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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#721

Post by kimixa »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #498
kimixa wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup - I've related it to working with Juniors, often smart and have good understandings and "book knowledge" of many of the languages and tools involved, but you often have to step back and correct things regularly - normally around local details and project specifics. But then the "junior" you work with every day changes, so you have to start again from scratch. I think there needs to be a sea change in the current…

Try writing more documentation. If your project is bigger than a one man team then you need it anyways and with LLM coding you effectively have an infinite man team.

But that doesn't actually work for my use cases though, plenty of other people have already told me "I'm Holding It Wrong" without actual suggestions that work I've started ignoring them. At this stage I just assume many people work in very different sectors, and some see the "great benefits" often proselytized on the internet. And other areas don't see that. Systems programming, where I work, seems to be a poor fit - possibly due to relatively lack of content in the training corpus, perhaps due to company internal styles and APIs meaning lots of the context is taken up simply detailing takes a huge amount of the context leaving little for further corrections or details, or some other failure modes.

We have lots of documentation. Arguably too much - it quickly fills much of the claude opus context window with relevant documentation alone, and even then repeatedly outputs things directly counter to the documentation it just ingested.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#722

Post by uhubgghbb »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #612
docmars wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted, but you're right — being able to crank out ideas on our own is the "killer app" of AI so to speak. Granted, you would learn a lot more if you had pieced your ideas together manually, but it all depends on your own priorities. The difference is, you're not stuck cleaning up after someone else's bad AI code. That's the side to the AI coin that I think a lot of tech workers are st…

What would I learn that I don’t already know? The exact syntax and property of Terraform and boto3 for every single one of the 150+ services that AWS offers? How to modify a React based front end written by another developer even though I haven’t and have actively stayed away from front end development for well over a decade? Will a company pay me more for knowing those details? Will I be more affectively able to arc…

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#723

Post by uhubgghbb »

jstanley wrote: post #367
socalgal2 wrote: post #261

Earlier 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…

> 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 Maybe, but beware assuming you could do something you haven't actually tried to do. Everything is easy in the abstract.

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#724

Post by zackmorris »

skydhash wrote: post #579
zackmorris wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to +1 this as a deep thinker who disagrees with the blog post's conclusion. I remember back on the years and decades I wasted dealing with the conceptual flaws inherent to nearly all software, and it breaks my heart. 90-99% of programming is a waste of time. Most apps today have less than a single spreadsheet page of actual business logic. The rest is boilerplate. Conjuring up whatever arcane runes are ne…

> 90-99% of programming is a waste of time. Most apps today have less than a single spreadsheet page of actual business logic. I would very much like to know the kind of app you’ve seen. It’s very hard to see something like mpv, calibre, abiword, cmus,… through that lens. Even web apps like forgejo, gonic, sr.ht, don’t fit into that view.

Fair enough. I meant social network websites and social media apps like Facebook and TikTok that could have been made in a weekend using HyperCard, FileMaker, Microsoft Access, etc, if we had real reactive backends similar to Firebase, Airtable and Zapier, which come so close to almost working for normal people but miss the mark fundamentally somehow.

I know that programming has gone terribly wrong, but it's hard for me to articulate how, because it's all of it - the entire frontend web development ecosystem, mobile development languages and frameworks, steep learning curve languages like Rust that were supposed to make things easier but put the onus on the developer to get the busywork right, everything basically. It's like trying to explain screws to craftsmen only familiar with nails.

In the simplest terms, it's because corporations are driving the development of those tools and vacuuming up all profits on the backs of open sources maintainers working in their parents' basements, rather than universities working from first principles to solve hard problems and give solutions away to everyone for free for the good of society. We've moved from academia to slavery and call it progress.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#725

Post by Krssst »

signatoremo wrote: post #495
Krssst wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS and compilers have a deterministic public interface. They obey a specification developers know, so you they can be relied on to write correct software that depends on them even without knowing the internal behavior. Generative AI does not have those properties.

> They obey a specification developers know Which spec? Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? You can’t even know that for sure if you roll your own code, with no 3rd party libraries. Bugs are by definition issues arise when developers expect they code to do one thing, but it does another thing, because of unforeseen combination of factors. Yet…

For compilers: the C++ standard.

For OSes: POSIX, or the MSDN documentation for Windows.

Compiler bugs and OS bugs are extremely rare so we can rely on them to follow their spec.

AI bugs are very much expected when the "spec" (the prompt) is correct, and since the prompt is written using imprecise human language likely by people that are not used to writing precise specifications, the prompt is likely either mistaken or insufficiently specified.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#726

Post by conception »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #140
conception wrote: post #131

“We now buy our bread… it comes sliced… and sure you can just go and make your sandwich and it won’t be a rustic, sourdough that you spent months cultivating. Your tomatoes will be store bought not grown heirlooms. In the end… you have lost the art of baking bread. And your sandwich making skills are lost to time… will humanity ever bake again with these mass factories of bread? What have we lost! Woe is me. Woe is m…

That is a very good analogy - sliced shop bread is tasteless and not that good for you compared to sourdough. Likewise awful store bought tomatoes taste like nothing compared to heirloom tomatoes and arguably have different nutritional content. Shop bread and tomatoes though can be manufactured without any thought of who makes them, though they can be reliably manufactured without someone guiding an LLM which is perh…

I 100% agree. Though i would argue that, like trash sliced bread, 99% of software is just CRUD reinvented over and over. Which, like a deli sandwich, is probably fine not to have artisanal bread for.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#727

Post by 7402 »

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…

"... software is not a product, but rather a medium for the storage of knowledge"

Phillip G. Armour The Five Orders of Ignorance https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27293624_The_Five_O...

Re: I miss thinking hard

#728

Post by cyber_kinetist »

buu700 wrote: post #218
josephg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but thinking with an LLM is different. The article says: > By “thinking hard,” I mean encountering a specific, difficult problem and spending multiple days just sitting with it to overcome it. The "thinking hard" I do with an LLM is more like management thinking. Its chaotic and full of conversations and context switches. Its tiring, sure. But I'm not spending multiple days contemplating a single idea. The "thi…

YMMV, but I've found that I actually do way more of that type of "thinking hard" thanks to LLMs. With the menial parts largely off my plate, my attention has been freed up to focus on a higher density of hard problems, which I find a lot more enjoyable.

Yup, there is a surprisingly high amount of boilerplate in programming, and LLMs definitely can remove this and let you focus on the more important problems. For a person with a day job, working on side projects actually became fun with LLMs again, even with the limitation of free time and mental energy to invest in.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#729

Post by lasgawe »

I agree with your points. I can clearly see the difference in myself between how I used to program before and how I do now.

At one point, I was using Copilot very heavily. One day I lost my internet connection and tried to write code manually, but I did not even know what to write. All I had been doing was reading the code and pressing the Tab key.

When I tried to write code myself, my fingers automatically moved to the Tab key with perfect millisecond timing. That was the day I disabled AI auto-completion and decided to use only Ask mode in Copilot.

Now I only use code generation when I 100% (atleast 90%) understand what is happening in the code, or when I am working on something that will not help my future growth, like routine code at my job.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#730

Post by sgarland »

wtetzner wrote: post #664
CamperBob2 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re destroying the only thing I like about my job - figuring problems out. So, tackle other problems. You can now do things you couldn't even have contemplated before. You've been handed a near-godlike power, and all you can do is complain about it?

> You can now do things you couldn't even have contemplated before. You've been handed a near-godlike power, and all you can do is complain about it? This seems to be a common narrative, but TBH I don't really see it. Where is all the amazing output from this godlike power? It certainly doesn't seem like tech is suddenly improving at a faster pace. If anything, it seems to be regressing in a lot of cases.

Agreed. Mostly, what has occurred is I now have to field a lot more PRs that weren't well thought out (let's be honest, there was no thought), and - my personal favorite - argue with an AI via a human, where they post an AI's opinion on what I said as a reply. I've started just asking them to post links to documentation validating their claims.
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