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Some things just take time

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Re: Some things just take time

#91

Post by tombert »

skydhash wrote: post #86
Chris_Newton wrote: post #60

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).

I've definitely gotten it into contexts where it will never stop going into the wrong direction, even when I tell it to forget everything it did before, and told it a correct path forward. Usually restarting the entire session fixes it, but not always.

Re: Some things just take time

#92

Post by andwaal »

I think it's hard to argue with the idea that we should slow down and think more, and that AI is pushing us to do the opposite. But time is limited, it's very limited. And at least in a professional setting, to spend time on the correct things is key.

What AI allow us is to do those things we would not have been able to prioritize before. To "write" those extra tests, add that minor feature or to solve that decade old bug. Things that we would never been able to prioritize are we noe able to do. It's not perfect, it's sometimes sloppy, but at least its getting shit done. It does not matter if you solve 10% of your problem perfect if you never have time for the remaining 90.

I do miss the coding, _a lot_, but productivity is a drug and I will take it.

Re: Some things just take time

#93

Post by ozim »

potro wrote: post #57
alexpotato wrote: post #46

I've been working on a clone of Sid Meier's Pirates but with a princess theme (for my daughters). I've been using AI to help me write it and I've come to a couple conclusions: - AI can make working PoCs incredibly quickly - It can even help me think of story lines, decision paths etc - Given that, there is still a TON of decisions to be made e.g. what artwork to use, what makes sense from a story perspective - Playte…

I have very similar experience. I vibecoded a foreign language practice app for myself. It works decent from functional perspective and I don’t see too many bugs. But the biggest productivity constraint I see is the time I need to spend using it in order to understand what is working and where the issues are.

My newest joke is:

„I was able to vibecode those 5 apps I always wanted but never had time to code them myself … it is so different now because — I don’t have time to use them”.

Re: Some things just take time

#94

Post by w10-1 »

What's faster now are the time-dependent factors of production - product development, go-to market, etc.

What's slower now are threats to production - even minor regulations take years or decades, and often appear only when workarounds have surfaced.

So what changed in the last 40+ years are the many tools for businesses to shape the conditions of their business -the downstream market, upstream suppliers, and regulatory support/constraints. This is extremely patient work over generations of players, sometimes by individuals, but usually by coalitions of mutual corporate self-interest, where even the largest players couldn't refuse to participate.

It's evolution.

Re: Some things just take time

#95

Post by ChuckMcM »

I've been hearing similar things from a lot of different directions. The underlying issue about "you cannot replace time" is one that is good to internalize early. A number of people I know who "missed" their kids growing up because they were working hard to make lots of money. You can't go buy "time with my kids when they were growing up."

Agentic coding very much feels like a "video game" in the sense of you pull the lever and open the loot box and sometimes it's an epic +10 agility sword and sometimes its just grey vendor trash. Whether or not it generates "good" or even "usable" code fades to the background as the thrill of "I just asked for a UI to orchestrate micro services and BLAMMO there it was!" moves to the fore.

Re: Some things just take time

#96

Post by MPSimmons »

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I think the signals that we use to determine whether we're doing the right things are different with the new AI enhanced toolsets.

Refactoring decent sized components are an order of magnitude easier than it was, but the more important signal is still, why are you refactoring? What changed in your world or your world-view that caused this?

Good things still take time, and you can't slop-AI code your way to a great system. You still need domain expertise (as the EXCELLENT short story from the other day explained, Warranty Void if Regenerated (https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated) ). The decrease in friction does definitely allow for more slop, but it also allows for more excellence. It just doesn't guarantee excellence.

Re: Some things just take time

#98

Post by hk__2 »

big-chungus4 wrote: post #12
Swizec wrote: 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 write a metaphore in a comment, you remove half of it, you add another one in the middle, you add the half of the first one, and… nobody understands anything.

Re: Some things just take time

#100

Post by gopalv »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #60

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…

> Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction.

This is a real problem when the "direction" == "good feedback" from a customer standpoint.

Before we had a product person for every ~20 people generating code and now we're all product people, the machines are writing the code (not all of it, but enough of it that I will -1 a ~4000 line PR and ask someone to start over, instead of digging out of the hole in the same PR).

Feedback takes time on the system by real users to come back to the product team.

You need a PID like smoothing curve over your feature changes.

Like you said, Speed isn't velocity.

Specifically if you have a decent experiment framework to keep this disclosure progressive in the customer base, going the wrong direction isn't a huge penalty as it used to be.

I liked the PostHog newsletter about the "Hidden dangers of shipping fast", I can't find a good direct link to it.

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