…
However, for hobby projects where I purposely use tech I’m not very familiar with, I force myself not to use LLMs at all - even as a chat. Thus, operating The old way - writing code manually, reading documentation, etc brings me a joy of learning back and, hopefully, establishes new neurone connections.
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> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble. For example I needed to cut out some pages from a pdf. I could have found a tool online(I’m sure there are several), write one myself. However, Claude quickly performed the task. Definitely. Making small, single-purpose utilities with LLMs is almost as easy these days as googling for them on-line - much easier, in fact, if you account for time spent filtering out all…
Whatever happened to just typing "apt install qrencode"? It's definitely "fast, reliable, free of surveillance economy bullshit, and doesn't employ URL shorteners".
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You need to know "qrencode" exists under that exact name. Claude already knows about it and how to use it.
Sure, but that's entirely different from vibe-coding a tool, which sounds like a colossal waste of resources.
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As a rational consumer, how would you distinguish between some intentional "keep pulling the slot machine" failure rate and the intrinsic failure rate? I feel like saying "the market will fix the incentives" handwaves away the lack of information on internals. After all, look at the market response to Google making their search less reliable - sure, an invested nerd might try Kagi, but Google's still the market leade…
FWIW, kagi is better than Google
I've seen the exact opposite with Claude. It literally ditched my request mid-analysis when doing a root cause analysis. It decided I was tired of the service failing and then gave me some restart commands to 'just get it working'
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I have not and I'm actually really bad at learning human languages, but know a dozen programming languages. You would think they would be similar, but for some reason it's really easy for me to program in any language and really hard for me to pick up a human language.
Learning human languages is not a similar process to learning programming languages at all. I've never been sure why so many people think it is.
Learning how to bike requires only a handful of skills, most of them are located in the motor control centers in your brain (mostly in the Cerebellum), which is known to retain skills much better then any other parts of your brain. Your programing skills are comprised of thousands of separate skills which are mostly located in your frontal-cortex (mostly in your frontal and temporal lobes), and learning a foreign language is basically that but more (like 10x more).
So while a foreign language is not the perfect analogy (nothing is), I think it is a reasonable analogy as a counter example to the bicycle myth.
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"No-one has ever learned skill just by reading/observing" - Except of course all of those people in Cosmology who, you know, observe.
what skill do they have? making stars? no they are skilled at observing, which is what they do.
Feels like a combination of writing very detailed task descriptions and reviewing junior devs. It's horrible. I very much hope this won't be my job.