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Some things just take time

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Re: Some things just take time

#81
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care about the opinion of kids. I'm also completely unimpressed by someone wearing a Rolex though, so different mileage for different people.

You should be able to understand the definition of a common term such as "status symbol" though. Understanding words does not require being impressed by anything, nor caring about the opinion of kids.

Different mileage for different people.

Re: Some things just take time

#82

Sounds familiar, for most of my life I have tried to remove all "friction" from life – applying that engineering mindset to make everything as efficient as possible. Only then I realized that life somehow is about that "friction".

Indeed. Without friction you can't steer.

Re: Some things just take time

#83
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be able to understand the definition of a common term such as "status symbol" though. Understanding words does not require being impressed by anything, nor caring about the opinion of kids.

If most people are thinking "whoopdedoo... you clearly have more money than sense" when they see your status symbol, is it still a status symbol?

It depends, if someone fundamentally believes that having more money than someone else means that person is of higher status, then it is.

If people don't consider that someone with more money is of a higher status then symbols of that wealth aren't meaningful.

I think a lot of people have an ingrained belief that "more money == more status"

Re: Some things just take time

#84
post #5

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks. But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills that void. Make sure you fit the roc…

You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if you remove the fish, it will have less water than before. You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first half, you will end up with more water.

You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out, you put your right foot in, and you shake it all about.

Re: Some things just take time

#85
I feel for the larger companies and the people who started 10 years ago, though.

They have spent the last decade building processes and guardrails for getting consistent average performance from people. But now, some talented people who worked at those companies are building their own new companies without the overhead and moving much, much more quickly.

I think what we assume is "vibe slop at inference speed" is not as simple as people make it out to be. From a perspective, I think generally it might be people trying to save jobs.

I'm seeing more slop come out of larger, older companies than the new ones (with experienced operators).

And the speed is somewhat scary. For smaller team it doesn't take as much effort to build deep, beautiful product anymore.

The bottleneck was never the ability for a engineer to code. It was the 16 layers between the customer and the programmer which has vanished in smaller companies and is forcing larger ones to produce slop.

Re: Some things just take time

#86

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of bot…

> It moves fast but without knowing which direction to move in.

It also moves fast with a tendency to pick the wrong direction (according to the goal of the prompter) at every decision point (known or unknown).

Re: Some things just take time

#88
post #5

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks. But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills that void. Make sure you fit the roc…

You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if you remove the fish, it will have less water than before. You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first half, you will end up with more water.

The point of the metaphor is not to say "spending time is mechanically similar to putting things in a container". It is to look at spending time from a new angle, and see if it helps you understand it better. A wise person sees a metaphor as a launching point for thought, not as an expression of a metaphysical connection.

Yes, there are bad metaphors, and people who take metaphors too seriously. That you can conjure a bad metaphor with somewhat similar to semantics to some other metaphor does not mean that said metaphor is bad.

Re: Some things just take time

#89
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out? It definitely hasn't for me. I spent about an hour today trying to use AI to write something fairly simple and I'm still no further forward. I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development.

Apologies for the obligatory question, but what did you try to do, and with which AI did you try to do it with?

Well following advice from folk on here earlier, I thought I'd start small and try to get it to write some code in Go that would listen on a network socket, wait for a packet with a bunch of messages (in a known format) come in, and split those messages out from the packet.

I ended up having to type hundreds of lines of description to get thousands of lines of code that doesn't actually work, when the one I wrote myself is about two dozen lines of code and works perfectly.

It just seems such a slow and inefficient way to work.

Re: Some things just take time

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out? It definitely hasn't for me. I spent about an hour today trying to use AI to write something fairly simple and I'm still no further forward. I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development.

> I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development. When Russians invaded Germany during WWII, some of them (who had never seen a toilet) thought that toilets were advanced potato washing machines, and were rightfully pissed when their potatoes were flushed away and didn't come back. Sounds like you're feeling a similar frustration with your problem.

I don't really see where that comparison is relevant.

Why is AI supposed to be good?

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