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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#731

Post by sgarland »

hirvi74 wrote: post #680
docmars wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You touch on an aspect of AI-driven development that I don't think enough people realize: choosing to use AI isn't all or nothing. The hard problems should be solved with our own brains, and it behooves us to take that route so we can not only benefit from the learnings, but assemble something novel so the business can differentiate itself better in the market. For all the other tedium, AI seems perfectly acceptable…

> choosing to use AI isn't all or nothing. That's how I have been using AI the entire time. I do not use Claude Code or Codex. I just use AI to ask questions instead of parsing the increasingly poor Google search results. I just use the chat options in the web applications with manual copy/pasting back and forth if/when necessary. It's been wonderful because I feel quite productive, and I do not really have much of a…

Same! I don't mind copy/pasting a code snippet or asking a question, and I also always ask it to show its sources for anything non-obvious. That alone cuts down on a lot of bullshit.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#732

Post by jodrellblank »

globular-toast wrote: post #318
voidUpdate wrote: post #292

If you miss the experience of not using LLMs, then just... don't? Is someone forcing you to code with LLM help?

I think a lot of people are struggling with this. Look at the obesity epidemic. Nobody is forcing you to buy ultraprocessed foods. Nobody is forcing you to overeat. You can still cook with fresh vegetables at home. But many/most people in Western countries struggle with their weight. An even better analogy is the slot machine. Once you've "won" one time it's hard to break the cycle. There's so little friction to just…

Nobody is "forcing" but billions of dollars on the best psychologists and marketing is doing their hundred year long best to get as close as they can to it.

They (collectively) have thousands of employees, billions of dollars, and tons of things to play with (taste, texture, appearance, mouthfeel, snappiness, salt, sweet, sugar, packaging colours and styles, slogans, marketing, brand associations, shop placement, advertising) all you have is willpower to fight against 4 billion years of evolution telling you that fatty, sugary, energy dense food is important, and a whole pile of biases and weaknesses that you aren't really aware of and they are very aware of and trying to maximally take advantage of.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#733

Post by tipsytoad »

While I large agree, when I rely too much on agentic llm usage I come away feeling that I haven’t really learnt much over the session, and the code wasn’t really “mine”. It’s also easy to let your skills atrophy over time if you’re not careful, and for the hardest / interesting problems I often turn the llm off entirely and write out the code by hand, and come out a lot happier than just guiding Claude

Re: I miss thinking hard

#734

Post by c_reator »

ossicones wrote: post #563

I sympathize with this. I wonder if the author might find it helpful to reimagine the thinking they do as coming up with good questions, rather than good answers. I was inspired to try to do so myself after reading this essay: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-019-1902-1 "[I]f a scientist proposes an important question and provides an answer to it that is later deemed wrong, the scientist will still be…

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." - Max Planck

Re: I miss thinking hard

#735

Post by iujasdkjfasf »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #7

Dude, I know you touched on this but seriously. Just don't use AI then. It's not hard, it's your choice to use it or not. It's not even making you faster, so the pragmatism argument doesn't really work well! This is a totally self inflicted problem that you can undo any time you want.

[dead]

Re: I miss thinking hard

#737

Post by cryptonector »

ericmcer wrote: post #608
keyle wrote: post #63

I don't get it. I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review. If anything, all we've changed is working at a higher level. The product is the same. But these people just keep mixing things up like "wow I got a ferrari now, watch it fly off the road!" Yeah so you got a tools upgrade; it's faster, it's more powerful. Keep it on the road or give up driving! We went from auto completing keywords, t…

You don't have a strong mental model after agentic coding something in my experience. It isn't an abstraction like assembly -> C. If you code something like: extract the raw audio data from an audio container, it doesn't matter if you write it in assembly, C, Javascript, whatever. You will be able to visualize how the data is structured when you are done. If you had an agent generate the code the data would just be a…

Maybe in order to get the most out of agentic programming one needs to either a) already master the domain in question, or b) become a master in the process.

When (b) then the process can be the thing that triggers "thinking hard", and when (a) the one's mastery can be the reason one "thinks hard" when driving the agent.

Does this help TFA? Idk. Maybe if TFA can try either doing (a) a lot or (b) a lot it might. Or maybe agentic programming is going to drive out of the business those who stop thinking hard because they have agents to help them.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#738

Post by docmars »

hirvi74 wrote: post #680
docmars wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You touch on an aspect of AI-driven development that I don't think enough people realize: choosing to use AI isn't all or nothing. The hard problems should be solved with our own brains, and it behooves us to take that route so we can not only benefit from the learnings, but assemble something novel so the business can differentiate itself better in the market. For all the other tedium, AI seems perfectly acceptable…

> choosing to use AI isn't all or nothing. That's how I have been using AI the entire time. I do not use Claude Code or Codex. I just use AI to ask questions instead of parsing the increasingly poor Google search results. I just use the chat options in the web applications with manual copy/pasting back and forth if/when necessary. It's been wonderful because I feel quite productive, and I do not really have much of a…

It's funny you say this because this is considered the "old" way to use LLMs since agents can write code so well, but I don't think enough people realize how much more efficient your preferred approach is compared to the era before LLMs were widely available at all.

Gone are the days of hopeless Googling where 20 minutes of research becomes 3 hours with the possibility of having zero solutions. The sheer efficiency of having reliable, immediate answers is a tremendous improvement, even if you're choosing to write everything by hand using it as a reference.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#739

Post by docmars »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #705
docmars wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Be the change you want to see in the world.

Gladly! I think what I would choose is building on-shore teams exclusively. That's the change I'd like to see more of, while overseas teams build their own economies instead of ripping away jobs from domestic citizens in an already difficult job market.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#740

Post by bdangubic »

docmars wrote: post #739
dimitrios1 wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Be the change you want to see in the world. Gladly! I think what I would choose is building on-shore teams exclusively. That's the change I'd like to see more of, while overseas teams build their own economies instead of ripping away jobs from domestic citizens in an already difficult job market.

almost feels like this could be a good political slogan for a campaign… like “america first” or something like that… oh wait… :)
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