[HN Gopher] I miss thinking hard
___________________________________________________________________
I miss thinking hard
Author : jernestomg
Score : 1186 points
Date : 2026-02-04 03:54 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jernesto.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jernesto.com)
| Besibeta wrote:
| The problem with the "70% solution" is that it creates a massive
| amount of hidden technical debt. You aren't thinking hard because
| you aren't forced to understand the edge cases or the real origin
| of the problem. It used to be the case that you will need plan 10
| steps ahead because refactoring was expensive, now people just
| focus in the next problem ahead, but the compounding AI slop will
| blow up eventually.
| andsoitis wrote:
| would you agree that there's more time to think about what
| problems are worth solving?
| joshpicky wrote:
| I generally feel the same. But in addition, I also enjoy the pure
| act of coding. At least for me that's another big part why I feel
| left behind with all this Agent stuff.
| jernestomg wrote:
| I agree, that's another factor. Definitely the mechanical act
| of coding specially if your are good at it gives the type of
| joy that I can imagine an artisan or craftsman having when
| doing his work.
| r-johnv wrote:
| I've found that it's often useful to spend the time thinking
| about the way I would architect the code (down to a fair level of
| minutia) before letting the agent have a go.
|
| That way my 'thinker' is satiated and also challenged - Did the
| solution that my thinker came up with solve the problem better
| than the plan that the agent wrote?
|
| Then either I acknowledge that the agent's solution was better,
| giving my thinker something to chew on for the next time; or my
| solution is better which gives the thinker a dopamine hit and
| gives me better code.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| donatj wrote:
| Spoken like someone who doesn't have their company measuring
| their AI usage and regularly laying people off.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Need to be in the top 5% of AI users while staying in your
| budget of $50/month!
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| It's not hard to burn tokens on random bullshit (see
| moltbook). If you really can deliver results at full speed
| without AI, it shouldn't be hard to keep cover.
| llmthrow0827 wrote:
| If you can't figure out how to game this, you're both not
| thinking hard and not using AI effectively.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I have a Claude code set up in a folder with instructions on
| how to access iMessage. Ask it questions like "What did my
| wife say I should do next Friday?"
|
| Reads the SQLite db and shit. So burn your tokens on that.
| layer8 wrote:
| That sucks, but honestly I'd get out of there as fast as
| possible. Life is too short to live under unfulfilling work
| conditions for any extended amount of time.
| donatj wrote:
| And speak of the devil. Apparently the next round of layoffs
| had already started when I posted this, unbeknownst to me.
| topspin wrote:
| I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing
| it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints,
| technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as
| hard as I've ever done.
| paladin314159 wrote:
| I echo this sentiment. Even though I'm having Claude Code write
| 100% of the code for a personal project as an experiment, the
| need for thinking hard is very present.
|
| In fact, since I don't need to do low-thinking tasks like
| writing boilerplate or repetitive tests, I find my thinking
| ratio is actually higher than when I write code normally.
| jernestomg wrote:
| I'm with you, thinking about architecture is generally still
| a big part of my mental effort. But for me most architectural
| problems are solve in short periods of thought and a lot of
| iteration. Maybe its an skill issue, but not now nor in the
| pre-LLM era I've been able to pre-solve all the architecture
| with pure thinking.
|
| That said architectural problems have been also been less
| difficult, just for the simple fact that research and
| prototyping has become faster and cheaper.
| ratorx wrote:
| I think it depends on the scope and level of solution I
| accept as "good". I agree that often the thinking for the
| "next step" is too easy architecturally. But I still enjoy
| thinking about the global optimum or a "perfect system",
| even it's not immediately feasible, and can spend large
| amounts of time on this.
|
| And then also there's all the non-systems stuff - what is
| actually feasible, what's most valuable etc. Less "fun",
| but still lots of potential for thinking.
|
| I guess my main point is there is still lots to think about
| even post-LLM, but the real challenge is making it as "fun"
| or as easily useful as it was pre-LLM.
|
| I think local code architecture was a very easy domain for
| "optimality" that is actually tractable and the joy that
| comes with it, and LLMs are harmful to that, but I don't
| think there's nothing to replace it with.
| Aeolun wrote:
| And thinking of how to convey all of that to Claude without
| having to write whole books :)
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| tfw you start expressing your thoughts as code because its
| shorter instead
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Ya, they are programming _languages_ after all. Language
| is really powerful when you really how to use it. Some of
| us are more comfortable with the natural variety, some of
| us are more comfy with code -\\_(tsu)_ /-
| exodust wrote:
| Agreed. My recent side projects involve lots of thinking over
| days and weeks.
|
| With AI we can set high bars and do complex original stuff.
| Obviously boilerplate and common patterns are slop slap
| without much thinking. That's why you branch into new
| creative territory. The challenge then becomes visualising
| the mental map of modular pieces all working nicely together
| at the right time to achieve your original intent.
| wnolens wrote:
| Yes, if anything I think harder because I know it's on the
| frontier of whatever I'm building (so i'm more motivated and
| there's much more ROI)
| amiantos wrote:
| I use Claude Code a lot, and it always lets me know the moment
| I stopped thinking hard, because it will build something
| completely asinine. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say...
| holysoles wrote:
| I very much think its possible to use LLMs as a tool in this
| way. However a lot of folks are not. I see people, both
| personally and professionally, give it a problem and expect it
| to both design and implement a solution, then hold it as a gold
| standard.
|
| I find the best uses, for at least my self, are smaller parts
| of my workflow where I'm not going to learn anything from doing
| it: - build one to throw away: give me a quick prototype to get
| stakeholder feedback - straightforward helper functions: I have
| the design and parameters planned, just need an implementation
| that I can review - tab-completion code-gen - If I want leads
| for looking into something (libraries, tools) and Googling
| isn't cutting it
| topspin wrote:
| > then hold it as a gold standard
|
| I just changed employers recently in part due to this:
| dealing with someone that appears to now spend his time
| coercing LLM's to give the answers he wants, and becoming
| deaf to any contradictions. LLMs are very effective at
| amplifying the Reality Distortion Field for those that live
| in them. LLMs are replacing blog posts for this purpose.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I'd go as far as to say I think harder now - or at least
| quicker. I'm not wasting cycles on chores; I can focus on the
| bigger picture.
| 9rx wrote:
| I've never felt more mental exhaustion than after a LLM
| coding session. I assume that is a result of it requiring me
| to think harder too.
| josephg wrote:
| I feel this too. I suspect its a byproduct of all the
| context switching I find myself doing when I'm using an LLM
| to help write software. Within a 10 minute window, I'll
| read code, debug a problem, prompt, discuss the design,
| test something, do some design work myself and so on.
|
| When I'm just programming, I spend a lot more time working
| through a single idea, or a single function. Its much less
| tiring.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It wasn't until I read your comment that I was able to
| pinpoint why the mental exhaustion feels familiar. It's the
| same kind (though not degree) of exhaustion as formal
| methods / proofs.
|
| Except without the reward of an intellectual high
| afterwards.
| samusiam wrote:
| Personally I do get the intellectual high after a long
| LLM coding session.
| Gigachad wrote:
| In my experience it's because you switch from writing code
| to reviewing code someone else wrote. Which is massively
| more difficult than writing code yourself.
| thrw045 wrote:
| Reading this comment and other similar comments there's
| definitely a difference between people. Personally I agree and
| resonate a lot with the blog post, and I've always found
| designs of my programs to come sort of naturally. Usually the
| hard problems are the technical problems and then the design is
| figured out based on what's needed to control the program. I
| never had to think that hard about design.
| cwnyth wrote:
| Aptitude testing centers like Johnson O'Connor have tests for
| that. There are (relatively) huge differences between
| different people's thinking and problem solving styles. For
| some, creating an efficient process feels natural, while
| others need stability and redundancy. Programmers are by and
| large the latter.
|
| [1]: https://www.jocrf.org/how-clients-use-the-analytical-
| reasoni...
| Aeglaecia wrote:
| there's no such thing as right or wrong , so the following
| isn't intended as any form of judgement or admonition , merely
| an observation that you are starting to sound like an llm
| topspin wrote:
| > you are starting to sound like an llm
|
| My observation: I've always had that "sound." I don't know or
| care much about what that implies. I will admit I'm now
| deliberately avoiding em dashs, whereas I was once an
| enthusiastic user of them.
| samusiam wrote:
| I still use em-dashes. I started using them when my
| professor lambasted my use of semi-colons. I'm not looking
| back -- LLM haters be damned!
| johnfn wrote:
| It's certainly a different _style_ of thinking hard. I used to
| really stress myself over coding - i.e. I would get frustrated
| that solving an issue would cause me to introduce some sort of
| hack or otherwise snowball into a huge refactor. Now I spend
| most of my time thinking about what cool new features I am
| going to build and not really stressing myself out too much.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I think OP's post is an attempt to move us past this stage of
| the discussion, which is frankly an old hat.
|
| The point they are making is that using AI tools makes it a lot
| harder for them to keep up the discipline to think hard.
|
| This may or may not be true for everyone.
| ksymph wrote:
| It is a different kind of thinking, though.
| josephg wrote:
| 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 "thinking hard" I do over multiple days with a single
| problem is more like that of a scientist / mathematician. I
| find myself still thinking about my problem while I'm lying in
| bed that night. I'm contemplating it in the shower. I have
| little breakthroughs and setbacks, until I eventually crack it
| or give up.
|
| Its different.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| There are a _lot_ of hard problems to solve in orchestration.
| We 've barely scratched the surface on this.
| buu700 wrote:
| 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.
| senectus1 wrote:
| its how you use the tool... reminds me of that episode of
| simpsons when homer gets a gun lic... he goes from not using it
| at all, to using it a little, to using it without thinking
| about what hes doing and for ludicrous things...
|
| thinking is tiring and life is complicated, the tool makes it
| easy to slip into bad habits and bad habits are hard to break
| even when you _recognise_ its a bad habit.
|
| Many people are too busy/lazy/self-unaware to evaluate their
| behaviour to recognise a bad habit.
| allovertheworld wrote:
| Thats not thinking hard, you are making decisions
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not
| doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks,
| constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm
| thinking as hard as I've ever done.
|
| Okay, for you that is new - post-LLM.
|
| For me, pre-LLM I thought about all those things _as well as_
| the code itself.
|
| IOW, I thought about even more things. Now you (if I understand
| your claim correctly) think only about those higher level
| things, unencumbered by stuff like implementation
| misalignments, etc. By definition alone, you are thinking
| _less_ hard.
|
| ------------------------
|
| [1] Many times the thinking about code itself acted as a
| feedback mechanism for all those things. If thinking about the
| code itself never acted as a feedback mechanism to your higher
| thought processes then ... well, maybe you weren't doing it the
| way I was.
| black3r wrote:
| My experience is similar, but I feel I'm actually thinking way
| harder than I ever was before LLMs.
|
| Before LLMs once I was done with the design choices as you
| mention them - risks, constraints, technical debt,
| alternatives, possibilities, ... I cooked up a plan, and with
| that plan, I could write the code without having to think hard.
| Actually writing code was relaxing for me, and I feel like I
| need some relax between hard thinking sessions.
|
| Nowadays we leave the code writing to LLMs because they do it
| way faster than a human could, but then have to think hard to
| check if the code LLM wrote satisfies the requirements.
|
| Also reviewing junior developers' PRs became harder with them
| using LLMs. Juniors powered by AI are more ambitious and more
| careless. AI often suggests complicated code the juniors
| themselves don't understand and they just see that it works and
| commit it. Sometimes it suggests new library dependencies
| juniors wouldn't think of themselves, and of course it's the
| senior's role to decide whether the dependency is warranted and
| worthy of being included. Average PR length also increased. And
| juniors are working way faster with AI so we spend more time
| doing PR reviews.
|
| I feel like my whole work somehow from both sides collapsed to
| reviewing code = from one side the code that my AI writes, from
| the other side the code that juniors' AI wrote, the amount of
| which has increased. And even though I like reviewing code, it
| feels like the hardest part of my profession and I liked it
| more when it was balanced with tasks which required less
| thinking...
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| I think AI didn't do this. Open source, libraries, cloud,
| frameworks and agile conspired to do this.
|
| Why solve a problem when you can import library / scale up / use
| managed kuberneted / etc.
|
| The menu is great and the number of problems needing deep thought
| seems rare.
|
| There might be deep thought problems on the requirements side of
| things but less often on the technical side.
| oa335 wrote:
| I feel like AI has given me the opportunity to think MORE, not
| less. I'm doing so much less mindless work, spending most of my
| efforts critically analyzing the code and making larger scale
| architectural decisions.
|
| The author says " Even though the AI almost certainly won't come
| up with a 100% satisfying solution, the 70% solution it achieves
| usually hits the "good enough" mark."
|
| The key is to keep pushing until it gets to the 100% mark. That
| last 30% takes multiples longer than the first 70%, but that is
| where the satisfaction lies for me.
| zatkin wrote:
| I feel that AI doesn't necessarily replace my thinking, but
| actually helps to explore deeper - on my behalf - alternative
| considerations in the approach to solving a problem, which in
| turn better informs my thinking.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| With AI, I now think much harder. Timelines are shorter, big
| decisions are closer together, and more system interactions have
| to be "grokked" in my head to guide the model properly.
|
| I'm more spent than before where I would spend 2 hours wrestling
| with tailwind classes, or testing API endpoints manually by
| typing json shapes myself.
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| I miss the thrill of running through the semi-parched grasslands
| and the heady mix of terror triumph and trepidation as we close
| in on our meal for the week.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think that feeling is fairly common across the entire
| population. Play more tag, it'll help.
| goatlover wrote:
| There are people who still hunt, fish and run. Some even climb
| without ropes. It would seem the feeling is missed.
| keithnz wrote:
| I feel like I'm doing much nicer thinking now, I'm doing more
| systems thinking, not only that I'm iterating on system design a
| lot more because it is a lot easier to change with AI
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I haven't reduced my thinking! Today I asked AI to debug an
| issue. It came with a solution that it was clearly correct, but
| it didn't explain why the code was in that state. I kept steering
| AI (which just wanted to fix) toward figuring out the why and it
| digged through git and github issue at some point,in a very cool
| way. And finally it pulled out something that made sense. It was
| defensive programming introduced to fix an issue somewhere else,
| which was also in turn fixed, so useless.
|
| At that point an idea popped in my mind and I decided to look for
| similar patterns in the codebase, related to the change, found 3.
| 1 was a non bug, two were latent bugs.
|
| Shipped a fix plus 2 fixes for bugs yet to be discovered.
| throwerxyz wrote:
| >I haven't reduced my thinking!
|
| You just detailed an example of where you did in fact reduce
| your thinking.
|
| Managers who tell people what to get done do not think about
| the problem.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I think my message is doing a disservice to explaining what
| actually happened because a lot of it happens in my head.
| 1. I received the ticket, as soon as I read it I had a hunch
| it was related to some querying ignoring a field that should
| be filtered by every query (thinking) 2. I give this
| hunch to the AI which goes search in the codebase in the
| areas I suggested the problem could be and that's when it
| find the issue and provide a fix 3. I think the
| problem could be spread given there is a method that removes
| the query filter, it could have been used in multiple places,
| so I ask AI to find other usages of it (thinking, this is my
| definition of "steering" in this context) 4. AI
| reports 3 more occurrences and suggests that 2 have the same
| bug, but one is ok 5. I go in, review the code and
| understand it and I agree, it doesn't have the bug (thinking)
| 6. AI provide the fix for all the right spots, but I said
| "wait, something is fishy here, there is a commit that
| explicitly say it was added to remove the filter, why is
| that?" (thinking), so I ask AI to figure out why the commit
| says that 7. AI proceeds to run a bunch of git-
| history related commands, finds some commit and then does
| some correlation to find another commit. This other commit
| introduced the change at the same time to defend from a bug
| in a different place 8. I understand what's going on
| now, I'm happy with the fix, the history suggests I am not
| breaking stuff. I ask AI to write a commit with detailed
| information about the bug and the fix based on the
| conversation
|
| There is a lot of thinking involved. What's reduced is search
| tooling. I can be way more fuzzy, rather than `rg 'whatever'`
| I now say "find this and similar patterns"
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Did you use your AI to create that list for you?
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| That's not very nice. Be nice.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Who are you? The morality police?
| glemmaPaul wrote:
| Thanks for expanding your comment. But to what you explain
| here, I think your knowledge and comprehension has only
| slimmed down a notch. It seems to me that this argument
| equates thinking to be on the vertical vertices only, but
| may I say there is a horizontal/broad aspect to it? e.g.
| You lose grip on what is a good combination of
| framework/language/standards, you remove the abstraction of
| multiple layers of external and internal APIs, you leave to
| study the right software pattern for the job, having the AI
| comprehend the large chunks for you (thats all loss on
| thinking). You've lost simple querying and digging through
| codebase. Gosh, lets even say you lost a bit of git command
| knowledge. You catch my drift here? I am completely for
| using AI as a tool to do a lot of the boilerplate work with
| the right directions. Though remembering some changes in
| codebase before and letting LLMs do the work, is not the
| same to me as fully owning up to your system as you know,
| you actually know. Old man shouting at screen so, to each
| their own of course! Cheers
| porcoda wrote:
| > At the end of the day, I am a Builder. I like building things.
| The faster I build, the better.
|
| This I can't relate to. For me it's "the better I build, the
| better". Building poor code fast isn't good: it's just creating
| debt to deal with in the future, or admitting I'll toss out the
| quickly built thing since it won't have longevity. When quality
| comes into play (not just "passed the tests", but is something
| maintainable, extensible, etc), it's hard to not employ the
| Thinker side along with the Builder. They aren't necessarily
| mutually exclusive.
|
| Then again, I work on things that are expected to last quite a
| while and aren't disposable MVPs or side projects. I suppose if
| you don't have that longevity mindset it's easy to slip into
| Build-not-Think mode.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| Cognitive skills are just like any other - use them and they will
| grow, do not and they will decline. Oddly enough, the more one
| increases their software engineering cognition, the less the
| distance between "The Builder" and "The Thinker" becomes.
| raincole wrote:
| I really don't believe AI allows you to think less hard. If it
| did, it would be amazing, but the current AI hasn't got to that
| capability. It forces you to think about different things at
| best.
| rustystump wrote:
| At the day job there was a problem with performance loading data
| in an app.
|
| 7 months later waffling on it on and off with and without ai I
| finally cracked it.
|
| Author is not wrong though, the number of times i hit this isnt
| as often since ai. I do miss the feeling though
| Dr_Birdbrain wrote:
| I think this problem existed before AI. At least in my current
| job, there is constant, unrelenting demand for fast results.
| "Multi-day deep thinking" sounds like an outrageous luxury, at
| least in my current job.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Which is a reason for software becoming worse across the board.
| Just look at Windows. The "go go go" culture is ruinous to
| products.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Even 30 years ago when I started in the industry, most jobs
| required very little deep thinking. All of mine has been done
| on personal projects. Thats just the reality of the typical
| software engineering job.
| tbmtbmtbmtbmtbm wrote:
| this is why productivity is a word that should really just be
| reserved for work contexts, and personal time is better used
| for feeding "The Thinker"
| gyomu wrote:
| 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 what
| you're making the moment before you actually start making it.
| That's when you think you know what you want to make. The
| process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards
| understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were
| aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about
| solving problems; it's about discovering what the right problem
| to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we
| didn't solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong
| problem.
|
| When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you
| could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you
| thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed
| artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make
| removes the very human element of discovery and learning that's
| at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you
| know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when
| it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of
| the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine."
| anonymous344 wrote:
| yes, this is maybe it's my preference to jump directly to
| coding, instead of canva to draw the gui and stuff. i would not
| know what to draw because the involvemt is not so deep ...or
| something
| helloplanets wrote:
| And when programming with agentic tools, you need to actively
| push for the idea to not regress to the most obvious/average
| version. The amount of effort you need to expend on pushing the
| idea that deviates from the 'norm' (because it's novel), is
| actually comparable to the effort it takes to type something
| out by hand. Just two completely different types of effort.
|
| There's an upside to this sort of effort too, though. You
| actually need to make it crystal clear what your idea is and
| what it is not, because of the continuous pushback from the
| agentic programming tool. The moment you stop pushing back, is
| the moment the LLM rolls over your project and more than likely
| destroys what was unique about your thing in the first place.
| fallous wrote:
| You just described the burden of outsourcing programming.
| tomrod wrote:
| 100%! There is significant analogy between the two!
| salawat wrote:
| There is a reason management types are drawn to it like
| flies to shit.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Working with and communicating with offshored teams is a
| specific skill too.
|
| There are tips and tricks on how to manage them and not
| knowing them will bite you later on. Like the basic thing
| of never asking yes or no questions, because in some
| cultures saying "no" isn't a thing. They'll rather just
| default to yes and effectively lie than admit failure.
| darkwater wrote:
| With the basic and enormous difference that the feedback
| loop is 100 or even 1000x faster. Which changes the type of
| game completely, although other issues will probably arise
| as we try this new path.
| Terr_ wrote:
| That embeds an assumption that the outsourced human
| workers are incapable of thought, and experience/create
| zero feedback loops of their own.
|
| Frustrated rants about deliverables aside, I don't think
| that's the case.
| darkwater wrote:
| No. It just means the harsh reality: what's really soul
| crushing in outsourced work is having endless meetings to
| pass down / get back information, having to wait
| days/weeks/months to get some "deliverable" back on which
| iterate etc. Yes, outsourced human workers are totally
| capable of creative thinking that makes sense, but their
| incentive will always be throughput over quality, since
| their bosses usually give closed prices (at least in what
| I lived personally).
|
| If you are outsourcing to an LLM in this case YOU are
| still in charge of the creative thought. You can just
| judge the output and tune the prompts or go deep in more
| technical details and tradeoffs. You are "just" not
| writing the actual code anymore, because another layer of
| abstraction has been added.
| Jagerbizzle wrote:
| Also, with an LLM you can tell it to throw away
| everything and start over whenever you want.
|
| When you do this with an outsourced team, it can happen
| at most once per sprint, and with significant pushback,
| because there's a desire for them to get paid for their
| deliverable even if it's not what you wanted or suffers
| some other fundamental flaw.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Yep, just these past two weeks. I tried to reuse an
| implementation I had used for another project, it took me
| a day to modify it (with Codex), I tried it out and it
| worked fine with a few hundred documents.
|
| Then I tried to push through 50000 documents, it crashed
| and burned like I suspected. It took one day to go from
| my second more complicated but more scalable spec where I
| didn't depend on an AWS managed service to working
| scalable code.
|
| It would have taken me at least a week to do it myself
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| It doesn't have to be soul crushing.
|
| Just like people more, and have better meetings.
|
| Life is what you make it.
|
| Enjoy yourself while you can.
| darkwater wrote:
| It's not strictly soul-crushing for me, but I definitely
| don't like to waste time in non-productive meetings where
| everyone bullshits everyone else. Do you like that? Do
| you find it a good use of your time and brain attention
| capacity?
| docmars wrote:
| 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.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Just have better meetings
|
| If we could I think we would be doing that...
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| It's going to come across very naive and dumb, but I
| believe we can and people just aren't aware of or they
| simply aren't implementing the basics.
|
| Harvard Business Review and probably hundreds of other
| online content providers provide some simple rules for
| meetings yet people don't even do these.
|
| 1. Have a purpose / objective for the meeting. I consider
| meetings to fall into one of three broad categories
| information distribution, problem solving, decision
| making. Knowing this will allow the meeting to go a lot
| smoother or even be moved to something like an email and
| be done with it.
|
| 2. Have an agenda for the meeting. Put the agenda in the
| meeting invite.
|
| 3. If there are any pieces of pre-reading or related
| material to be reviewed, attach it and call it out in the
| invite. (But it's very difficult to get people to spend
| the time preparing for a meeting.)
|
| 4. Take notes during the meeting and identify any action
| items and who will do them (preferably with an initial
| estimate). Review these action items and people
| responsible in the last couple of minutes of the meeting.
|
| 5. Send out the notes and action items.
|
| Why aren't we doing these things? I don't know, but I
| think if everyone followed these for meetings of 3+
| people, we'd probably see better meetings.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Probably like most businesses issues, it's a people
| problem. They have to care in the first place and idk if
| you can make people who don't care starting caring.
|
| I agree the info is out there about how to run effective
| meetings.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Not really, its just obviously true that the
| communication cycle with your terminal/LLM is faster than
| with a human over Slack/email.
| agumonkey wrote:
| We need a new word for on-premise offshoring.
|
| On-shoring ;
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > On-shoring
|
| I thought "on-shoring" is already commonly used for the
| process that undos off-shoring.
| saghm wrote:
| How about "in-shoring"? We already have "insuring" and
| "ensuring", so we might as well add another confusingly
| similar sounding term to our vocabulary.
| weebull wrote:
| How about we leave "...shoring" alone?
| boring-human wrote:
| En-shoring?
| intended wrote:
| Ai-shoring.
|
| Tech-shoring.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Would work, but with "snoring". :D
| dzdt wrote:
| vibe-shoring
| pferde wrote:
| Corporate has been using the term "best-shoring" for a
| couple of years now. To my best guess, it means "off-
| shoring or on-shoring, whichever of the two is cheaper".
| heliumtera wrote:
| We already have a perfect one
|
| Slop;
| tmtvl wrote:
| Rubber-duckying... although a rubber ducky can't write
| code... infinite-monkeying?
| biofox wrote:
| In silico duckying
| bregma wrote:
| eshoring
| AgentOrange1234 wrote:
| NIH-shoring?
| onion2k wrote:
| Outsourcing development and vibe coding are incredibly
| similar processes.
|
| If you just chuck ideas at the external coding team/tool
| you often get rubbish back.
|
| If you're good at managing the requirements and defining
| things well you can achieve very good things with much less
| cost.
| bitwize wrote:
| YES!
|
| AI assistance in programming is a service, not a tool. You
| are commissioning Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. to write the
| program for you.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > need to make it crystal clear
|
| That's not an upside in that it's unique to LLM vs human
| written code. When writing it yourself, you also need to make
| it crystal clear. You do that in the language of
| implementation.
| balamatom wrote:
| And programming languages are designed for clarifying the
| implementation details of abstract processes; while human
| language is this undocumented, half grandfathered in, half
| adversarially designed instrument for making apes get along
| (as in, move in the same general direction) without
| excessive stench.
|
| The humane and the machinic need to meet halfway - any
| computing endeavor involves not only specifying something
| clearly enough for a computer to execute it, but also
| communicating to humans how to benefit from the process
| thus specified. And that's the proper domain not only of
| software engineering, but the set of related disciplines
| (such as the various non-coding roles you'd have in a
| project team - if you have any luck, that is).
|
| But considering the incentive misalignments which easily
| come to dominate in this space even when multiple
| supposedly conscious humans are ostensibly keeping their
| eyes on the ball, _no matter how good the language machines
| get_ at doing the job of any of those roles, I will still
| intuitively mistrust them exactly as I mistrust any human
| or organization with responsibly wielding the kind of pre-
| LLM power required for coordinating humans well enough to
| produce industrial-scale LLMs in the first place.
|
| What's said upthread about the wordbox continually trying
| to _revert you to the mean_ as you 're trying to prod it
| with the cowtool of English into outputting something
| _novel_ , rings very true to me. It's not an LLM-specific
| selection pressure, but one that LLMs are very likely to
| have 10x-1000xed as the culmination of a multigenerational
| gambit of sorts; one whose outset I'd place with the ever-
| improving immersive simulations that got the GPU supply
| chain going.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| I can't help but imagine training horses vs training cats.
| One of them is rewarding, a pleasure, beautiful to see, the
| other is frustrating, leaves you with a lot of scratches and
| ultimately both of you "agreeing" on a marginal compromise.
| lambdaone wrote:
| Right now vibe coding is more like training cats. You are
| constantly pushing against the model's tendency to produce
| its default outputs regardless of your directions. When
| those default outputs are what you want - which they are in
| many simple cases of effectively English-to-code
| translation with memorized lookup - it's great. When they
| are not, you might as well write the code yourself and at
| least be able to understand the code you've generated.
| kimixa wrote:
| 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 LLM
| tech to make that no longer the case - either _massively_
| increased context sizes, so they can contain near a
| career worth of learning (without the tendency to start
| ignoring that context, as the larger end of the current
| still-way-too-small-for-this context windows available
| today), or even allow continuous training passes to allow
| direct integration of these "learnings" into the weights
| themselves - which might be _theoretically_ possible
| today, but is many orders of magnitude higher in compute
| requirements than available today even if you ignore
| cost.
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| 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.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| I've never seen horse that scratches you.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Yet another example of "comments that are only sort of true
| because high temperature sampling isn't allowed".
|
| If you use LLMs at very high temperature with samplers which
| correctly keep your writing coherent (i.e. Min_p, or better
| like top-h, P-less decoding, etc), than "regression to the
| mean" literally DOES NOT HAPPEN!!!!
| adevilinyc wrote:
| How do you configure LLM temperature in coding agents, e.g.
| opencode?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You can't without hacking it! That's my point! The only
| places you can easily are via the API directly, or
| "coomer" frontends like SillyTavern, Oobabooga, etc.
|
| Same problem with image generation (lack of support for
| different SDE solvers, the image version of LLM sampling)
| but they have different "coomer" tools, i.e. ComfyUI or
| Automatic1111
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Once again, porn is where the innovation is...
| dizhn wrote:
| Please.. "Creative Writing"
| kabr wrote:
| https://opencode.ai/docs/agents/#temperature
|
| set it in your opencode.json
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Note when I said "you have to hack it in", I mean you'll
| need to hack in support for modern LLM samplers like
| min_p, which enables setting temperature up to infinity
| (given min_p approaching 1) while maintaining coherence.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Have you actually tried high temperature values for coding?
| Because I don't think it's going to do what you claim it
| will.
|
| LLMs don't "reason" the same way humans do. They follow
| text predictions based on statistical relevance. So raising
| the temperature will more likely increase the likelihood of
| unexecutable pseudocode than it would create a valid but
| more esoteric implementation of a problem.
| Terr_ wrote:
| To put it another way, a high-temperature mad-libs
| machine will write a very _unusual_ story, but that isn
| 't necessarily the same as a _clever_ story.
| balamatom wrote:
| So why is this "temperature" not on, like, a rotary
| encoder?
|
| So you can just, like, tweak it when it's working against
| your intent in either direction?
| Terr_ wrote:
| AFAIK there's no algorithmic reason against it, but
| services might not expose the controls in a convenient
| way, or at all.
| bob1029 wrote:
| High temperature seems fine for my coding uses on GPT5.2.
|
| Code that fails to execute or compile is the default
| expectation for me. That's why we feed compile and
| runtime errors back into the model after it proposes
| something each time.
|
| I'd much rather the code sometimes not work than to get
| stuck in infinite tool calling loops.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| Fair enough but I am a programmer because I like programming.
| If I wanted to be a product manager I could have made that
| transition with or without LLMs.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I'm a programmer (well half my job) because I was a short
| (still short) fat (I got better) kid with a computer in the
| 80s.
|
| Now, the only reason I code and have been since the week I
| graduated from college was to support my insatiable
| addictions to food and shelter.
|
| While I like seeing my ideas come to fruition, over the
| last decade my ideas were a lot larger than I could
| reasonably do over 40 hours without having other people
| working on projects I lead. Until the last year and a half
| where I could do it myself using LLMs.
|
| Seeing my carefully designed spec that includes all of the
| cloud architecture get done in a couple of days - with my
| hands on the wheel - that would have taken at least a week
| with me doing some work while juggling dealing with a
| couple of other people - is life changing
| docmars wrote:
| 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 struggling with, eventually leading to rampant
| burnout.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| 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 architect and design
| solutions that a company will pay my employer to contract
| me to do and my company pays me? They pay me decently not
| because I "codez real gud". They pay me because I can go
| from empty AWS account, empty repo and ambiguous customer
| requirements to a working solution (after spending time
| talking to a customer) to a full well thought out
| architecture + code on time on budget and that meets
| requirements.
|
| I am not bragging, I'm _old_ those are table stakes to
| being able to stay in this game for 3 decades
| sgarland wrote:
| Agreed. The higher-ups at my company are, like most places,
| breathlessly talking about how AI has changed the
| profession - how we no longer need to code, but merely
| describe the desired outcome. They say this as though it's
| a good thing.
|
| They're destroying the only thing I like about my job -
| figuring problems out. I have a fundamental impedance
| mismatch with my company's desires, because if someone
| hands me a weird problem, I will happily spend all day or
| longer on that problem. Think, hypothesize, test, iterate.
| When I'm done, I write it up in great detail so others can
| learn. Generally, this is well-received by the engineer who
| handed the problem to me, but I suspect it's mostly because
| I solved their problem, not because they enjoyed reading
| the accompanying document.
| dahart wrote:
| FWIW, when a problem truly is weird, AI & vibe coding
| tends to not be able to solve it. Maybe you can use AI to
| help you spend _more_ time working on the weird problems.
|
| When I play sudoku with an app, I like to turn on auto-
| fill numbers, and auto-erase numbers, and highlighting of
| the current number. This is so that I can go directly to
| the crux of the puzzle and work on that. It helps me
| practice working on the hard part without having to slog
| through the stuff I know how to do, and generally
| speaking it helps me do harder puzzles than I was doing
| before. BTW, I've only found one good app so far that
| does this really well.
|
| With AI it's easier to see there are a lot of problems
| that I don't know how to solve, but others do. The
| question is whether it's wasteful to spend time
| independently solving that problem. Personally I think
| it's good for me to do it, and bad for my employer (at
| least in the short term). But I can completely understand
| the desire for higher-ups to get rid of 90% of wheel re-
| invention, and I do think many programmers spend a lot of
| time doing exactly that; independently solving problems
| that have already been solved.
| docmars wrote:
| 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
| to use.
|
| Where the sticking point comes in is when CEOs, product
| teams, or engineering leadership put too much pressure on
| using AI for "everything", in that all solutions to a
| problem should be AI-first, even if it isn't appropriate
| --because velocity is too often prioritized over
| innovation.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| > _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 an AI dependency. I am still
| doing all of my work, but I can get a quicker answer to
| simple questions than parsing through a handful of
| outdated blogs and StackOverflow answers.
|
| If I have learned one thing about programming computers
| in my career, it is that not all documentation (even
| official documentation) was created equally.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Though it is not like management roles have ever
| appreciated the creative aspects of the job, including
| problem solving. Management has always wished to just
| describe the desired outcome and get magic back. They
| don't like acknowledging that problems and complications
| exist in the first place. Management likes to think that
| they are the true creatives for company vision and don't
| like software developers finding solutions bottom up.
| Management likes to have a single "architect" and maybe a
| single "designer" for the creative side that they like
| and are a "rising" political force (in either the Peter
| Principle or Gervais Principle senses) rather than deal
| with a committee of creative people. It's easier for them
| to pretend software developers are blue collar cogs in
| the system rather than white collar problem solvers with
| complex _creative_ specialties. LLMs are only
| accelerating those mechanics and beliefs.
| docmars wrote:
| Agreed. I hate to say it, but if anyone thought this
| train of thought in management was bad now, it's going to
| get much worse, and unfortunately burnout is going to
| sweep the industry as tech workers feel evermore
| underappreciated and invisible to their leaders.
|
| And worse: with few opportunities to grow their skills
| from rigorous thinking as this blog post describes. Tech
| workers will be relegated to cleaning up after sloppy AI
| codebases.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I greatly agree with that deep cynicism and I too am a
| cynic. I've spent a lot of my career in the legacy code
| mines. I've spent a lot of my career trying to climb my
| way out of them or at least find nicer, more lucrative
| mines. LLMs are the "gift" of legacy-code-as-a-service.
| They only magnify and amplify the worst parts of my
| career. The way the "activist shareholder" class like to
| over-hype and believe in Generative AI magic today only
| implies things have more room to keep getting worse
| before they get better (if they ever get better again).
|
| I'm trying my best to adapt to being a "centaur" in this
| world. (In Chess it has become statistically evident that
| Human and Bot players of Chess are generally "worse" than
| the hybrid "Centaur" players.) But even "centaurs" are
| going to be increasingly taken for granted by companies,
| and at least for me the sense is growing that as WOPR
| declared about tic-tac-toe (and thermo-nuclear warfare)
| "a curious game, the only way to win is not to play". I
| don't know how I'd bootstrap an entirely new career at
| this point in my life, but I keep feeling like I need to
| try to figure that out. I don't want to just be a janitor
| of other people's messes for the rest of my life.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _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?
| wtetzner wrote:
| > 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.
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| I became an auto mechanic because I love machining heads,
| and dropping oil pans to inspect, and fitting crankshafts
| in just right, and checking fuel filters, and adjusting
| alternators.
|
| If I wanted to work on electric power systems I would have
| become an electrician.
|
| (The transition is happening.)
| fflluuxx wrote:
| This is why people thinkless of artists like Damien Hirst and
| Jeff Koons because their hands have never once touched the
| art. They have no connection to the effort. To the process.
| To the trail and error. To the suffer. They've out sourced
| it, monetized it, and make it as efficient as possible. It's
| also soulless.
| rixed wrote:
| To me it feels a bit like literate programming, it forces you
| to form a much more accurate idea of your project before your
| start. Not a bad thing, but can be wasteful also when
| eventually you realise after the fact that the idea was
| actually not that good :)
| wtetzner wrote:
| Yeah, it's why I don't like trying to write up a
| comprehensive design before coding in the first place. You
| don't know what you've gotten wrong until the rubber meets
| the road. I try to get a prototype/v1 of whatever I'm
| working on going as soon as possible, so I can root out
| those problems as early as possible. And of course, that's
| on top of the "you don't really know what you're building
| until you start building it" problem.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Uniqueness is not the aim. Who cares if something is uniquely
| bad? But in any case, yes, if you use LLMs uncritically, as a
| substitute for reasoning, then you obviously aren't doing any
| reasoning and your brain will atrophy.
|
| But it is also true that most programming tedious and hardly
| enriching for the mind. In those cases, LLMs can be a
| benefit. When you have identified the pattern or principle
| behind a tedious change, an LLM can work like a junior
| assistant, allowing you to focus on the essentials. You still
| need to issue detailed and clear instructions, you still need
| to verify the work.
|
| Of course, the utility of LLMs is a signal that either the
| industry is bad at abstracting, or that there's some
| practical limit.
| seg_lol wrote:
| I think _harder_ while using agents, just not about the same
| things. Just because we all got a super powers doesn 't make
| the problems go away, they just move and we still have our
| full brains to solve them.
|
| It isn't all great, skills that feel important have already
| started atrophying, but other skills have been strengthened.
| The hardest part is in being able to pace onself as well as
| figuring out how to start cracking certain problems.
| boredtofears wrote:
| I dunno, when you've made about 10,000 clay pots its kinda nice
| to skip to the end result, you're probably not going to learn a
| ton with clay pot #10,001. You can probably come up with some
| pretty interesting ideas for what you want the end result to
| look like from the onset.
|
| I find myself being able to reach for the things that my normal
| pragmatist code monkey self would consider out of scope - these
| are often not user facing things at all but things that
| absolutely improve code maintenance, scalability,
| testing/testability, or reduce side effects.
| belZaah wrote:
| Depends on the problem. If the complexity of what you are
| solving is in the business logic or, generally low, you are
| absolutely right. Manually coding a signup flow #875 is not
| my idea of fun either. But if the complexity is in the
| implementation, it's different. Doing complex cryptography,
| doing performance optimization or near-hardware stuff is just
| a different class of problems.
| boredtofears wrote:
| In my experience AI is pretty good at performance
| optimizations as long as you know what to ask for.
|
| Can't speak to firmware code or complex cryptography but my
| hunch is if it's in it's training dataset and you know
| enough to guide it, it's generally pretty useful.
| kranner wrote:
| > my hunch is if it's in it's training dataset and you
| know enough to guide it, it's generally pretty useful.
|
| Presumably humanity still has room to grow and not
| everything is already in the training set.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > In my experience AI is pretty good at performance
| optimizations as long as you know what to ask for.
|
| This rather tells that the kind of performance
| optimizations that you ask for are very "standard".
| charcircuit wrote:
| Most optimizations are making sure you do not do work
| that is unnecessary or that you use the hardware
| effectively. The standard techniques are all you need 99%
| of the time you are doing performance work. The hard part
| about performance is dedicating the time towards it and
| not letting it regress as you scale the team. With AI you
| can have agents constantly profiling the codebase
| identifying and optimizing hotspots as they get
| introduced.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Most optimizations are making sure you [...] use the
| hardware effectively.
|
| If you _really_ care about using the hardware
| effectively, optimizing the code is _so much more_ than
| what you describe.
| boredtofears wrote:
| As most are
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > If the complexity of what you are solving is in the
| business logic or, generally low, you are absolutely right.
|
| The problem is rather that programmers who work on business
| logic often _hate_ programmers who are actually capable of
| seeing (often mathematical) patterns in the business logic
| that could be abstracted away; in other words: many
| business logic programmers hate abstract mathematical
| stuff.
|
| So, in my opinion/experience this is a very self-inflected
| problem that arises from the whole culture around business
| logic and business logic programming.
| skydhash wrote:
| Coding signup flow #875 should as easy as using a snippet
| tool or a code generator. Everyone that explains why using
| an LLM is a good idea always sound like living in the stone
| age of programming. There are already industrial level
| tools to get things done faster. Often so fast that I feel
| time being wasted describing it in english.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Of course I use code generation. Why would that be
| mutually exclusive from AI usage? Claude will take full
| advantage of it with proper instruction.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| import claypot
|
| trillion dollar industry boys
| wtetzner wrote:
| > you're probably not going to learn a ton with clay pot
| #10,001
|
| Why not just use a library at that point? We already have
| support for abstractions in programming.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said
| when cameras first hit the scene.
| vermilingua wrote:
| Source?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Art history. It's how we ended up with Impressionism, for
| instance.
|
| People felt (wrongly) that traditional representational
| forms like portraiture were threatened by photography.
| Happily, instead of killing any existing genres, we got
| some interesting new ones.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said
| when cameras first hit the scene.
|
| This is a non sequitur. Cameras have not replaced paintings,
| assuming this is the inference. Instead, they serve only to
| be an additional medium for the same concerns quoted:
| The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you
| towards understanding what you actually want to make,
| whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning.
|
| Just as this is applicable to refining a software solution
| captured in code, just as a painter discards unsatisfactory
| paintings and tries again, so too is it when people say,
| "that picture didn't come out the way I like, let's take
| another one."
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the
| inference._
|
| You wouldn't have known that, going by all the bellyaching
| and whining from the artists of the day.
|
| Guess what, they got over it. You will too.
| kranner wrote:
| > Guess what, they got over it. You will too.
|
| Prediction is difficult, especially of the future.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It ain't over 'til it's over. And when you come to a fork
| in the road, take it.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| >> Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is
| the inference.
|
| > You wouldn't have known that, going by all the
| bellyaching and whining from the artists of the day.
|
| > Guess what, they got over it.
|
| You conveniently omitted my next sentence, which
| contradicts your position and reads thusly:
| Instead, they serve only to be an additional medium for
| the same concerns quoted ...
|
| > You will too.
|
| This statement is assumptive and gratuitous.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Username checks out, at least.
| salawat wrote:
| Logic needs to be shown the door on occasion. Sometimes
| via the help of an ole Irish bar toss.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| There are other sites. Other doors, on other bars.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > Username checks out, at least.
|
| Thoughtful retorts such as this are deserving of the same
| esteem one affords the "rubber v glue"[0] idiom.
|
| As such, I must oblige.
|
| 0 - https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/I%27m+rubber%2c+
| you%27r...
| lkey wrote:
| What stole the joy you must have felt, fleetingly, as a
| child that beheld the world with fresh eyes, full of
| wonder?
|
| Did you imagine yourself then, as your are now, hunched
| over a glowing rectangle. Demanding imperiously that the
| world share your contempt for the sublime. Share your
| jaundiced view of those that pour the whole of themselves
| into the act of creation, so that everyone might once
| again be graced with wonder anew.
|
| I hope you can find a work of art that breaks you free of
| your resentment.
| ceuk wrote:
| Thank you for brightening my morning with a brief moment
| of romantic idealism in a black ocean of cynicism
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| So _I 'm_ the cynic here. That's a hoot.
| williamcotton wrote:
| _Photography's rapid commercialisation [21] meant that many
| painters - or prospective painters - were tempted to take
| up photography instead of, or in addition to, their
| painting careers. Most of these new photographers produced
| portraits. As these were far cheaper and easier to produce
| than painted portraits, portraits ceased to be the
| privilege of the well-off and, in a sense, became
| democratised [22]._
|
| _Some commentators dismissed this trend towards
| photography as simply a beneficial weeding out of second-
| raters. For example, the writer Louis Figuier commented
| that photography did art a service by putting mediocre
| artists out of business, for their only goal was exact
| imitation. Similarly, Baudelaire described photography as
| the "refuge of failed painters with too little talent". In
| his view, art was derived from imagination, judgment and
| feeling but photography was mere reproduction which
| cheapened the products of the beautiful [23]._
|
| https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-
| impacts.html#:~:te...
| sonofhans wrote:
| Ironic. The frequency and predictability of this type of
| response -- "This criticism of new technology is invalid
| because someone was wrong once in the past about unrelated
| technology" -- means there might as well be an LLM posting
| these replies to every applicable article. It's boring and no
| one learns anything.
|
| It would be a lot more interesting to point out the
| differences and similarities yourself. But then if you wanted
| an interesting discussion you wouldn't be posting trite
| flamebait in the first place, would you?
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Note that we still have not solved cameras _or even_ cars.
|
| The biggest lesson I am learning recently is that
| technologists will bend over backwards to gaslight the
| public to excuse their own myopia.
| dwrolvink wrote:
| Interesting comparison. I remember watching a video on that.
| Landscape paintings, portraits, etc, was an art that has
| taken an enormous nosedive. We, as humans, have missed out on
| a lot of art because of the invention of the camera. On the
| other hand, the benefits of the camera need no elaboration.
| Currently AI had a lot of foot guns though, which I don't
| believe the camera had. I hope AI gets to that point too.
| jack_pp wrote:
| The footgun cameras had was exposure time.
|
| 1826 - The Heliograph - 8+ hours
|
| 1839 - The Daguerreotype - 15-30 Mins
|
| 1841 - The Calotype - 1-2 Mins
|
| 1851 - Wet Plate Collodion - 2-20 Secs
|
| 1871 - The Dry Plate - < 1 Second.
|
| So it took 45 years to perfect the process so you could
| take an instant image. Yet we complain after 4 years of
| LLMs that they're not good enough.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >We, as humans, have missed out on a lot of art because of
| the invention of the camera.
|
| I so severely doubt this to the point I'd say this
| statement is false.
|
| As we go toward the past art was expensive and rare. Better
| quality landscape/portraits were exceptionally rare and
| really only commissioned by those with money, which again
| was a smaller portion of the population in the time before
| cameras. It's likely there are more high quality paintings
| now per capita than there were ever in the past, and the
| issue is not production, but exposure to the high quality
| ones. Maybe this is what you mean by 'miss out'?
|
| In addition the general increase in wealth coupled with the
| cost of art supplies dropping this opens up a massive room
| for lower quality art to fill the gap. In the past canvas
| was typically more expensive so sucky pictures would get
| painted over.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Yeah, and cameras changed art forever.
| exodust wrote:
| people still make clay pots and paint landscapes
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Creativity is not what would expect out of the
| Renaissance
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If you don't like change, then my recommendation is to
| steer clear of careers in either art _or_ technology.
| abhgh wrote:
| This is an amazing quote - thank you. This is also my argument
| for why I can't use LLMs for writing (proofreading is OK) -
| what I write is not produced as a side-effect of thinking
| through a problem, writing _is_ how I think through a problem.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Counterpoint (more devil's advocate), I'd argue it's better
| than an LLM writes something (e.g. the solution or thinking
| through of a problem) than nothing at all.
|
| Counterpoint to my own counterpoint, will anyone actually
| (want to) read it?
|
| counterpoint to the third degree, to loop it back around, an
| LLM might and I'd even argue an LLM is better at reading and
| ingesting long text (I'm thinking architectural documentation
| etc) than humans are. Speaking for myself, I struggle to read
| attentively through e.g. a document, I quickly lose interest
| and scan read or just focus on what I need instead.
| yurishimo wrote:
| I kinda saw this happen in realtime on reddit yesterday.
| Someone asked for advice on how to deal with a team that
| was in over their heads shipping slop. The crux of their
| question was fair, but they used a different LLM to
| translate their original thoughts from their native
| language into English. The prompt was "translate this to
| english for a reddit post" - nothing else.
|
| The LLM adding a bunch of extra formatting to add emphasis
| and structure to what might have originally been a bit of a
| ramble, but obviously human written. The comments
| absolutely lambasted this OP for being a hypocrite
| complaining about their team using AI, but then seeing
| little problem with posting what is obviously an AI
| generated question because the OP didn't deem their English
| skills good enough to ask the question directly.
|
| I'm not going to pass judgement on this scenario, but I did
| think the entire encounter was a "fun" anecdote in addition
| to your comments.
|
| Edit: wrods
| vict7 wrote:
| I saw the same post and was a bit saddened that all the
| comments seemed to be focused on the implied hypocrisy of
| the OP instead of addressing the original concern.
|
| As someone that's a bit of a fence-sitter on the matter
| of AI, I feel that using it in the way that OP did is one
| of the less harmful or intrusive uses.
| duskdozer wrote:
| I see it as worse because you could have put just as much
| effort in - less even - and gotten a better result just
| sticking it in a machine translator and pasting that.
| samusiam wrote:
| Writing is how I think through a problem too, but that also
| applies to writing and communicating with an AI coding agent.
| I don't need to write the code per se to do the thinking.
| skydhash wrote:
| You could write pseudocode as well. Bit fo someone who is
| familiar with a programming language, it's just faster to
| use the latter. And if you're really familiar with the
| language, you start thinking in it.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Coding is not at all like working a lump of clay unless you're
| still writing assembly.
|
| You're taking a bunch of pre-built abstractions written by
| other people on top of what the computer is actually doing and
| plugging them together like LEGOs. The artificial syntax that
| you use to move the bricks around is the thing you call coding.
|
| The human element of discovery is still there if a robot stacks
| the bricks based on a different set of syntax (Natural
| Language), nothing about that precludes authenticity or the
| human element of creation.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Exactly, and that's why I find AI coding solving this well,
| because I find it tedious to put the bricks together for the
| umpteenth time when I can just have an AI do it (which I will
| of course verify the code when it's done, not advocating for
| vibe coding here).
|
| This actually leaves me with a lot _more_ time to think,
| about what I want the UI to look like, how I 'll market my
| software, and so on.
| lsy wrote:
| I think the analogy to high level programming languages
| misunderstands the value of abstraction and notation. You
| can't reason about the behavior of an English prompt because
| English is underspecified. The value of code is that it has a
| fairly strong semantic correlation to machine operations, and
| reasoning about high level code is equivalent to reasoning
| about machine code. That's why even with all this advancement
| we continue to check in code to our repositories and leave
| the sloppy English in our chat history.
| skydhash wrote:
| Yep. Any statement in python or others can be mapped to
| something that the machine will do. And it will be the same
| thing every single time (concurrency and race issue aside).
| There's no english sentence that can be as clear.
|
| We've created formal notation to shorten writing. And
| computation is formal notation that is actually useful. Why
| write pages of specs when I could write a few lines of
| code?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| There's also creative space inside the formal notation.
| It's not just "these are the known abstractions, please
| lego them together", the formal syntax and notation is
| just one part of the whole. The syntax and notation
| define the forms of poetry (here's the meter, here's the
| rhyme scheme, here's how the whitespace works), but as
| software developers we're still filling in the words that
| fit that meter and rhyme scheme and whitespace. We're
| adding the flowery metaphors in the way we choose
| variable names and the comments we choose to add and the
| order we define things or choose to use them.
|
| Software developers can use the exact same "lego block"
| abstractions ("this code just multiplies two numbers")
| and tell very different stories with it ("this code is
| the formula for force power", "this code computes a
| probability of two events occurring", "this code gives us
| our progress bar state as the combination of two sub-
| processes", etc).
|
| LLMs have only so many "stories" they are trained on, and
| so many ways of thinking about the "why" of a piece of
| code rather than mechanical "what".
| skydhash wrote:
| Computers only care about the _what_ , and have no use
| for the _why_. Humans care about the latter too and the
| programmer lives at the intersection of both. Taking a
| _why_ and transforming it into a _what_ is the coding
| process.
|
| Software engineering is all about making sure the _what_
| actually solves the _why_ , making the _why_ visible
| enough in the _what_ so that we can modify the latter if
| the former changes (it always does).
|
| Current LLM are not about transforming a _why_ into a
| _what_. It's about transforming an underspecified _what_
| into some _what_ that we hope fits the _why_. But as we
| all know from the 5 Why method, _why_ 's are recursive
| structure, and most software engineer is about diving
| into the details of the _why_. The _what_ are easy once
| that done because computers are simple mechanisms if you
| chose the correct level of abstraction for the project.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| You're both right. It just depends on the problems you're
| solving and the languages you use.
|
| I find languages like JavaScript promote the idea that of
| "Lego programming" because you're encouraged to use a module
| for everything.
|
| But when you start exploring ideas that haven't been
| thoroughly explored already, and particularly in systems
| languages which are less zealous about DRY (don't repeat
| yourself) methodologies, the you can feel a lot more like a
| sculptor.
|
| Likewise if you're building frameworks rather than reusing
| them.
|
| So it really depends on the problems you're solving.
|
| For general day-to-day coding for your average 9-to-5
| software engineering job, I can definitely relate to why
| people might think coding is basically "LEGO engineering".
| Jensson wrote:
| > Coding is not at all like working a lump of clay unless
| you're still writing assembly.
|
| Isn't the analogy apt? You can't make a working car using a
| lump of clay, just a car statue, a lump of clay is already an
| abstraction of objects you can make in reality.
| balamatom wrote:
| Bingo.
| vaylian wrote:
| > You're taking a bunch of pre-built abstractions written by
| other people on top of what the computer is actually doing
| and plugging them together like LEGOs.
|
| Correct. However, you will probably notice that your solution
| to the problem doesn't feel right, when the bricks that are
| available to you, don't compose well. The AI will just
| happily smash together bricks and at first glance it might
| seem that the task is done.
|
| Choosing the right abstraction (bricks) is part of finding
| the right solution. And understanding that choice often
| requires exploration and contemplation. AI can't give you
| that.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Not yet, anyway; I do trust LLMs for writing snippets or
| features at this point, but I don't trust them for setting
| up new applications, technology choices, architectures,
| etc.
|
| The other day people were talking about metrics, the amount
| of lines of code people vs LLMs could output in any given
| time, or the lines of code in an LLM assisted application -
| using LOC as a metric for productivity.
|
| But would an LLM ever suggest using a utility or library,
| or re-architecture an application, over writing their own
| code?
|
| I've got a fairly simple application, renders a table (and
| in future some charts) with metrics. At the moment all that
| is done "by hand", last features were stuff like filtering
| and sorting the data. But that kind of thing can also be
| done by a "data table" library. Or the whole application
| can be thrown out in favor of a workbook (one of those data
| analysis tools, I'm not at home in that are at all). That'd
| save hundreds of lines of code + maintenance burden.
| z3dd wrote:
| I was creating a Jira/bb wrapper with node recently and
| Claude actually used plenty of libraries to solve some
| tasks.
| Nab443 wrote:
| Same with gpt, but I felt it was more like "hey, everyone
| uses that, so why not me" than finding the right tool for
| the job. Can't say for Claude.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Unless you limit your scope of problem solving to only what
| you can do yourself, you are going to have to delegate work
| - your abstraction is going to be specs and delegating work
| to other people and ensuring it works well together and
| follows the specs - just like working with an LLm.
| hennell wrote:
| It depends what you're doing not really what you do it with.
|
| I can do some crud apps where it's just data input to data
| store to output with little shaping needed. Or I can do apps
| where there's lots of filters, actions and logic to happen
| based on what's inputted that require some thought to ensure
| actually solve the problem it's proposed for.
|
| "Shaping the clay" isn't about the clay, it's about the
| shaping. If you have to make a ball of clay and also have to
| make a bridge of Lego a 175kg human can stand on, you'll
| learn more about Lego and building it than you will about
| clay.
|
| Get someone to give you a Lego instruction sheet and you'll
| learn far less, because you're not shaping anymore.
| a_better_world wrote:
| changing "clay" for "legos" doesn't change the core argument.
| The tactile feel you get for the medium as you work it with
| your hands and the "artificial syntax" imposed by the medium.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Lego boxes include a set of instructions that implies there's
| only one way to assemble the contents, but that's sometimes
| an injustice to the creative space that Legos are built to
| provide. There can be a joy in algorithmically building the
| thing some other designers worked to make look nice, but
| there's a creative space outside the instructions, too.
|
| The risk of LLMs laying more of these bricks isn't just loss
| of authenticity and less human elements of discovery and
| creation, it's further down the path of "there's only one
| instruction manual in the Lego box, and that's all the robots
| know and build for you". It's an increased commodification of
| a few legacy designers' worth of work over a larger creative
| space than at first seems apparent.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > plugging them together like LEGOs
|
| Aren't Legos known for their ability to enable creativity and
| endless possibilities? It doesn't feel that different from
| the clay analogy, except a bit coarser grained.
| isolli wrote:
| This is very insightful, thanks. I had a similar thought
| regarding data science in particular. Writing those pandas
| expressions by hand during exploration means you get to know
| the data intimately. Getting AI to write them for you limits
| you to a superficial knowledge of said data (at least in my
| case).
| nielsbot wrote:
| While there is still a market for artisanal furniture, dishes
| and clothes most people buy mass-produced dishes, clothes and
| furniture.
|
| I wonder if software creation will be in a similar place. There
| still might be a small market for handmade software but the
| majority of it will be mass produced. (That is, by LLM or even
| software itself will mostly go away and people will get their
| work done via LLM instead of "apps")
| pinkgolem wrote:
| I would argue the opposite..
|
| What you get right now is mass replicated software, just
| another copy of sap/office/Spotify/whatever
|
| That software is not made individually for you, you get a
| copy like millions of other people and there is nearly no
| market anymore for individual software.
|
| Llms might change that, we have a bunch of internal apps now
| for small annoying things..
|
| They all have there quirks, but are only accessible
| internally and make life a little bit easier for people
| working for us.
|
| Most of them are one shot llms things, throw away if you do
| not need it anymore or just one shoot again
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The question is whether that's a good thing or not;
| software adages like "Not Invented Here" aren't going to go
| away. For personal tools / experiments it's probably fine,
| just like hacking together something in your spare time,
| but it can become a risk if you, others, or a business
| start to depend on it (just like spare time hacked tools).
|
| I'd argue that in most cases it's better to do some
| research and find out if a tool already exists, and if it
| isn't exactly how you want it... to get used to it, like
| one did with all other tools they used.
| williamcotton wrote:
| > _it can become a risk if you, others, or a business
| start to depend on it (just like spare time hacked
| tools)._
|
| So that Excel spreadsheet that manages the entire sales
| funnel?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| As with furniture, it's supply vs demand, and it's a
| discussion that goes back decades at this point.
|
| Very few people (even before LLM coding tools) actually did
| low level "artisanal" coding; I'd argue the vast majority of
| software development goes into implementing features in b2b /
| b2c software, building screens, logins, overviews, detail
| pages, etc. That requires (required?) software engineers too,
| and skill / experience / etc, but it was more assembling
| existing parts and connecting them.
|
| Years ago there was already a feeling that a lot of software
| development boiled down to taping libraries together.
|
| Or from another perspective, replace "LLM" with
| "outsourcing".
| intended wrote:
| Acceptance of mass production is only post establishment of
| quality control.
|
| Skipping over that step results in a world of knock offs and
| product failures.
|
| People buy Zara or H&M because they can offload the work of
| verifying quality to the brand.
|
| This was a major hurdle that mass manufacturing had to
| overcome to achieve dominance.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Acceptance of mass production is only post establishment
| of quality control.
|
| Hence why a lot of software development is gluing libraries
| together these days.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| 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
| house/apartment with stuff already made and still feel like
| it's mine. I made it. I decided what's in it. I didn't have to
| make it all from scratch.
|
| For me, lots of programming is the same. I just want to
| assemble the pieces
|
| > When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you
| could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you
| thought you wanted to make
|
| No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't
| grind their own lens. Popular and highly acclaimed games not at
| crap because they didn't write their own physics engine (Zelda
| uses Havok) or their own game engine (Plenty of great games use
| Unreal or Unity)
| Krssst wrote:
| 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.
| refactor_master wrote:
| But the code you're writing is guard railed by your
| oversight, the tests you decide on and the type checking.
|
| So whether you're writing the spec code out by hand or ask
| an LLM to do it is besides the point if the code is
| considered a means to an end, which is what the post above
| yours was getting at.
| skydhash wrote:
| Tests and type checking are often highway-wide guardrails
| when the path you want to take is like a tightrope.
|
| Also the code is not a means to an end. It's going to be
| run somewhere doing stuff someone wants to do reliably
| and precisely. The overall goal was ever to invest some
| programmer time and salary in order to free more time for
| others. Not for everyone to start babysitting stuff.
| signatoremo wrote:
| > 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 we all
| are ok with that. That's why we accept AI code. They work
| well enough.
| skydhash wrote:
| > Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set
| of libraries you'd get less than 10 millisecond response?
|
| There can be. But you'd have to map the libraries to
| opcodes and then count the cycles. That's what people do
| when they care about that particular optimization. They
| measure and make guaranties.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| That's not realistic with any processor that does branch
| prediction, cache hits vs cache misses etc
| skydhash wrote:
| You can easily compute the worst cases. All the details
| are in the specs of the processor.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Assuming also that you are not running on top of an
| operating system, running in a VM with "noisy
| neighbors"...
|
| I haven't counted cycles since programming assembly on a
| 65C02 where you cooks save a clock cycle by accessing
| memory in the first page of memory - two opcodes to do
| LDA $02 instead of LDA $0201
| skydhash wrote:
| Then assumes the opposite. Build an RTOS and don't
| virtualize your software on top of it.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Yes but developers don't have a deterministic interface. I
| still had to be careful about writing out my specs and make
| sure they were followed. At least I don't have to watch my
| tone when my two mid level ticket taking developers -
| Claude and Codex - do something stupid. They also do it a
| lot faster
| globular-toast wrote:
| There are two stages to becoming a decent programmer: first
| you learn to use abstraction, then you learn when not to use
| abstraction.
|
| Trying to find the right level is the art. Once you learn the
| tools of the trade and can do abstraction, it's natural to
| want to abstract everything. Most programmers go through such
| a phase. But sometimes things really are distinct and trying
| to find an abstraction that does both will never be
| satisfactory.
|
| When building a house there are generally a few distinct
| trades that do the work: bricklayers, joiners, plumbers,
| electricians etc. You could try to abstract them all: it's
| all just joining stuff together isn't it? But something would
| be lost. The dangers of working with electricity are
| completely different to working with bricks. On the other
| hand, if people were too specialised it wouldn't work either.
| You wouldn't expect a whole gang of electricians, one who can
| only do lighting, one who can only do sockets, one who can
| only do wiring etc. After centuries of experience we've found
| a few trades that work well together.
|
| So, yes, it's all just abstraction, but you can go too far.
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| Well said, great analogy. Sometimes the level of
| abstraction feels arbitrary - you have to understand the
| circumstances that led there to see why it's not.
| knollimar wrote:
| In higher end work they do have specialized lighting,
| branch power, and feeder electricians. And among feeder
| even special ones for medium voltage etc
| archagon wrote:
| AI is not an abstraction.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >I instead just fill my house/apartment with stuff already
| made and still feel like it's mine.
|
| I'm starting to wonder if we lose something in all this
| convenience. Perhaps my life is better because I cook my own
| food, wash my own dishes, chop my own firewood, drive my own
| car, write my own software. Outwardly the results look better
| the more I outsource but inwardly I'm not so sure.
|
| On the subject of furnishing your house the IKEA effect seems
| to confirm this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
| yason wrote:
| The creative process is not dependent on the abstraction.
|
| > For me, lots of programming is the same. I just want to
| assemble the pieces
|
| How did those pieces came to be? By someone assembling other
| pieces or by someone crafting them together out of nowhere
| because nobody else had written them by the time?
|
| Of course you reuse other parts and abstractions to do
| whatever _things that you 're not working on_ but each time
| you do something that hasn't been done before you can't but
| engage the creative process, even if you're sitting on top of
| 50 years worth of abstractions.
|
| In other words, what a programmer essentially has is a
| playfield. And whether the playfield is a stack of
| transistors or coding agents, when you program you create
| something new even if it's defined and built in terms of the
| playfield.
| jstanley wrote:
| > 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.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators
| didn't grind their own lens.
|
| But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if
| Tarantino just typed "Write a gangster movie." into a prompt
| field.
| heliumtera wrote:
| And if he did, why would I prefer using his prompt instead
| of mine?
|
| "Write a gangster movie that I like", instead of "...a
| movie this other guy likes".
|
| But because this is not the case, we appreciate Tarantino
| more than we appreciate gangster movies. It is about the
| process.
| dropofwill wrote:
| This is exactly the process happening in the music space
| with Suno. Go to their subreddit, they all talk about how
| they only listen to 'their' songs, for the exact reasons
| you list.
|
| Its bleak out there.
| heliumtera wrote:
| It is very different with music. Music and images fall
| into "just shit something and I don't care what is is"
| category. Most people prompting for things in this
| category will be satisfied with anything, they might not
| admit, but the degrees of freedom the model has is
| infinite. Now when you pin the output, let's say a
| character you generated, and ask for modifications WHILE
| KEEPING lots of characteristics, you reduce the degrees
| of freedom from infinite to a small, very constrained,
| set of states. There are workarounds but natively llms
| can't really do this. You ask the model to rotate an
| image, the hair becomes blue and the sword becames an
| axe.
|
| With music this is much more pronounced because most
| people are musically illiterate, so even the basic
| mistakes while dragging characteristics over diffs
| becomes invisible. It's an interesting phenomenon I
| agree, but it says more about lack of taste and
| illiteracy of the common individual.
|
| But on the point of "thinking hard", with music and
| artistic production in general, individuals (human with
| soul, not npc) crave for ideas and perspective. It is the
| play, the relationship between ideas that are hard to
| vocalize and describe but can be provocative. Because we
| cannot describe or understand, we have no choice other
| than provoke into another a similar contemplation.
|
| But make no mistake, nobody is enjoying llm slop. They
| have fantasies that now they can produce something of
| value, or delegate this production. If this becomes true,
| instantly they lose and everyone goes directly to the
| source.
|
| Art is specifically about communicating the
| inconceivable, cannot be delegated. If the tool is
| sufficient to produce art, then the expression is of the
| tool itself, now they ARE.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > But because this is not the case, we appreciate
| Tarantino more than we appreciate gangster movies.
|
| Do we? I don't think people appreciate tarantino more
| than gangster movies. Don't think people appreciate
| tarantino more than pulp fiction. Frankly, tarantino
| doesn't factor in at all.
|
| > It is about the process.
|
| I never considered the process when watching pulp
| fiction. It's the finished product, not the process, that
| matters.
|
| Put it this way, we know who tarantino is because of pulp
| fiction. Not the other way around.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > It's the finished product, not the process, that
| matters.
|
| I think the point is that the finished product depends on
| the process.
| adriand wrote:
| > But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if
| Tarantino just typed "Write a gangster movie." into a
| prompt field.
|
| Doesn't that prove the point? You could do that right now,
| and it would be absolute trash. Just like how right now we
| are nowhere close to being able to make great software with
| a single prompt.
|
| I've been vibecoding a side project and it has been three
| months of ideating, iterating, refining and testing. It
| would have taken me immeasurably longer without these
| tools, but the end result is still 100% my vision, and it
| has been a tremendous amount of work.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Pulp Fiction, like many Tarantino movies, also gets much of
| its effect from using existing songs rather than using an
| all new soundtrack
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Songs he likely hand picked and for reasons that even you
| and I don't know about, instead of songs suggested by an
| AI with no personal taste.
| munificent wrote:
| More to your original point, Tarantino is actually well
| known for his deliberate uses of rare lenses. He doesn't
| grind them himself, but he did resurrect a dead lens
| format for The Hateful Eight:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_Panavision_70
| cowboylowrez wrote:
| When I read discussions about this sort of thing, I often
| find that folks look harder for similarities and patterns but
| once they succeed here, they ignore the differences. AI in
| particular is so full of this "pattern matching" style of
| thinking that the really significance of this tech, ie., how
| absolutely new and different it is, yeah it just sort of goes
| ignored, or even worse, machines get "pattern matched" into
| humans and folks argue from that point of view lol witness
| all the "new musicians" who vibe code disco hits, I'll
| invariably see the argument that AIs train on existing music
| just like humans do so whats the big deal?
|
| But these arguments and the OP's article do reinforce that AI
| rots brains. Even my sparing use of googles gemini and my
| interaction with the bots here have really dinged my ability
| to do simple math.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Did you not read the post? You're talking from the space of
| the Builder while neglecting the Thinker. That's fine for
| some people, but not for others.
| lakatadam wrote:
| I really appreciate this sentiment. It feels absolutely
| overwhelming the pace at which new tools and AI protocols are
| being released, leaving a feeling of constantly falling
| behind. But approaching from the other end, I can just make
| things that I do come up with and explore the new protocols
| only if I can't do the thing with what I've already grasped.
| munificent wrote:
| _> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators
| didn 't grind their own lens._
|
| One of the reasons Barry Lyndon is over 50 years old and
| still looks like no other movie today is because Kubrick
| tracked down a few lenses originally designed for NASA and
| had custom mounts built for them to use with cinema cameras.
|
| https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-
| fa...
|
| _> Popular and highly acclaimed games not at crap because
| they didn 't write their own physics engine (Zelda uses
| Havok)_
|
| Super Mario Bros is known for having a surprisingly subtle
| and complex physics system that enabled the game to feel both
| challenging and fair even for players very new to consoles.
| Celeste a newer game also famous for being very difficult yet
| not feeling punishing does something similar:
|
| https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_towerfall_p.
| ..
|
| _> or their own game engine (Plenty of great games use
| Unreal or Unity)_
|
| And Minecraft doesn't, which is why few other games at the
| time of its release felt and played like it.
|
| You're correct that no one builds _everything_ from scratch
| all the time. However, if all you ever do is cobble a few
| pre-made things together, I think you 'll discover that
| nothing you make is ever that interesting or enduring in
| value. Sure, it can be useful, and satisfying. But the kinds
| of things that really leave a mark on people, that affect
| them deeply, always have at least _some_ aspect where the
| creator got obsessive and went off the deep end and did their
| own thing from scratch.
|
| Further, you'll never learn what a transformative experience
| it can be to _be_ that creator who gets obsessive about a
| thing. You 'll miss out on discovering the weird parts of
| your own soul that are more fascinated by some corner of the
| universe than anyone else is.
|
| I have a lot of regrets in my life, but I don't regret the
| various times I've decided I've deeply dug into some thing
| and doing it from scratch. Often, that has turned out later
| to be some of the most long-term useful things I've done even
| though it seemed like a selfish indulgence at the time.
|
| Of course, it's your life. But consider that there may be a
| hidden cost to always skimming along across the tops of the
| stacks of things that already exist out there. There is
| growth in the depths.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| "The muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Start
| alone."
|
| That has actually been a major problem for me in the past where
| my core idea is too simple, and I don't give "the muse" enough
| time to visit because it doesn't take me long enough to build
| it. Anytime I have given the muse time to visit, they always
| have.
| ibestvina wrote:
| This makes no sense to me. There are plenty of artists out
| there (e.g. El Anatsui), not to mention whole professions such
| as architects, who do not interact directly with what they are
| building, and yet can have profound relationship with the final
| product.
|
| Discovering the right problem to solve is not necessarily
| coupled to being "hands on" with the "materials you're
| shaping".
| darepublic wrote:
| you think El Anatsui would concur that they didn't interact
| directly with what they were building? "hands on", "material
| you're shaping" is a metaphor
| ibestvina wrote:
| I don't see why his involvement, explaining to his team how
| exactly to build a piece, is any different from a developer
| explaining to an LLM how to build a certain feature, when
| it comes to the level of "being hands on".
|
| Obviously I am not comparing his final product with my
| code, I am simply pointing out how this metaphor is flawed.
| Having "workers" shape the material according to your plans
| does not reduce your agency.
| skydhash wrote:
| > I don't see why his involvement, explaining to his team
| how exactly to build a piece, is any different from a
| developer explaining to an LLM
|
| Because everyone under him knows that a mistake big
| enough is a quick way to unemployment or legal actions.
| So the whole team is pretty much aligned. A developer
| using an LLM may as well try to herd cats.
| ibestvina wrote:
| First, that's quite a sad view of incentives structures.
| Second, you can't be serious in thinking that "worker
| worried they might be fired" puts the person in charge
| closer to the "materials" and more "hands on" with the
| project.
| lolive wrote:
| In my company, [enterprise IT] architects are separated into
| two kinds. People with a CV longer than my arm who
| know/anticipate everything that could fail and have reached a
| level of understandind that I personnally call "wisdom". And
| theorists, who read books and norms, who focus mostly on the
| nominal case, and have no idea [and no interest] in how the
| real world will be a hard brick wall that challenges each and
| every idea you invent.
|
| Not being hands-on, and more important not LISTENING to the
| hands-on people and learning from them, is a massive issue in
| my surroundings.
|
| So thinking hard on something is cool. But making it real is
| a whole different story.
|
| Note: as Steve used to say, "real artists ship".
| darepublic wrote:
| Thanks for the quote, it definitely resonates. Distressing to
| see many people who can't relate to this, taking it literally
| and arguing that there is nothing lost the more removed they
| are from the process.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| I love Aral, he is so invested.
| Cuervo_ wrote:
| I personally have found success with an approach that's the
| inverse of how agents are being used generally.
|
| I don't allow my agent to write any code. I ask it for guidance
| on algorithms, and to supply the domain knowledge that I might
| be missing. When using it for game dev for example, I ask it to
| explain in general terms how to apply noise algorithms for
| procedural generation, how to do UV mapping etc, but the actual
| implementation in my language of choice is all by hand.
|
| Honestly, I think this is a sweet spot. The amount of time I
| save getting explanations of concepts that would otherwise get
| a bit of digging to get is huge, but I'm still entirely in
| control of my codebase.
| shsksj wrote:
| Yep, this is the sweet spot. Though I still let it type code
| a lot - boilerplate stuff I'd be bored out of my mind typing.
| And I've found it has an extremely high success rate typing
| that code on top of its very easy for me to review that code.
| No friction at all. Granted this is often no larger than 100
| lines or so (across various files).
|
| If it takes you more than a few seconds or so to understand
| code an agent generated you're going to make mistakes. You
| should know exactly what it's going to produce before it
| produces it.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| >> Coding is like
|
| That description is NOT coding, coding is a subset of that.
|
| Coding comes once you know what you need to build, coding is
| the process of you expressing that in a programming language
| and as you do so you apply all your knowledge, experience and
| crucially your taste, to arrive at an implementation which does
| what's required (functionally and non-functionally) AND is open
| to the possibility of change in future.
|
| Someone else here wrote a great comment about this the other
| day and it was along the lines of if you take that week of work
| described in the GP's comment, and on the friday afternoon you
| delete all the code checked in. Coding is the part to recreate
| the check in, which would take a lot less than a week!
|
| All the other time was spent turning you into the developer who
| could understand why to write that code in the first place.
|
| These tools do not allow you to skip the process of creation.
| They allow you to skip aspects of coding - if you choose to,
| they can also elide your tastes but that's not a requirement of
| using them, they do respond well to examples of code and other
| directions to guide them in your tastes. The functional and
| non-functional parts they're pretty good at without much
| steering now but i always steer for my tastes because, e.g.
| opus 4.5 defaults to a more verbose style than i care for.
| pikzel wrote:
| It's all individual. That's like saying writing only happens
| when you know exactly the story to tell. I love open a blank
| project with a vague idea of what I want to do, and then just
| start exploring while I'm coding.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I'm sure some coding works this way, but I'd be surprised
| if it's more than a small percentage of it.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I have no idea who this guy is (I guess he's a fantasy
| novelist?) but this video came up in my YouTube feed recently
| and feels like it matches closely with the themes you're
| expressing. https://youtu.be/mb3uK-_QkOo?si=FK9YnawwxHLdfATv
| jstanley wrote:
| But you can move a layer up.
|
| Instead of pouring all of your efforts into making one single
| static object with no moving parts, you can simply _specify_
| the individual parts, have the machine make them for you, and
| pour your heart and soul into making a machine that is composed
| of _thousands_ of parts, that you could never hope to make if
| you had to craft each one by hand from clay.
|
| We used to have a way to do this before LLMs, of course: we had
| companies that employed many people, so that the top level of
| the company could simply specify what they wanted, and the
| lower levels only had to focus on making individual parts.
|
| Even the person making an object from clay is (probably) not
| refining his own clay or making his own oven.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, but bad ingredients do not make a yummy pudding.
|
| Or, it's like trying to make a MacBook Pro by buying
| electronics boards from AliExpress and wiring them together.
| jstanley wrote:
| I'd rather have a laptop made from AliExpress components
| than only have a single artisanal hand-crafted resistor.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, the point is that only if you're willing to accept
| crappy results then you can use AI to build bigger
| things.
| sdoering wrote:
| To me that seems like a spurious (maybe even false)
| dichotomy. You can have crappy results without AI. And
| you can have great results with AI.
|
| Your contrast is an either or, that - in the real world -
| does not exist.
|
| Take content written by AI, prompted by a human. A lot of
| it is slop and crap. And there will be more slop and crap
| with AI than before. But that was the case, when the
| medium changed from hand writen to printed books. And
| when paper and printing became cheap, we had slop like
| those 10 Cent Western or Romance novellas.
|
| We also still had Goethe, still had Kleist, still had
| Grass (sorry, very German centric here).
|
| We also have Inception vs. the latest sequel of any
| Marvel franchise.
|
| I have seen AI writen, but human prompted short stories,
| that made people well up and find ideas presented in a
| light not seen before. And I have seen AI generated
| stories that one wants to purge from my brain.
|
| It isn't the tool - it is the one yielding it.
|
| Question: Did photoshop kill photography? Because
| honestly, this AI discussion to me sounds very much like
| the discussion back then.
| weebull wrote:
| > Question: Did photoshop kill photography? Because
| honestly, this AI discussion to me sounds very much like
| the discussion back then.
|
| It killed an aspect of it. The film processing in the
| darkroom. Even before digital cameras were ubiquitous it
| was standard to get a scan before doing any processing
| digitally. Chemical processing was reduced the minimum
| necessary.
| amelius wrote:
| Lightroom killed photography.
| mlrtime wrote:
| I was going to reply defending AI tooling and crappy
| results, but I think I'm done with it.
|
| I think there are just a class of people know that think
| that you cannot get 'macbook' quality with a LLM. I don't
| know why I try to convince them, it's not in my benefit.
| i7l wrote:
| That's a false dichotomy, because transistors and ICs are
| manufactured to be deterministic and nearly perfect. LLMs
| can never be guaranteed to be like that.
|
| Yes, some things are better when manufactured in highly
| automated ways (like computer chips), but their design
| has been thoroughly tested and before shipping the chips
| themselves go through lots of checks to make sure they
| are correct. LLM code is almost never treated that way
| today.
| sfn42 wrote:
| It's more like the chess.com vs lichess example in my mind.
| On the one hand you have a big org, dozens of devs, on the
| other you have one guy doing a better job.
|
| It's amazing what one competent developer can do, and it's
| amazing how little a hundred devs end up actually doing when
| weighed down by beaurocracy. And lets not pretend even half
| of them qualify as competent, not to mention they probably
| don't care either. They get to work and have a 45 min coffee
| break, move some stuff around in the Kanban board, have
| another coffee break, then lunch, then foosball etc. Ad when
| they actually write some code it's ass.
|
| And sure, for those guys maybe LLMs represent a huge
| productivity boost. For me it's usually faster to do the work
| myself than to coax the bot into creating something
| acceptable.
| saarraz1 wrote:
| Agreed. Most people don't do anything and this might
| actually get them to produce code at an acceptable rate. I
| find that I often know what I need to do and just hitting
| the LLM until it does what I want is more work than writing
| the damn code (the latter also being a better way to be
| convinced that it works, since you actually know what it
| does and how). People are very bad code reviewers,
| especially those people who don't do anything, so making
| them full time code reviewers always seemed very odd to me.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This is really what it's about.
|
| As someone that started with Machine Code, I'm grateful for
| compiled -even interpreted- languages. I can't _imagine_
| doing the kind of work that I do, nowadays, in Machine Code.
|
| I'm finding it quite interesting, using LLM-assisted
| development. I still need to keep an eye on things (for
| example, the LLM tends to suggest crazy complex solutions,
| like writing an entire control from scratch, when a simple
| subclass, and five lines of code, will work much better), but
| it's actually been a great boon.
|
| I find that I learn a lot, using an LLM, and I love to learn.
| croes wrote:
| But we become watchers instead of makers.
|
| There is a difference between cooking and putting a ready
| meal into the microwave.
|
| Both satisfy your hunger but only one can give some kind of
| pride.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Eh. I've had pride in my work for over 40 years.
|
| The tools change, but the spirit only grows.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| The same thing happens if you are the head cook in a
| restaurant.
|
| If you are a cook wanting to open a restaurant, you will
| be delegating, the same thing with AI. If you are fine
| only doing what your hands can possibly do in the time
| allotted, go ahead and cook in your kitchen.
|
| But I need to make money to be able to trade for the food
| I eat.
| croes wrote:
| You will make money but the others are the artists.
|
| That's the whole point. You become a customer of an AI
| service, you get what you want but it wasn't done by you.
| You get money but not the feeling of accomplishment from
| cracking a problem. Like playing a video game following a
| solution or solving a crossword puzzle with google.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| What good is a "feeling of accomplishment" as I am on the
| street homeless, hungry and naked?
| croes wrote:
| Pretty B/W view. The feeling of accomplishment is the
| part that makes a job interesting, if it's just about
| money it becomes dull.
|
| And don't forget, it's more likely to find someone
| cheaper who can write the same prompts as you than people
| with the same kind of experience in cracking problems.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| To tackle the second part first, do you think creating
| finely crafted bespoke code is going to save a mid level
| ticket taker (not referring to you of course) who can
| take well defined requirements and create code is going
| to save anyone's job - ie "a human LLM"?
|
| Those types of developers on the enterprise dev side -
| where most developers work - were becoming a commodity a
| decade ago and wages have been basically stagnant. Now
| those types of developers are finding it hard to stand
| out and get noticed.
|
| The trick is to move "up the stack" and closer to the
| customer whether that be an internal customer or external
| customer and be able to work at a higher level of scope,
| impact and ambiguity.
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
|
| It's been well over a decade and 6 jobs ago that I had to
| do a coding interview to prove I was able "to codez real
| gud", every job I've had since then has been more
| concerned with whether I was "smart and get things done".
| That could mean coding, leading teams, working with "the
| business", being on Zoom calls with customers, flying out
| to the customers site, or telling a PE backed company
| with low margins that they didn't need a team of
| developers, they needed to outsource complete
| implementations to other companies.
|
| I've always seen coding as grunt work. But the only way
| to go from requirements -> architectural vision -> result
| and therefore getting money in my pocket.
|
| My vision was based on what I could do myself in the
| allotted time at first and then what I could do with
| myself + leading a team. Now it's back to what I can do
| by myself + Claude Code and Codex.
|
| As far as the first question, my "fun" during my adult
| life has come from teaching fitness classes until I was
| 35 and running with friends in charity races on the
| weekend, and just hanging out, spending time with my (now
| grown) stepsons after that and for the past few years
| just spending time with my wife and traveling, concerts,
| some "digital nomadding" etc
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Check this out: https://imgur.com/a/aVxryBf
|
| It's a carved wooden dragon that my dad got from
| Indonesia (probably about 50 years ago).
|
| It's hard to appreciate, if you aren't holding it, but it
| weighs _a lot_ , and is intricately carved, all over.
|
| I guarantee that the carver used a Dremel.
|
| I still have a huge amount of respect for their work.
| That wood is like _rock_. I would not want to carve it
| with hand tools.
|
| There's just some heights we can't reach, without a
| ladder.
| i7l wrote:
| And therein lies the crux: some people love to craft each
| part themselves, whereas others love to orchestrate but not
| manufacture each part.
|
| With LLMs and engineers often being forced by management to
| use them, everyone is pushed to become like the second group,
| even though it goes against their nature. The former group
| see the part as a means, whereas the latter view it as the
| end.
|
| Some people love the craft itself and that is either taken
| away or hollowed out.
| berkes wrote:
| > we had companies that employed many people, so that the top
| level of the company could simply specify what they wanted,
| and the lower levels only had to focus on making individual
| parts.
|
| I think this makes a perfect counter-example. Because this
| structure is an important reason for YC to exist and what the
| HN crowd often rallies against.
|
| Such large companies - generally - don't make good products.
| Large companies rarely make good products in this way. Most,
| today, just buy companies that built something in the GP's
| cited vein: a creative process, with pivots, learnings, more
| pivots, failures or - when successful - most often successful
| in an entirely different form or area than originally
| envisioned. Even the large tech monopolies of today
| originated like that. Zuckerberg never envisioned VR worlds,
| photo-sharing apps, or chat apps, when he started the campus-
| fotobook-website. Bezos did not have some 5d-chess blueprint
| that included the largest internet-infrastructure-for-hire
| when he started selling books online.
|
| If anything, this only strengthens the point you are arguing
| against: a business that operates by a "head" "specifying
| what they want" and having "something" figure out how to
| build the parts, is historically a very bad and inefficient
| way to build things.
| leftbehinds wrote:
| reminds of arguments for - hosting a server vs running stuff in
| cloud - vps vs containers
| logicprog wrote:
| This is beautifully written, but as a point against agentic AI
| coding, I just don't really get it.
|
| It seems to assume that vibe coding or like whatever you call
| the Gas Town model of programming is the only option, but you
| don't have to do that. You don't have to specify upfront what
| you want and then never change or develop that as you go
| through the process of building it, and you don't have to
| accept whatever the AI gives you on the other end as final.
|
| You can explore the affordances of the technologies you're
| using, modify your design and vision for what you're building
| as you go; if anything, I've found AI coding mix far easier to
| change and evolve my direction because it can update all the
| various parts of the code that need to be updated when I want
| to change direction as well as keeping the tests and
| specification and documentation in sync, easily and quickly.
|
| You also don't need to take the final product as a given, a
| "simulacrum delivered from a vending machine": build, and then
| once you've gotten something working, look at it and decide
| that it's not really what you want, and then continue to
| iterate and change and develop it. Again, with AI coding, I've
| found this easier than ever because it's easier to iterate on
| things. The process is a bit faster for not having to move the
| text around and looking up API documentation myself, even
| though I'm directly dictating the architecture and organization
| and algorithms and even where code should go most of the time.
|
| And with the method I'm describing, where you're in the code
| just as much as the AI is, just using it to do the
| text/API/code munging, you can even let the affordances of not
| just the technologies, but the source code and programming
| language itself effect how you do this: if you care about the
| code quality and clarity and organization of the code that the
| AI is generating, you'll see when it's trying to brute force
| its way past technical limitations and instead redirect it to
| follow the grain. It just becomes easier and more fluid to do
| that.
|
| If anything, AI coding in general makes it easier to have a
| conversation with the machine and its affordances and your
| design vision and so on, then before because it becomes easier
| to update everything and move everything around as your ideas
| change.
|
| And nothing about it means that you need to be ignorant of
| what's going on; ostensibly you're reviewing literally every
| line of code it creates and deciding what libraries and
| languages as well as the architecture, organization and
| algorithms it's using. You are aren't you? So you should know
| everything you need to know. In fact, I've learned several
| libraries and a language just from watching it work, enough
| that I can work with them without looking anything up, even new
| syntax and constructs that would have been very unfamiliar
| prior on my manual coding days.
| koliber wrote:
| Sometimes you want an artistic vase that captures some
| essential element of beauty, culture, or emotion.
|
| Sometimes you want a utilitarian teapot to reliably pour a cup
| of tea.
|
| The materials and rough process for each can be very similar.
| One takes a master craftsman and a lot of time to make and
| costs a lot of money. The other can be made on a production
| line and the cost is tiny.
|
| Both have are desirable, for different people, for different
| purposes.
|
| With software, it's similar. A true master knows when to get it
| done quick and dirty and when to take the time to ponder and
| think.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Sometimes you want a utilitarian teapot to reliably pour a
| cup of tea.
|
| If you pardon the analogy, watch how Japanese make a
| utilitarian teapot which reliably pours a cup of tea.
|
| It's more complicated and skill-intensive than it looks.
|
| In both realms, making an artistic vase can be simpler than a
| simple utilitarian tool.
|
| AI is good at making (poor quality, arguably) artistic vases
| via its stochastic output, not highly refined, reliable
| tools. Tolerances on these are tighter.
| koliber wrote:
| There is a whole range of variants in between those two
| "artistic vs utilitarian" points. Additionally, there is a
| ton of variance around "artistic" vs "utilitarian".
|
| Artisans in Japan might go to incredible lengths to create
| utilitarian teapots. Artisans who graduated last week from
| a 4-week pottery workshop will produce a different kind
| quality, albeit artisan. $5.00 teapots from an East Asian
| mass production factory will be very different than high
| quality mass-produced upmarket teapots at a higher price. I
| have things in my house that fall into each of those
| categories (not all teapots, but different kinds of wares).
|
| Sometimes commercial manufacturing produces worse
| tolerances than hand-crafting. Sometimes, commercial
| manufacturing is the only way to get humanly unachievable
| tolerances.
|
| You can't simplify it into "always" and "never" absolutes.
| Artisan is not always nicer than commercial. Commercial is
| not always cheaper than artisan. _____ is not always _____
| than ____.
|
| If we bring it back to AI, I've seen it produce crap, and
| I've also seen it produce code that honestly impressed me
| (my opinion is based on 24 years of coding and engineering
| management experience). I am reluctant to make a call where
| it falls on that axis that we've sketched out in this
| message thread.
| spacecadet wrote:
| This is cute, but this is true for ALL activities in life. I
| have to constantly remind my brother that his job is not unique
| and if he took a few moments, he might realize, flipping
| burgers is also molding lumps of clay.
|
| I think the biggest beef I have with Engineers is that for
| decades they more or less reduced the value of other lumps of
| clay and now want to throw up arms when its theirs.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| In 30 years across 10 jobs, the companies I've worked for have
| not paid me to "code". They've paid me to use my experience to
| add more business value than the total cost of employing me.
|
| I'm no less proud of what I built in the last three weeks using
| three terminal sessions - one with codex, one with Claude, and
| one testing everything from carefully designed specs - than I
| was when I first booted a computer, did "call -151" to get to
| the assembly language prompt on my Apple //e in 1986.
|
| The goal then was to see my ideas come to life. The goal now is
| to keep my customers happy, get projects done on time, on
| budget and meets requirements and continue to have my employer
| put cash in my account twice a month - and formerly put AMZN
| stock in my brokerage account at vesting.
| resters wrote:
| It's very similar now, you have to _surf a swell of selective
| ignorance_ that is (feels?) less reliable than the ignorance
| that one adopts when using a dependency one hasn 't read and
| understood the source code for.
|
| One must be conversant in abstractions that are themselves
| ephemeral and half hallucinated. It's a question of what to
| cling to, what to elevate beyond possible hallucinated rubbish.
| At some level it's a much faster version of the meastspace
| process and it can be extermely emotionally uncomfortable and
| anarchic to many.
| jatora wrote:
| Yeah? And then you continue prompting and developing, and go
| through a very similar iterative process, except now it's
| faster and you get to tackle more abstract, higher level
| problems.
|
| "Most developers don't know the assembly code of what they're
| creating. When you skip assembly you trade the very thing you
| could have learned to fully understand the application you were
| trying to make. The end result is a sad simulacrum of the
| memory efficiency you could have had."
|
| This level of purity-testing is shallow and boring.
| wtetzner wrote:
| I don't think this comparison holds up. With a higher-level
| language, the material you're building with is a formal
| description of the software, which can be fed back into a
| compiler to get a deterministic outcome.
|
| With an LLM, you put in a high-level description, and then
| check in the "machine code" (generated code).
| anymouse123456 wrote:
| Having a background in fine art (and also knew Aral many years
| ago!), this prose resonates heavily with me.
|
| Most of the OP article also resonated with me as I bounce back
| and forth between learning (consuming, thinking, pulling,
| integrating new information) to building (creating, planning,
| doing) every few weeks or months. I find that when I'm feeling
| distressed or unhappy, I've lingered in one mode or the other a
| little too long. Unlike the OP, I haven't found these modes to
| be disrupted by AI at all, in fact it feels like AI is
| supporting both in ways that I find exhilarating.
|
| I'm not sure OP is missing anything because of AI per se, it
| might just be that they are ready to move their focus to
| broader or different problem domains that are separate from
| typing code into an IDE?
|
| For me, AI has allowed me to probe into areas that I would have
| shied away from in the past. I feel like I'm being pulled
| upward into domains that were previously inaccessible.
|
| I use Claude on a daily basis, but still find myself frequently
| hand-writing code as Claude just doesn't deliver the same
| results when creating out of whole cloth.
|
| Claude does tend to make my coarse implementations tighter and
| more robust.
|
| I admittedly did make the transition from software only to
| robotics ~6 years ago, so the breadth of my ignorance is still
| quite thrilling.
| dwaite wrote:
| Supposedly when Michelangelo was asked about how he created the
| statue of David, he said "I just chipped away everything that
| wasn't David."
|
| Your work is influenced by the medium by which you work. I used
| to be able to tell very quickly if a website was developed in
| Ruby on Rails, because some approaches to solve a problem are
| easy and some contain dragons.
|
| If you are coding in clay, the problem is getting turned into a
| problem solvable in clay.
|
| The challenge if you are directing others (people or agents) to
| do the work is that you don't know if they are taking into
| account the properties of the clay. That may be the difference
| between clean code - and something which barely works and is
| unmaintainable.
|
| I'd say in both cases of delegation, you are responsible for
| making sure the work is done correctly. And, in both cases, if
| you do not have personal experiences in the medium you may not
| be prepared to judge the work.
| nindalf wrote:
| For me it's a related but different worry. If I'm no longer
| thinking deeply, then maybe my thinking skills will simply
| atrophy and die. Then when I really need it, I won't have it.
| I'll be reduced to yanking the lever on the AI slot machine,
| hoping it comes up with something that's good enough.
|
| But at that point, will I even have the ability to distinguish
| a good solution from a bad one? How would I know, if I've been
| relying on AI to evaluate if ideas are good or not? I'd just be
| pushing mediocre solutions off as my own, without even
| realising that they're mediocre.
| tcgv wrote:
| I get what he's pointing at: building teaches you things the
| spec can't, and iteration often reveals the real problem.
|
| That said, the framing feels a bit too poetic for engineering.
| Software isn't only craft, it's also operations, risk, time,
| budget, compliance, incident response, and maintenance by
| people who weren't in the room for the "lump of clay" moment.
| Those constraints don't make the work less human; they just
| mean "authentic creation" isn't the goal by itself.
|
| For me the takeaway is: pursue excellence, but treat learning
| as a means to reliability and outcomes. Tools (including LLMs)
| are fine with guardrails, clear constraints up front and
| rigorous review/testing after, so we ship systems we can reason
| about, operate, and evolve (not just artefacts that feel
| handcrafted).
| rsyring wrote:
| > That said, the framing feels a bit too poetic for
| engineering.
|
| I wholeheartedly disagree but I tend to believe that's going
| to be highly dependent on what type of developer a person is.
| One who leans towards the craftsmanship side or one who leans
| towards the deliverables side. It will also be impacted by
| the type of development they are exposed to. Are they in an
| environment where they can even have a "lump of clay" moment
| or is all their time spent on systems that are too
| old/archaic/complex/whatever to ever really absorb the
| essence of the problem the code is addressing?
|
| The OP's quote is exactly how I feel about software. I often
| don't know exactly what I'm going to build. I start with a
| general idea and it morphs towards excellence by the
| iteration. My idea changes, and is sharpened, as it
| repeatedly runs into reality. And by that I mean, it's
| sharpened as I write and refactor the code.
|
| I personally don't have the same ability to do that with code
| review because the amount of time I spend reviewing/absorbing
| the solution isn't sufficient to really get to know the
| problem space or the code.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The best analogy I think is, if you just take Stack Overflow
| code solutions, smoosh over your code and hit compile / build,
| and move on without ever looking at "why it works" you're
| really not using your skills to the best of your ability, and
| it could introduce bugs you didn't expect, or completely
| unnecessary dependencies. With Stack Overflow you can have
| other people pointing out the issues with the accepted answer
| and giving you better options.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| This keeps coming up again and again and again, but like how
| many times were you able to copy paste SO solution wholesale
| and just have it work? Other than for THE most simple cases
| (usually CSS) there would always have to be some
| understanding involved. Of course you don't always learn
| deeply every time, but the whole "copy paste off of
| stackoverflow" was always an exaggeration that is being used
| in seeming earnest.
| 4er_transform wrote:
| Honestly this sounds like a Luddite mindset (and I mean that
| descriptively, not to be insulting). This mindset holds us
| back.
|
| You can imagine the artisans who made shirts saying the exact
| same thing as the first textile factories became operational.
|
| Humans have been coders in the sense we mean for a matter of
| decades at most - a blip in our existence. We're capable of far
| more, and this is yet another task we should cast into the
| machine of automation and let physical laws do the work for us.
|
| We're capable of manipulating the universe into doing our
| bidding, including making rocks we've converted into silicones
| think on our behalf. Making shirts and making code: we're
| capable of so much more.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| > Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates
| what you thought you wanted to make
|
| Isn't this also an overstatement, and the problem is worse.
| That is - the code being handed back is a great prototype,
| needs polishing/finishing, and is ignorant of obvious implicit
| edge cases unless you explicitly innumerate all of them in your
| prompts??
|
| For me, the state of things reminds me of a bad job I had years
| ago.
|
| Worked with a well-regarded long tenured but truculent senior
| engineer who was immune to feedback due to his seniority. He
| committed code that either didn't run, didn't past tests, or
| implemented only the most obvious happy path robotically
| literal interpretation of requirements.
|
| He was however, very very fast... underbidding teammates on
| time estimates by 10x.
|
| He would hand back the broken prototype and we'd then spend the
| 10x time making his code actually something you can run in
| production.
|
| Management kept pushing this because he had a great reputation,
| promised great things, and every once in a while did actually
| deliver stuff fast. It took years for management to come around
| to the fact that this was not working.
| dekhn wrote:
| That quote sounds like special pleading for artisans.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I relate to this. But also, isn't it just that every human
| endeavor goes through an evolution from craft to commodity,
| which is sad for the craftsmen but good for everyone else, and
| that we happen to be the ones living through that for software?
|
| For instance, I think about the pervasive interstate overpass
| bridge. There was a time long ago when building bridges was a
| craft. But now I see like ten of these bridges every day, each
| of which is better - in the sense of how much load they can
| support and durability and reliability - than the best that
| those craftsmen of yore could make.
|
| This doesn't mean I'm in any way immune to nostalgia. But I try
| to keep perspective, that things can be both sad and ultimately
| good.
| convolvatron wrote:
| there is a presumption that the models we are using today are
| 'good enough'. by models I mean thinks like linkers and
| package managers, micro services and cluster management
| tools.
|
| I personally think that we're not done evolving really, and
| to call it quits today would leave alot of efficiency and
| productivity on the table
| wtetzner wrote:
| If you're only building things that have been built before,
| then sure, though I'd argue we already had solutions for that
| before LLMs.
| tbmtbmtbmtbmtbm wrote:
| Make sure you start every day with the type of confidence that
| would allow you to refer to yourself as an intellectual one-
| percenter
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| He specifically wrote that his intellect was _not_ in the "top
| 1%" of people who seemed to solve problems easily. His "1%
| status" was in the bullheadedness needed to pound away at a
| problem for days to find a solution.
| tayo42 wrote:
| > I tried getting back in touch with physics, reading old
| textbooks. But that wasn't successful either. It is hard to
| justify spending time and mental effort solving physics problems
| that aren't relevant or state-of-the-art
|
| I tried this with physics and philosophy. I think i want to do a
| mix of hard but meaningful. For academic fields like that its
| impossible for a regular person to do as a hobby. Might as well
| just do puzzles or something.
| themafia wrote:
| > Yes, I blame AI for this.
|
| Just don't use it. That's always an option. Perhaps your builder
| doesn't actually benefit from an unlimited runway detached from
| the cost of effort.
| bariswheel wrote:
| Good highlight of the struggle between Builder and Thinker, I
| enjoyed the writing. So why not work on PQC? Surely you've
| thought about other avenues here as well.
|
| If you're looking for a domain where the 70% AI solution is a
| total failure, that's the field. You can't rely on vibe coding
| because the underlying math, like Learning With Errors (LWE) or
| supersingular isogeny graphs, is conceptually dense and hasn't
| been commoditized into AI training data yet. It requires that
| same 'several-day-soak' thinking you loved in physics,
| specifically because we're trying to build systems that remain
| secure even against an adversary with a quantum computer. It's
| one of the few areas left where the Thinker isn't just a luxury,
| but a hard requirement for the Builder to even begin.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Instant upvote for a Philiip Mainlander quote at the end. He's
| the OG "God is Dead" guy and Nietzsche was reacting (very poorly)
| to Mainlander and other pessimists like Schopenhauer when he
| followed up with his own, shittier version of "god is dead"
|
| Please read up on his life. Mainlander is the most
| extreme/radical Philosophical Pessimist of them all. He wrote a
| whole book about how you should rationally kill yourself and then
| he _killed himself_ shortly after.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Mainl%C3%A4nder
|
| https://dokumen.pub/the-philosophy-of-redemption-die-philoso...
|
| Max Stirner and Mainlander would have been friends and are
| kindred spirits philosophically.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_philosophical_...
| sfink wrote:
| I definitely relate to this. Except that while I was in the 1% in
| university who thought hard, I don't think my success rate was
| that high. My confidence in the time was quite high, though, and
| I still remember the notable successes.
|
| And also, I haven't started using AI for writing code yet. I'm
| shuffling toward that, with much trepidation. I ask it lots of
| coding questions. I make it teach me stuff. Which brings me to
| the point of my post:
|
| The other day, I was looking at some Rust code and trying to work
| out the ownership rules. In theory, I more or less understand
| them. In practice, not so much. So I had Claude start quizzing
| me. Claude was a pretty brutal teacher -- he'd ask 4 or 5
| questions, most of them solvable from what I knew already, and
| then 1 or 2 that introduced a new concept that I hadn't seen. I
| would get that one wrong and ask for another quiz. Same thing: 4
| or 5 questions, using what I knew plus the thing just introduced,
| plus 1 or 2 with a new wrinkle.
|
| I don't think I got 100% on any of the quizzes. Maybe the last
| one; I should dig up that chat and see. But I learned a ton, and
| had to think really hard.
|
| Somehow, I doubt this technique will be popular. But my
| experience with it was very good. I recommend it. (It does make
| me a little nervous that whenever I work with Claude on things
| that I'm more familiar with, he's always a little off base on
| some part of it. Since this was stuff I didn't know, he could
| have been feeding me slop. But I don't think so; the explanations
| made sense and the the compiler agreed, so it'd be tough to get
| anything completely wrong. And I was thinking through all of it;
| usually the bullshit slips in stealthily in the parts that don't
| _seem_ to matter, but I had to work through everything.)
| Animats wrote:
| "Sometimes you have to keep thinking past the point where it
| starts to hurt." - Fermi
| anonymous344 wrote:
| yes but you solved problems already solved by someone else. how
| about something that hasn't been solved, or yet even noticed?
| that gives the greatest satisfaction
| rc-1140 wrote:
| I think what plagues a lot of pure STEM types in this tumultuous
| period of AI (or "AI") is that they've spent a majority of their
| lives mulling over some problem until they've worked out every
| possible imperfection, and once they've achieved something they
| consider close to that level of perfection, _that 's_ when they
| say they're done.
|
| While this may be an unfair generalization, and apologies to
| those who don't feel this way, but I believe STEM types like the
| OP are used to problem solving that's linear in the sense that
| the problem only exists in its field as something to be solved,
| and once they figure it out, they're done. The OP even described
| his mentality as that of a "Thinker" where he received a problem
| during his schooling, mulled over it for a long time, and
| eventually came to the answer. That's it, next problem to crack.
| Their whole lives revolve around this process and most have never
| considered anything outside it.
|
| Even now, despite my own healthy skepticism of and distaste for
| AI, I am forced to respect that AI can do some things very fast.
| People like the OP, used to chiseling away at a problem for days,
| weeks, months, etc., now have that throughput time slashed.
| They're used to the notion of thinking long and hard about a very
| specific problem and finally having some output; now, code
| modules that are "good enough" can be cooked up in a few minutes,
| and if the module works the problem is solved and they need to
| find the next problem.
|
| I think this is more common than most people want to admit, going
| back to grumblings of "gluing libraries together" being
| unsatisfying. The only suggestion I have for the OP is to expand
| what you think about. There are other comments in this thread
| supporting it but I think a sea change that AI is starting to
| bring for software folks is that we get to put more time towards
| enhancing module design, user experience, resolving tech debt,
| and so on. People being the ones writing code is still very
| important.
|
| I think there's more to talk about where I do share the OP's
| yearning and fears (i.e., people who weren't voracious readers or
| English/literary majors being oneshot by the devil that is AI
| summaries, AI-assisted reading, etc.) but that's another story
| for another time.
| ai_critic wrote:
| > I think what plagues a lot of pure STEM types in this
| tumultuous period of AI (or "AI") is that they've spent a
| majority of their lives mulling over some problem until they've
| worked out every possible imperfection, and once they've
| achieved something they consider close to that level of
| perfection, that's when they say they're done.
|
| These people are miserable to work with if you need things done
| quickly and can tolerate even slight imperfection.
|
| That operating regime is, incidentally, 95% of the work we
| actually get paid to do.
| foxmoss wrote:
| Eventually I always get to a problem I can't solve by just
| throwing an LLM at it and have to go in and properly debug
| things. At that point knowing the code base helps a hell of a
| lot, and I would've been better off writing the entire thing by
| hand.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| What a bizarre claim. If _you_ can solve anything by thinking,
| why don 't you become a scientist? Think of a theory that unites
| quantum physics and general relativity.
| keyle wrote:
| 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, to auto completing
| symbols, to auto completing statements, to auto completing
| paragraphs, to auto completing entire features.
|
| Because it happened so fast, people feel the need to rename
| programming every week. We either vibe coders now, or agentic
| coders or ... or just programmers hey. You know why? I write in
| C, I get machine code, I didn't write the machine code! It was
| all an abstraction!
|
| Oh but it's not the same you say, it changes every time you ask.
| Yes, for now, it's still wonky and janky in places. It's just a
| stepping stone.
|
| Just chill, it's programming. The tools just got even better.
|
| You can still jump on a camel and cross the desert in 3 days.
| Have at it, you risk dying, but enjoy. Or you can just rent a
| helicopter and fly over the damn thing in a few hours. Your
| choice. Don't let people tell you it isn't travelling.
|
| We're all Linus Torvalds now. We review, we merge, we send back.
| And if you had no idea what you were doing before, you'll still
| have no idea what you're doing today. You just fat-finger less
| typos today than ever before.
| joseangel_sc wrote:
| except the thing does not work as expected and it just makes
| you worse not better
| keyle wrote:
| Like I said that's temporary. It's janky and wonky but it's a
| stepping stone.
|
| Just look at image generation. Actually factually look at it.
| We went from horror colours vomit with eyes all over, to 6
| fingers humans, to pretty darn good now.
|
| It's only time.
| leecommamichael wrote:
| Why is image generation the same as code generation?
| dcw303 wrote:
| it's not. We were able to get rid of 6 fingered hands by
| getting very specific, and fine tuning models with lots
| of hand and finger training data.
|
| But that approach doesn't work with code, or with
| reasoning in general, because you would need to
| exponentially fine tune everything in the universe. The
| illusion that the AI "understands" what it is doing is
| lost.
| rvz wrote:
| It isn't.
|
| Code generation progression in LLMs still carries higher
| objective risk of failure depending on the experience on
| the person using it because:
|
| 1. They still do not trust if the code works (even if it
| has tests) thus, needs thorough human supervision and
| still requires on-going maintainance.
|
| 2. Hence (2) it can cost you _more money_ than the tokens
| you spent building it in the first place when it goes
| horribly wrong in production.
|
| Image generation progression comes with close to no
| operational impact, and has far less human supervision
| and can be safely done with none.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| This sounds like every system that I didn't write
| completely myself and honestly some that I did
| mr_freeman wrote:
| > Just look at image generation. Actually factually look at
| it. We went from horror colours vomit with eyes all over,
| to 6 fingers humans, to pretty darn good now.
|
| Yes, but you're not taking into account what actually
| caused this evolution. At first glance, it looks like
| exponential growth, but then we see OpenAI (as one example)
| with trillions in obligations compared to 12-13 billion in
| annual revenue. Meanwhile, tool prices keep rising,
| hardware demand is surging (RAM shortages, GPUs), and yet
| new and interesting models continue to appear. I've been
| experimenting with Claude over the past few days myself.
| Still, at some point, something is bound to backfire.
|
| The AI "bubble" is real, you don't need a masters degree in
| economics to recognize it. But with mounting economic
| pressures worldwide and escalating geopolitical tension we
| may end up stuck with nothing more than those amusing Will
| Smith eating pasta videos for a while.
| beebmam wrote:
| Comments like these are why I don't browse HN nearly ever
| anymore
| w4yai wrote:
| Nothing new. Whenever a new layer of abstraction is added,
| people say it's worse and will never be as good as the old
| way. Though it's a totally biased opinion, we just have
| issues with giving up things we like as human being.
| roadbuster wrote:
| > Whenever a new layer of abstraction is added
|
| LLMs aren't a "layer of abstraction."
|
| 99% of people writing in assembly don't have to drop down
| into manual cobbling of machine code. People who write in
| C rarely drop into assembly. Java developers typically
| treat the JVM as "the computer." In the OSI network
| stack, developers writing at level 7 (application layer)
| almost never drop to level 5 (session layer), and
| virtually no one even bothers to understand the magic at
| layers 1 & 2. These all represent successful, effective
| abstractions for developers.
|
| In contrast, unless you believe 99% of "software
| development" is about to be replaced with "vibe coding",
| it's off the mark to describe LLMs as a new layer of
| abstraction.
| w4yai wrote:
| > unless you believe 99% of "software development" is
| about to be replaced with "vibe coding"
|
| Probably not vibe coding, but most certainly with some AI
| automation
| duskdozer wrote:
| The difference is that LLM output is very
| nondeterministic.
| w4yai wrote:
| It depends. Temperature is a variable. If you really need
| determinism, you could build a LLM for that. Non-
| determinism can be a good feature though.
| duskdozer wrote:
| How would you do that? If it's possible, it seems strange
| that someone hasn't done it already.
| wtetzner wrote:
| And because of that, we check in the generated code, not
| the high-level abstraction. So to understand your
| program, you have to read the output, not the input.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| That's your opinion and you can not use those tools.
|
| People are paying for it because it helps them. Who are you
| to whine about it?
| nunez wrote:
| But that's the entire flippin' problem. People are being
| forced to use these tools professionally at a stagering
| rate. It's like the industry is in its "training your
| replacement" era.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| you don't like it? Find a place that doesn't enforce it.
| Can't find it? Then either build it or accept that you
| want a horse carriage while people want taxi.
| dudewhocodes wrote:
| How can you be so sure to think you're not replaceable?
| Because when you use the tools, you're giving data to
| companies to eventually get even you.
| mr_freeman wrote:
| That's Capitalism, baby
| tired-turtle wrote:
| > We're all Linus Torvalds now.
|
| So...where's your OS and SCM?
|
| I get your point that wetware stills matter, but I think it's a
| bit much to contend that more than a handful of people (or
| everyone) is on the level of Linus Torvalds now that we have
| LLMs.
| keyle wrote:
| I should have been clearer. It was a pun, a take, a joke. I
| was referring to his day-to-day activity now, where he merges
| code, doesn't write hardly any code for the linux kernel.
|
| I didn't imply most of use can do half the thing he's done.
| That's not right.
| tired-turtle wrote:
| > his day-to-day activity now, where he merges code
|
| But even then...don't you think his insight into and
| ability to verify a PR far exceeds that of most devs (LLM
| or not)? Most of us cannot (reasonably) aspire to be like
| him.
| keyle wrote:
| Like I said if you didn't know what you were doing
| before, you won't know what you're doing with today.
|
| Agentic coding in general only amplify your ability (or
| disability).
|
| You can totally learn how to build an OS and invest 5
| years of your life doing so. The first version of Linux
| I'm sure was pretty shoddy. Same for a SCM.
|
| I've been doing this for 30 years. At some point, your
| limit becomes how much time you're willing to invest in
| something.
| DANmode wrote:
| But some can aspire to be him circa five years ago,
|
| while Linus has his own efforts multiplied as well.
| Draiken wrote:
| Even disregarding what he has done, this is utterly absurd.
| I almost spit my coffee reading that.
|
| You are going to tell me that the vibe coders care and read
| the code they merge with the same attention to detail and
| care that Linus has? Come on...
|
| That's the key for me. People are churning out "full
| features" or even apps claiming they are dealing with a new
| abstraction level, but they don't give a fuck about the
| quality of that shit. They don't care if it breaks in 3
| weeks/months/years or if that code's even needed or not.
|
| Someone will surely come say "I read all the code I
| generate" and then I'll say either you're not getting these
| BS productivity boost people claim or you're lying.
|
| I've seen people pushing out 40k lines of code in a single
| PR and have the audacity to tell me they've reviewed the
| code. It's preposterous. People skim over it and YOLO
| merge.
|
| Or if you do review everything, then it's not gonna be much
| faster than writing it yourself unless it's extremely
| simple CRUD stuff that's been done a billion times over. If
| you're only using AI for these tasks maybe you're a bit
| more efficient, but nothing close to the claims I keep
| reading.
|
| I wish people cared about what code they wrote/merged like
| Linus does, because we'd have a hell of a lot less issues.
| fragmede wrote:
| My hair hasn't turned blonde and I don't suddenly know how to
| speak Finnish, either.
|
| You might have missed their point.
| hnfong wrote:
| I think I understand what the author is trying to say.
|
| We miss thinking "hard" about the small details. Maybe "hard"
| isn't the right adjective, but we all know the process of
| coding isn't just typing stuff while the mind wanders. We keep
| thinking about the code we're typing and the interactions
| between the new code and the existing stuff, and keep thinking
| about potential bugs and issues. (This may or may not be
| "hard".)
|
| And this kind of thinking is totally different from what Linus
| Torvalds has to think about when reviewing a huge patch from a
| fellow maintainer. Linus' work is probably "harder", but it's a
| different kind of thinking.
|
| You're totally right it's just tools improving. When compilers
| improved most people were happy, but some people who loved hand
| crafting asm kept doing it as a hobby. But in 99+% cases hand
| crafting asm is a detriment to the project even if it's fun, so
| if you love writing asm yourself you're either out of work, or
| you grudgingly accept that you might have to write Java to get
| paid. I think there's a place for lamenting this kind of
| situation.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I agree. I think some of us would rather deal with small,
| incremental problems than address the big, high-level
| roadmap. High-level things are much more uncertain than
| isolated things that can be unit-tested. This can create
| feelings of inconvenience and unease.
| jtrn wrote:
| Spot on. It's the lumberjack mourning the axe while holding a
| chainsaw. The work is still hard. it's just different. The
| friction comes from developers who prioritize the 'craft' of
| syntax over delivering value. It results in massive motivated
| reasoning. We see people suddenly becoming activists about
| energy usage or copyright solely to justify not using a tool
| they dislike. They will hunt for a single AI syntax error
| while ignoring the history of bugs caused by human fatigue.
| It's not about the tech. it's about the loss of the old way
| of working.
|
| And it's also somewhat egotistical it seems to me. I sense a
| pattern that many developers care more about doing what they
| want instead of providing value to others.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I disagree. It's like the lumberjack working from home
| watching an enormous robotic forestry machine cut trees on
| a set of tv-screens. If he enjoyed producing lumber, then
| what he sees on those screens will fill him with joy. He's
| producing lots of lumber. He's much more efficient than
| with both axe and chainsaw.
|
| But if he enjoyed being in the forest, and _doesn't really
| care about lumber at all_ (Because it turns out, he never
| used or liked lumber, he merely produced it for his
| employer) then these screens won't give him any joy at all.
|
| That's how I feel. I don't care about code, but I also
| don't really care about products. I mostly care about the
| craft. It's like solving sudokus. I don't collect solved
| sudokus. Once solved I don't care about them. Having a
| robot solve sudokus for me would be completely pointless.
|
| > I sense a pattern that many developers care more about
| doing what they want instead of providing value to others.
|
| And you'd be 100% right. I do this work because my employer
| provides me with enough sudokus. And I provide value back
| which is more than I'm compensated with. That is: I'm
| compensated with two things: intellectual challenge, and
| money. That's the relationship I have with my employer. If
| I could produce 10x more but I don't get the intellectual
| challenge? The employer isn't giving me what I want - and
| I'd stop doing the work.
|
| I think "You do what the employer wants, produce what needs
| to be produced, and in return you get money" is a
| simplification that misses the literal forest for all the
| forestry.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| But now you are conflating solving problems with a
| personal preference of how the problem should be solved.
| This never bodes well (unless you always prefer picking
| the method best suited to solve the problem.)
| alkonaut wrote:
| Well as I said, I consider myself compensated with
| intellectual challenge/stimulus as part of my
| compensation. It's _why_ I do the work to begin with. Or
| to put it another way: it's either done in a way I like,
| or it's probably not done at all.
|
| I'm replaceable after all. If there is someone who is
| better and more effective at solving problems in some
| objectively good way - they should have my job. The only
| reason I still have it is because it seems this is hard
| to find. Employers are stuck with people who solve
| problems in the way they like for varying personal
| reasons and not the objectively best way of solving
| problems.
|
| The hard part in keeping employees happy is that you
| can't just throw more money at them to make them
| effective. Keeping them stimulated is the difficult part.
| Some times you must accept that you must perhaps solve a
| problem that isn't the most critical one to address, or
| perhaps a bad call business wise, to keep employees
| happy, or keep them at all. I think a lot of the "Big
| rewrites" are in this category, for example. Not really a
| good idea compared to maintenance/improvement, but if the
| alternative is maintaining the old one _and_ lose the
| staff who could do that?
| godelski wrote:
| A perfect solution never exists
| latexr wrote:
| > We see people suddenly becoming activists about energy
| usage or copyright solely to justify not using a tool they
| dislike.
|
| Maybe _you_ don't care about the environment (which
| includes yourself and the people you like), or income
| inequality, or the continued consolidation of power in the
| hands of a few deranged rich people, or how your favourite
| artists (do you have any?) are exploited by the industry,
| but some of us have been banging the drum about those
| issues for decades. Just because you're only noticing it
| now or don't care it doesn't mean it's a new thing or that
| everyone else is being duplicitous. It's a good thing more
| people are waking up and talking about those.
| chamomeal wrote:
| > And it's also somewhat egotistical it seems to me. I
| sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing
| what they want instead of providing value to others.
|
| I use LLMs a lot. They're ridiculously cool and useful.
|
| But I don't think it's fair to categorize anybody as
| "egotistical". I enjoy programming for the fun puzzley
| bits. The big puzzles, and even often the small tedious
| puzzles. I like wiring all the chunks up together. I like
| thinking about the best way to expose a component's API
| with the perfect generic types. That's the part I _like_.
|
| I don't always _like_ "delivering value" because usually
| that value is "achieve 1.5% higher SMM (silly marketing
| metric) by the end of the quarter, because the private
| equity firm that owns our company is selling it next year
| and they want to get a good return".
| hnfong wrote:
| Egotistical would be to reject the new tools in principle
| and be a less efficient developer.
|
| But really, most of us who personally feel sad about the
| work being replaced by LLMs can still act reasonable, use
| the new tooling at work like a good employee, and lament
| about it privately in a blog or something.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I work with a lot of artists, and selling them on (not
| totally rejecting) AI has largely been unsuccessful until
| they both understand the analogies and the specifics of what
| different tools do.
|
| AI makes you the manager. The models are like GRAs or
| contract workers, maybe new to their fields but with tireless
| energy, and you need to be able to instruct them correctly
| and evaluate their outputs. None of them can do everything,
| and you'll need to carefully hire the ones you want based on
| the work you need, which means breaking workflows into
| batchable parts. If you've managed projects before, you've
| done this.
|
| Right now, my focus is improving pipelines in composition and
| arrangement based on an artist's corpus. A lot of them just
| want to be more productive, and it's a slog to write, then
| break into parts, etc using modern notation software.
| tdstein wrote:
| > You just fat-finger less typos today than ever before.
|
| My typos are largely admissible.
| rising-sky wrote:
| I think the more apt analog isn't a faster car, a la Ferrari,
| it's more akin to someone who likes to drive and now has to sit
| and monitor the self-driving car steer and navigate. Comparing
| to the Ferrari is incorrect since it still takes a similar
| level of agency from the driver versus a <insert slower
| vehicle>
| nunez wrote:
| This is exactly the right analogy here.
|
| FSD is very very good most of the time. It's so good (well,
| v14 is, anyway), it makes it easy to get lulled into thinking
| that it works all the time. So you check your watch here,
| check your phone there, and attend to other things, and it's
| all good until the car decides to turn into a curb (which
| almost happened to me the other day) or swerve hard into a
| tree (which happened to someone else).
|
| Funny enough, much like AI, Tesla is shoving FSD down
| people's throats by gating Autopilot 2, a lane keeping
| solution that worked extremely well and is much friendlier to
| people who want limited autonomy here and there, behind the
| $99/mo FSD sub (and removing the option to pay for the
| package out of pocket).
| anavat wrote:
| It is simple. Continuing your metaphor, I have a choice of
| getting exactly where I want on a camel in 3 days, or getting
| to a random location somewhere on the other side of the desert
| on a helicopter in few hours.
|
| And being a reasonable person I, just like the author, choose
| the helicopter. That's it, that's the whole problem.
| augment_me wrote:
| You did something smart and efficinently using the least
| amount of energy and time needed. +1 for consciousness being
| a mistake
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Why is that the reasonable choice if it doesn't get you to
| your destination?
|
| I too did a lot of AI coding but when I saw the spaghetti it
| made, I went back to regular coding, with ask mode not agent
| mode as a search engine.
| anavat wrote:
| Because of compound efficiency and technological
| enablement.
|
| Or, risking to beat the metaphor to death, because over a
| span of time I'll cross many more deserts than I would have
| on a camel, and because I'll cross deserts that I wouldn't
| even try crossing on a camel.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Why does it matter how many deserts you cross if you
| never get to where you want to go? I similarly can take
| 10 flights across oceans but never end up in the city I'm
| trying to visit. Sounds like in your metaphor the person
| is just crossing desserts because they want to with no
| goal or destination in mind.
| treszkai wrote:
| Maybe you wanted to visit Mexico and your dream was
| specifically about Cancun, but then you ended up in
| Veracruz and were like "oh well, it is Mexico after all,
| I'd rather be here and visit five other countries
| similarly than only a single one with my dream city."
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I guess this is stretching the analogy a bit far because
| I'd rather get to the exact place I wanted to go rather
| than wasting my time non-deterministically wandering
| around because who knows how long that will take to get
| anywhere close to my destination.
| amelius wrote:
| Because taking a rental camel from the airport is faster.
| nottorp wrote:
| Helicopters are deterministic though :)
| globular-toast wrote:
| I get it.
|
| I got excited about agents because I told myself it would be
| "just faster typing". I told myself that my value was never as
| a typist and that this is just the latest tool like all the
| tools I had eagerly added to my kit before.
|
| But the reality is different. It's not just typing for me. It's
| coming up with crap. Filling in the blanks. Guessing.
|
| The huge problem with all these tools is they don't know what
| they know and what they don't. So when they don't know they
| just guess. It's absolutely infuriating.
|
| It's not like a Ferrari. A Ferrari does _exactly_ what I tell
| it to, up to the first-order effects of how open the throttle
| is, what direction the wheels face, how much pressure is on the
| brakes etc. The second-order effects are on me, though. I have
| to understand what effect these pressures will have on my
| ultimate position on the road. A normie car doesn 't give you
| as much control but it's less likely to come off the road.
|
| Agents are like a teleport. You describe where you want to be
| and it just takes you directly there. You say "warm and sunny"
| and you might get to the Bahamas, but you might also get to the
| Sahara. So you correct: "oh no, I meant somewhere _nice_ " and
| maybe you get to the Bahamas. But because you didn't travel
| there yourself you failed to realise what you actually got.
| Yeah, it's warm, sunny and nice, but now you're on an island in
| the middle of nowhere and have to import basically everything.
| So I prompt again and rewrite the entire codebase, right?
|
| Linus Torvalds works with experts that he trusts. This is like
| a manic 5 year old that doesn't care but is eager to work.
| Saying we all get to be Torvalds is like saying we all get to
| experience true love because we have access to porn.
| nunez wrote:
| You _think_ you're thinking as hard. Reading code != writing
| it. Just like watching someone do a thing isn't the same as
| actually doing it.
| abm53 wrote:
| Correct... reading code is a much more difficult and
| ultimately, productive, task.
|
| I suspect those using the tools in the best way are thinking
| harder than ever for this reason.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > reading code is a much more difficult
|
| Not inherently, no. Reading it and getting a cursory
| understanding is easy, truly understanding what it does
| well, what it does poorly, what the unintended side effects
| might be, that's the difficult part.
|
| In real life I've witnessed quite a few intelligent and
| experienced people who truly believe that they're thinking
| "really hard" and putting out work that's just as good as
| their previous, pre-AI work, and they're just not. In my
| experience it roughly correlates to how much time they
| think they're saving, those who think they're saving the
| most time are in fact cutting corners and putting out the
| sloppiest quality work.
| d-us-vb wrote:
| It depends on the language, paradigm (or lack thereof),
| quality/accuracy of the names.
|
| My work's codebase is 30 years of never-refactored C++.
| It takes an exceptional amount of focus and thinking to
| get even a cursory understanding of anything a particular
| method or class does or why it's there.
|
| But for languages like C, I agree with you (as long as
| function pointers aren't used abused).
| godelski wrote:
| The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--
| and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be
| very careful about that. - Feynman
| William_BB wrote:
| Sure. Reading a book is a much more difficult and
| ultimately, productive, task than writing a book.
| keithluu wrote:
| Well, depending on the scope of work, they may be still
| thinking hard, just on a higher level. That is, thinking
| about the requirements, specification, and design.
| rvz wrote:
| > We're all Linus Torvalds now. We review, we merge, we send
| back. And if you had no idea what you were doing before, you'll
| still have no idea what you're doing today. You just fat-finger
| less typos today than ever before.
|
| Except Linus understands the code that is being reviewed /
| merged in since he already built the kernel and git by hand.
| You only see him vibe-coding toys but not vibe-coding in the
| kernel.
|
| Today, we are going to see a gradual skill atrophy with
| developers over-relying on AI and once something like Claude
| goes down, they can't do _any work_ at all.
|
| The most accurate representation is that AI is going to rapidly
| make lots of so-called 'senior engineers' who are over-reliant
| and unable to detect bad AI code like juniors and interns.
| keyle wrote:
| If you can't rebuke code today. You can't rebuke code
| tomorrow.
| tmtvl wrote:
| By induction that means either nobody can rebuke code or
| someone who can rebuke code can do that from the day
| they're born.
| d-us-vb wrote:
| "can" has multiple meanings in English. It can express
| both epistemic (describing the world accurately as is)
| and dynamic (describing the capabilities and attributes
| of an object) modes. If used epistemically, then parent's
| phraseology makes perfect sense since his epistemology
| makes no claim about an object's variability across time.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| My "skill" for 40 years has been to turn what I wanted my
| computer to do into code to get it done using the tools
| available to me. A "senior developer" is not someone who
| "codez real gud". It's someone who can work at a higher level
| of scope and ambiguity and has a larger impact on the
| organization than a ticket taker
| darepublic wrote:
| >You can still jump on a camel and cross the desert in 3 days.
| Have at it, you risk dying, but enjoy. Or you can just rent a
| helicopter and fly over the damn thing in a few hours. Your
| choice. Don't let people tell you it isn't travelling.
|
| its obviously not wrong to fly over the desert in a helicopter.
| its a means to an end and can be completely preferable. I mean
| myself I'd prefer to be in a passenger jet even higher above
| it, at a further remove personally. But I wouldn't think that
| doing so makes me someone who knows the desert the same way as
| someone who has crossed it on foot. It is okay to prefer and
| utilize the power of "the next abstraction", but I think its
| rather pig headed to deny that nothing of value is lost to
| people who are mourning the passing of what they gained from
| intimate contact with the territory. and no it's not just about
| the literal typing. the advent of LLMs is not the 'end of
| typing', that is more reductionist failure to see the point.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| I felt the same way about python when I was switching from
| C++ to python for data analysis
| ericmcer wrote:
| How? Other then calling utility functions that C++ doesn't
| have you can't just like skip understanding what you are
| coding by using Python. If you are importing libraries that
| do stuff for you that wouldn't be any different than if
| someone wrote those libs in C++.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| Are you saying I was incorrect for feeling that way?
|
| The reason is that you no longer really know what's going
| on. (And yes, that feeling would be the same if C++ had
| as rich a library of packages as python for numerical
| analysis.)
|
| If you are doing something that requires precision you
| need to know everything that is happening in that
| library. Also IIRC, I think not knowing what type
| something is bothered me at the time.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Reminds me of all the parables about kings who "pretend to be
| a common man" for a day and walk among their subjects and
| leave with some new enlightenment.
|
| The idea that you lose a ton of knowledge when you experience
| things through intermediaries is an old one.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| I agree! It's a lot more pleasant than being stuck over
| figuring out how to use awk properly for hours. I knew what I
| needed to do then, and I know what I need to do now too. The
| difference is I get to results faster. Sometimes I even learn
| that awk was not even the right tool in my situation and learn
| about a new way of doing things while AI is "thinking" for me
| encyclopedism wrote:
| I find it interesting, the comments on this post (not just this
| particular comment per se) and the sheer inability to relate or
| ATTEMPT to relate to another persons experience or feeling. The
| post itself articulated a viewpoint and experience, your having
| a different one does not negate the other. Nor does your
| perspective mean the other does not exist. I'm dumbfounded at
| many of the comments.
|
| Here are some clipped comments that I pulled from the overall
| post
|
| > I don't get it.
|
| > I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard.
|
| > I don't. I miss being outside, in the sun, living my life.
| And if there's one thing AI has done it's save my time.
|
| > Then think hard? Have a level of self discipline and don't
| consistently turn to AI to solve your problems.
|
| > I am thinking harder than ever due to vibe coding.
|
| > Skill issue
|
| > Maybe this is just me, but I don't miss thinking so much.
|
| The last comment pasted is pure gold, a great one to put up on
| a wall. Gave me a right chuckle thanks!!!
| johnfn wrote:
| When I read the article, I feel the same emotions that I feel
| if someone were to tell me "I keep trying to ride a bike but
| I keep falling off". My experience with LLMs is that the
| "lack of thinking" is mostly a quick trough you fall into
| before you come out the other side understanding how to deal
| with LLMs better. And yes, there's nothing wrong with
| relating to someone's experience, but mostly I just want to
| tell that guy, just keep trying, it'll get better, and you'll
| be back to thinking hard if you keep at it.
|
| But then OP says stuff like:
|
| > I am not sure if there will ever be a time again when both
| needs can be met at once.
|
| In my head that translates to "I don't think there will ever
| be a time again when I can actually ride my bike for more
| than 100 feet." At which point you probably start getting
| responses more like "I don't get it" because there's only so
| much empathy you can give someone before you start getting a
| little frustrated and being like "cmon it's not THAT bad,
| just keep trying, we've all been there".
| encyclopedism wrote:
| If I can 'speak' for the OP:
|
| > I keep trying to ride a bike but I keep falling off
|
| I do not think this analogy is apt.
|
| The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take
| away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities
| that humans would WANT to do.
|
| The article is lamenting the disappearing of something
| meaningful for the OP. One can feel sad for this alone. It
| is not an equation to balance: X is gone but Y is now
| available. The lament stands alone. As the OP indicates
| with his 'pragmatism' we now collectively have little
| choice about the use of AI. The flood waters do not ask
| they take everyone in their path.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I
| review._
|
| Even if you "think just as hard" the act of physically writing
| things down is known to improve recall, so you're skipping a
| crucial step in understanding.
|
| And when I review code, it's a different process than writing
| code.
|
| These tradeoffs may be worth it, because we can ask the tools
| to analyze things for us just as easily as we can ask them to
| create things for us, but your own knowledge and understanding
| of the system is absolutely being degraded when working this
| way.
| ericmcer wrote:
| 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 an abstraction.
|
| It just isn't worth it to me. If I am working with audio and I
| get a strong mental model for what different audio
| formats/containers/codecs look like who knows what creative
| idea that will trigger down the line. If I have an agent just
| fix it then my brain will never even know how to think in that
| way. And it takes like... a day...
|
| So I get it as a optimized search engine, but I will never just
| let it replace understanding every line I commit.
| lbrito wrote:
| That's a warm and cozy way to look at things but its not true.
|
| LLM-aided coding is not a higher level tool. It is not writing
| in C vs writing in assembly. It is closer to asking other
| people to do something for you and (supposedly, hopefully,
| although how many people really do it?) reviewing the result.
|
| The thing is, some people already disliked the thinking
| involved in programming and are welcoming these tools. That's
| fine, but you don't get to equate it with programming.
| ccortes wrote:
| People here seem to be conflating thinking hard and thinking a
| lot.
|
| Most examples mentioned of "thinking hard" in the comments sound
| like they think about a lot of stuff superficially instead one
| particular problem deeply, which is what OP is referring to.
| ghuun wrote:
| If you actually have a problem worth thinking deeply about, AI
| usually can't help with it. For example, AI can't help you make
| performant stencil buffers on a Nokia Ngage for fun. It just
| doesn't have that in it. Plenty of such problems abound,
| especially in domains involving some or the other extreme (like
| high throughput traffic). Just the other day someone posted a
| vibe coded Wikipedia project that took ages to load (despite
| being "just" 66MB) and insisted it was the best it was possible
| to do, whereas Google can load the entire planet (perceptually)
| in a fraction of a second.
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| I believe it is a type of burnout. AI might have accelerated both
| the work and that feeling.
|
| I found that doing more physical projects helped me. Large
| woodworking, home improvement, projects. Built-in bookshelves, a
| huge butcher block bar top (with 24+ hours of mindlessly
| sanding), rolling workbenches, and lots of cabinets. Learning and
| trying to master a new skill, using new design software, filling
| the garage with tools...
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Personally: technical problems I usually think for a couple days
| at most before I need to start implementing to make progress. But
| I have background things like future plans, politics, philosophy,
| and stories, so I always have something to think about. Close-up
| technical thinking is great, but sometimes step back and look at
| the bigger picture?
|
| I don't think AI has affected my thinking much, but that's
| because I probably don't know how to use it well. Whenever AI
| writes a lot of code, I end up having to understand if not change
| most of it; either because I don't trust the AI, I have to change
| the specification (and either it's a small change or I don't
| trust the AI to rewrite), the code has a leaky abstraction, the
| specification was wrong, the code has a bug, the code looks like
| it has a bug (but the problem ends up somewhere else), I'm
| looking for a bug, etc. Although more and more often the AI saves
| time and thinking vs. if I wrote the implementation myself, it
| doesn't prevent me from having to think about the code at all and
| treating it like a black box, due to the above.
| theworstname wrote:
| If it's this easy to convince you to stop being creative, to stop
| putting in effort to think critically, then you don't deserve the
| fulfilment that creativity and critical thinking can give you.
| These vibe coding self pity articles are so bizarre.
| ars wrote:
| I think hard all the time, AI can only solve problems for me that
| _don 't_ require thinking hard. Give it anything more complex and
| it's useless.
|
| I use AI for the easy stuff.
| phamilton wrote:
| I think harder because of AI.
|
| I have to think more rigorously. I have to find ways to tie up
| loose ends, to verify the result efficiently, to create efficient
| feedback loops and define categorical success criteria.
|
| I've thought harder about problems this last year than I have in
| a long time.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I have to find ways to tie up loose ends, to verify the
| result efficiently, to create efficient feedback loops and
| define categorical success criteria.
|
| So... you _didn 't_ have to do that prior to using agents?
| phamilton wrote:
| Not as much upfront. I had plenty of opportunities to adjust
| and correct along the way. With AI, the cost of not thinking
| upfront is high and the cost of being wrong in upfront
| decisions is low, so we bias towards that.
|
| But beyond that, I have been thinking deeply about AI itself,
| which has all sorts of new problems. Permissions,
| verification, etc.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > With AI, the cost of not thinking upfront is high and the
| cost of being wrong in upfront decisions is low, so we bias
| towards that.
|
| I don't really understand what that means:
|
| 1. If the cost of not thinking upfront is high, that means
| you _need_ to think upfront.
|
| 2. If the cost of being wrong upfront is low, that means
| you _don 't_ need to think upfront.
|
| To me, it looks like those assertions contradict each
| other.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Why not find a subfield that is more difficult and requires some
| specialization then?
| sublinear wrote:
| > I have tried to get that feeling of mental growth outside of
| coding
|
| A few years before this wave of AI hit, I got promoted into a
| tech lead/architect role. All of my mental growth since then has
| been learning to navigate office politics and getting the 10k ft
| view way more often.
|
| I was already telling myself "I miss thinking hard" years before
| this promotion. When I build stuff now, I do it with a much
| clearer purpose. I have sincerely tried the new tools, but I'm
| back to just using google search if anything at all.
|
| All I did was prove to myself the bottleneck was never writing
| code, but deciding why I'm doing anything at all. If you want to
| think so hard you stay awake at night, try existential dread.
| It's an important developmental milestone you'd have been forced
| to confront anyway even 1000 years ago.
|
| My point is, you might want to reconsider how much you blame AI.
| rcvassallo83 wrote:
| Thinking harder than I have in a long time with AI assisted
| coding.
|
| As I'm providing context I get to think about what an ideal
| approach would look like and often dive into a research session
| to analyze pros and cons of various solutions.
|
| I don't use agents much because it's important to see how a
| component I just designed fits into the larger codebase. That
| experience provides insights on what improvements I need to make
| and what to build next.
|
| The time I've spent thinking about the composability,
| cohesiveness, and ergonomics of the code itself have really paid
| off. The codebase is a joy to work in, easy to maintain and
| extend.
|
| The LLMs have helped me focus my cognitive bandwidth on the
| quality and architecture instead of the tedious and time
| consuming parts.
| woah wrote:
| Just work on more ambitious projects?
| hoppp wrote:
| Exactly, go where the AI can't go.
|
| I am building a project that AI is incapable of doing and I
| really need to think hard and progress slowly but hopefully it
| will create real value.
| pixelmelt wrote:
| Would like to follow your blog, is there an rss feed?
| utopiah wrote:
| Pre-processed food consumer complains about not cooking anymore.
| /s
|
| ... OK I guess. I mean sorry but if that's revelation to you,
| that by using a skill less you hone it less, you were clearly NOT
| thinking hard BEFORE you started using AI. It sure didn't help
| but the problem didn't start then.
| ggm wrote:
| A lot of productive thinking happens when asleep, in the shower,
| in flow walking or cycling or rowing.
|
| It's hard to rationalise this as billable time, but they pay for
| outcome even if they act like they pay for 9-5 and so if I'm
| thinking why I like a particular abstraction, or see analogies to
| another problem, or begin to construct dialogues with
| mysel(ves|f) about this, and it happens I'm scrubbing my back (or
| worse) I kind of "go with the flow" so to speak.
|
| Definitely thinking about the problem can be a lot better than
| actually having to produce it.
| mw888 wrote:
| Give the AI _less_ responsibility but _more_ work. Immediate
| inference is a great example: if the AI can finish my lines, my
| `if` bodies, my struct instantiations, type signatures, etc., it
| can reduce my second-by-second work significantly while taking
| little of my cognitive agency.
|
| These are also tasks the AI can succeed at rather trivially.
|
| Better completions is not as sexy, but in pretending agents are
| great engineers it's an amazing feature often glossed over.
|
| Another example is automatic test generation or early correctness
| warnings. If the AI can suggest a basic test and I can add it
| with the push of a button - great. The length (and thus
| complexity) of tests can be configured conservatively relative to
| the AI of the day. Warnings can just be flags in the editors
| spotting obvious mistakes. Off-by-one errors for example, which
| might go unnoticed for a while, would be an achievable and
| valuable notice.
|
| Also, automatic debugging and feeding the raw debugger log into
| an AI to parse seems promising, but I've done little of it.
|
| ...And go from there - if a well-crafted codebase and an advanced
| model using it as context can generate short functions well, then
| by all means - scale that up with discretion.
|
| These problems around the AI coding tools are not at all special
| - it's a classic case of taking the new tool too far too fast.
| duskdozer wrote:
| This is the way I would consider using them; I just haven't
| really been able to figure out what I would need to get a
| reasonably fast and useful local setup without spending a ton
| of money.
| danavar wrote:
| Many people here might be in a similar situation to me, but I
| took an online masters program that allowed for continuing
| education following completion of the degree. This has become one
| of my hobbies; I can take classes at my own expense, not worry
| about my grades, and just enjoy learning. I can push myself as
| much as I want and since the classes are hard, just completing 1
| assignment is enough to force me to "think". Just sharing my
| experience for people who might be looking for ways to challenge
| themselves intellectually.
| erelong wrote:
| You were walking to your destination which was three miles away
|
| You now have a bicycle which gets you there in a third of the
| time
|
| You need to find destinations that are 3x as far away than before
| tevli wrote:
| but if you enjoy walking, what then?
| phromo wrote:
| I am thinking harder than ever due to vibe coding. How will
| markets shift? What will be in demand? How will the consumer side
| adapt? How do we position? Predicting the future is a hard
| problem... The thinker in me is working relentlessly since
| December. At least for me the thinker loves an existential crisis
| like no other.
| novoreorx wrote:
| To be honest, I do not quite understand the author's point. If he
| believes that agentic coding or AI has negative impact on being a
| thinker, or prevent him from thinking critically, he can simply
| stop using them.
|
| Why blame these tools if you can stop using them, and they won't
| have any effect on you?
|
| In my case, my problem was often overthinking before starting to
| build anything. Vibe coding rescued me from that cycle. Just a
| few days ago, I used openclaw to build and launch a complete
| product via a Telegram chat. Now, I can act immediately rather
| than just recording an idea and potentially getting to it
| "someday later"
|
| To me, that's evolutional. I am truly grateful for the
| advancement of AI technology and this new era. Ultimately, it is
| a tool you can choose to use or not, rather than something that
| prevents you from thinking more.
| ganzsz wrote:
| For me personally, the problem is my teammates. The ability or
| will to critically think, or investigate existing tools in the
| codebase seems to disappear. Too often now I have to send back
| a PR where something is fixed using novel implementations
| instead of the single function call using existing
| infrastructure.
| saulpw wrote:
| The ziphead era of coding is over. I'll miss it too.
| kamaal wrote:
| To me thinking hard involved the following steps-
|
| 1. Take a pen and paper.
|
| 2. Write down what we know.
|
| 3. Write down where we want to go.
|
| 4. Write down our methods of moving forward.
|
| 5. Make changes to 2, using 4, and see if we are getting closer
| to 3. And course correct based on that.
|
| I still do it a lot. LLM's act as assist. Not as a wholesale
| replacement.
| rammy1234 wrote:
| Great article. Moment I finished reading this article, I thought
| of my time in solving a UI menu problem with lot of items in it
| and algorithm I came up with to solve for different screen sizes.
| It took solid 2 hrs of walking and thinking. I still remember how
| I was excited when I had the feeling of cracking the problem.
| Deep thinking is something everyone has it within and it varies
| how fast you can think. But we all got it with right environment
| and time we all got it in us. But thats long time ago. Now I
| always off load some thinking to AI. it comes up with options and
| you just have to steer it. By time it is getting better. Just ask
| it you know. But I feel like it is good old days to think deep by
| yourself. Now I have a partner in AI to think along with me.
| Great article.
| drawnwren wrote:
| "Before you read this post, ask yourself a question: When was the
| last time you truly thought hard? ... a) All the time. b) Never.
| c) Somewhere in between."
|
| What?
| larodi wrote:
| Well thinking hard is still there if you work on hard abstract
| problems. I keep thinking very hard, even though 4 CCs pump code
| while I do this. Besides, being a Gary Kasparov, playing on
| several tables, takes thinking.
| rvz wrote:
| Great, so does that mean that it is time to vibe code our own
| alternatives of everything such as the Linux kernel because the
| AI is sure 'smarter' than all of us?
|
| Seen a lot of DIY vibe coded solutions on this site and they are
| just waiting for a security disaster. Moltbook being a notable
| example.
|
| That was just the beginning.
| IhateAI wrote:
| I refer to it as "Think for me SaaS", and it should be avoided
| like the plague. Literally, it will give your brain a disease we
| haven't even named yet.
|
| It's as if I woke up in a world where half of resturaunts
| worldwide started changing their name to McDonalds and
| gaslighting all their customers into thinking McDonalds is better
| than their "from scratch" menu.
|
| Just dont use these agentic tools, they legitimately are weapons
| who's target is your brain. You can ship just as fast with
| autocomplete and decent workflows, and you know it.
|
| Its weird, I dont understand why any self respecting dev would
| support these companies. They are openly hostile about their
| plans for the software industry (and many other verticles).
|
| I see it as a weapon being used by a sect of the ruling class to
| diminsh the value of labor. While im not confident they'll be
| successful, I'm very disappointed in my peers that are cheering
| them on in that mission. My peers are obviously being tricked by
| promises of being able join that class, but that's not what's
| going to happen.
|
| You're going to lose that thinking muscle and therefor the value
| of your labor is going to be directly correlated to the quantity
| and quality of tokens you can afford (or be given, loaned!?)
|
| Be wary!!!
| 16bitvoid wrote:
| I'm with you. It scares me how quickly some of my peers'
| critical thinking and architectural understanding have
| noticeably atrophied over the last year and a half.
| 7777332215 wrote:
| Short term thinkers versus long term thinkers. Just look at the
| end goal of these companies and you'll see why you shouldn't
| give them anything.
|
| To say it will free people of the boring tasks is so short
| sighted....
| vasco wrote:
| You don't have to miss it, buy a differential equation book and
| do one per day. Play chess on hard mode. I mean there's so many
| ways to make yourself think hard daily, this makes no sense.
|
| It's like saying I miss running. Get out and run then.
| conception wrote:
| "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 me."
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| 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 perhaps
| where the analogy falls down, and we always want them to be the
| same, but software is different in every form.
| ares623 wrote:
| Rich Hickey and the Clojure folks coined the term Hammock Driven
| Development. It was tongue in cheek but IMO it is an ideal to
| strive towards.
| tolerance wrote:
| I'd love to be able to see statistics that show LLM use and
| reception according to certain socioeconomic factors.
| 7777332215 wrote:
| Anything in particular you expect to see?
| everyone wrote:
| Guy complains about self vibe coding.. stop doing it then!! Do
| you really think it's practical? Your job must be really easy if
| it is.
| monch1962 wrote:
| As someone who's been coding for several decades now (i.e. I'm
| old), I find the current generation of AI tools very ... freeing.
|
| As an industry, we've been preaching the benefits of running lots
| of small experiments to see what works vs what doesn't, try out
| different approaches to implementing features, and so on. Pre-AI,
| lots of these ideas never got implemented because they'd take too
| much time for no definitive benefit.
|
| You might spend hours thinking up cool/interesting ideas, but not
| have the time available to try them out.
|
| Now, I can quickly kick off a coding agent to try out any hare-
| brained ideas I might come up with. The cost of doing so is very
| low (in terms of time and $$$), so I get to try out far more and
| weirder approaches than before when the costs were higher. If
| those ideas don't play out, fine, but I have a good enough
| success rate with left-field ideas to make it far more
| justifiable than before.
|
| Also, it makes playing around with one-person projects a lot
| practical. Like most people with partner & kids, my down time is
| pretty precious, and tends to come in small chunks that are
| largely unplannable. For example, last night I spent 10 minutes
| waiting in a drive-through queue - that gave me about 8 minutes
| to kick off the next chunk of my one-person project development
| via my phone, review the results, then kick off the next chunk of
| development. Absolutely useful to me personally, whereas last
| year I would've simply sat there annoyed waiting to be serviced.
|
| I know some people have an "outsourcing Lego" type mentality when
| it comes to AI coding - it's like buying a cool Lego kit, then
| watching someone else assemble it for you, removing 99% of the
| enjoyment in the process. I get that, but I prefer to think of it
| in terms of being able to achieve orders of magnitude more in the
| time I have available, at close to zero extra cost.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Totally agree. I can spend an afternoon trying out an approach
| to a problem or product (usually while taking meetings and
| writing emails as well). If it doesn't work, then that's a
| useful result from my time. If it does work, I can then double-
| down on review, tests, quality, security, etc and make sure
| it's all tickety-boo.
| fuomag9 wrote:
| Completely agree, there's so many small projects I'd never
| been able to even start in my free time, because I'm NOT a
| full-stack dev and I'd rather not spend all my evenings
| fixing or working around all the small changes and quirks of
| the $currentjsframework
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| > 8 minutes to kick off the next chunk of my one-person project
| development via my phone, review the results, then kick off the
| next chunk of development.
|
| How are you doing this via your phone?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| claude can deploy to github spaces and modify code for
| deployment to those by commits and pull requests to the repo
| exclusively
|
| claude via browser and claude mobile apps function this way
|
| but alongside that, people do make tunnels to their personal
| computer and setup ways to be notified on their phone, or to
| get the agent unstuck when it asks for a permission, from
| their phone
| fragmede wrote:
| The (iOS) Claude phone app has a Claude code feature which
| runs "in the cloud". It's pretty handy for getting things
| done on the bus.
| samusiam wrote:
| Termius + tailscale + tmux is a common setup for mobile
| coding sessions.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Exactly, it kills me to see a people a lot younger (I'm 51)
| pining about the good old days while the coding part of my day
| to day life now is using AI tools to their fullest extent.
| zackmorris wrote:
| 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
| needed to wake a slumbering beast made of anti-patterns and
| groupthink.
|
| For me, AI offers the first real computer that I've had access
| to in over 25 years. Because desktop computing stagnated after
| the 2000 Dot Bomb, and died on the table after the iPhone
| arrived in 2007. Where we should have symmetric multiprocessing
| with 1000+ cores running 100,000 times faster for the same
| price, we have the same mediocre quad core computer running
| about the same speed as its 3 GHz grandfather from the early
| 2000s. But AI bridges that divide by recruiting video cards
| that actually did increase in speed, albeit for SIMD which is
| generally useless for desktop computing. AI liberates me from
| having to mourn that travesty any longer.
|
| I think that people have tied their identity to programming
| without realizing that it's mostly transcribing.
|
| But I will never go back to manual entry (the modern equivalent
| of punch cards).
|
| If anything, I can finally think deeply without it costing me
| everything. No longer having to give my all just to tread water
| as I slowly drown in technical debt and deadlines which could
| never be met before without sacrificing a part of my psyche in
| the process.
|
| What I find fascinating is that it's truly over. I see so
| clearly how networks of agents are evolving now, faster than we
| can study, and have already passed us on nearly every metric.
| We only have 5-10 years now until the epiphany, the
| Singularity, AGI.
|
| It's so strange to have worked so hard to win the internet
| lottery when that no longer matters. People will stop buying
| software. Their AI will deliver their deepest wish, even if
| that's merely basic resources to survive, that the powers that
| be deny us to prop up their fever dream of late-stage crony
| capitalism under artificial scarcity.
|
| Everything is about to hit the fan so hard, and I am so here
| for it.
| skydhash wrote:
| > 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.
| eleveriven wrote:
| I think this is the other side of the same coin, and it's a
| really important one. When time is scarce, especially with
| family and a life outside work, the ability to turn tiny,
| fragmented moments into forward progress is huge
| zkmon wrote:
| When people missed working hard, they turned to fake physical
| work (gyms). So people now need some fake thinking work.
|
| Except for eating and sleeping, all other human activities are
| fake now.
| soanvig wrote:
| you forget about fake sleeping being loaded with fake dopamine
| hits before sleep AND broken sleep schedules; and eating fake
| ultraprocessed food instead of wholefoods.
| zkmon wrote:
| Thanks for correcting. That completes the fake life pattern.
|
| So, people fake things to get a fake life. Reminds me a
| Russian joke about factory workers. "They pretend to pay, and
| we pretend to work".
| rrvsh wrote:
| We've always been doing fake thinking work since the beginning,
| see: puzzles
| sbinnee wrote:
| What OP wants to say is that they miss the process of thinking
| hard for days and weeks and one day this brilliant idea popping
| up on their bed before sleep. I lost my "thinking hard" process
| again too today at work against my pragmatism, or more precisely
| my job.
| 6mirrors wrote:
| The sampling rate we use to take input information is fixed. And
| we always find a way to work with the sampled information, no
| matter if the input information density is high or low.
|
| We can play a peaceful game and a intense one.
|
| Now, when we think, we can always find a right level of abstract
| to think on. Decades ago a programmer thought with machine codes,
| now we think with high level concepts, maybe towards philosophy.
|
| A good outcome always requires hard thinking. We can and we WILL
| think hard at a appropriate level.
| urutom wrote:
| One thing this discussion made me realize is that "thinking hard"
| might not be a single mode of thinking.
|
| In grad school, I had what I'd call the classic version. I stayed
| up all night mentally working on a topology question about
| turning a 2-torus inside out. I already knew you can't flip a
| torus inside out in ordinary R^3 without self-intersection. So I
| kept moving and stretching the torus and the surrounding space in
| my head, trying to understand where the obstruction actually
| lived.
|
| Sometime around sunrise, it clicked that if you allow the move to
| go through infinity(so effectively S^3), the inside/outside
| distinction I was relying on just collapses, and the obstruction
| I was visualizing dissolves. Birds were chirping, I hadn't slept,
| and nothing useful came out of it, but my internal model of space
| felt permanently upgraded. That's clearly "thinking hard" in the
| sense.
|
| But there's another mode I've experienced that feels related but
| different. With a tough Code Golf problem, I might carry it
| around for a week. I'm not actively grinding on it the whole
| time, but the problem stays loaded in the background. Then
| suddenly, in the shower or on a walk, a compression trick or a
| different representation just clicks.
|
| That doesn't feel "hard" moment to moment. It's more like keeping
| a problem resident in memory long enough for the right structure
| to surface.
|
| One is concentrated and exhausting, the other is diffuse and
| slow-burning. They're different phenomenologically, but both feel
| like forms of deep engagement that are easy to crowd out.
| sigbottle wrote:
| Yup, yup! There's so many different ways of thinking hard.
|
| For me, thinking about an extremely technical TCS problem, for
| example, is my version of actively, tirelessly thinking hard.
| I'm logging a ton of observations, trying new ideas and
| hypotheses, using a mix of computer simulation and math to try
| and arrive at a concrete framing and answer.
|
| On the other end of the specturm, I have philosophy. It's
| definitely a different type of hard. Most of my "Aha!" moments
| come from when I realize I've been strawmanning some argument,
| and not _actually_ understanding what the person is saying. Why
| is the person saying this, relative to what, why is this a new
| observation, etc. Things are so amorphus and you can tweak the
| problem parameters in so many ways, and it 's really tempting
| to either be too fluid and pretend you understand the thinker
| (because it's a subset of some conception you already have), or
| be too rigid and dissolve the thinker as a category error /
| meaningless. I've never felt the same feeling as I did when
| doing TCS research, but the feeling was definitely hard
| thinking nonetheless.
|
| In terms of extremely nitty-gritty technical things, like
| linker bullshit and linux kernel programming, I'm much more
| familiar with, and these things are more about reading
| documentation (because the tool won't behave like you want it
| to) and iteration / testing (because... the tool won't behave
| like you want it to, so you need to make sure it behaves like
| you want it to!). This is also a type of thinking - I would
| call it hard as in the physiological response I have is similar
| to that of research in the very bad moments, but in terms of my
| lofty ideals, I don't want to call this hard.... it's very
| "accidental" complexity, but it's what I get paid to do :/
|
| At work, you have a huge idea space to consider, _both_ problem
| and solution framings, mixing in "bullshit" constraints like
| business ones. You also throw in the real-time aspect of it, so
| I can't just either armchair on a problem for a month (unlike
| Philosophy) or deep dive on a problem for a month (unlike
| research). I'm technically doing the third type of programming
| right now, but we'll see how long that lasts and I get put on a
| new project.
|
| I'm not even sure if there's a clean demarcation between any of
| these. These are certainly better than brainrotting youtube
| though.
| z3t4 wrote:
| I always search the web, ask others, or read books in order to
| find a solution. When I do not find an answer from someone else,
| that's where I have to think hard.
| soanvig wrote:
| That's weird as I do the opposite: think by myself, then look
| for help if I don't know.
| nunez wrote:
| I will never not be upset at my fellow engineers for selling out
| the ONE thing that made us valuable and respected in the
| marketplace and trying to destroy software engineering as a
| career because "Claude Code go brrrrrr" basically.
|
| It's like we had the means for production and more or less
| collectively decided "You know what? Actually, the bourgeoisie
| can have it, sure."
| oblio wrote:
| Money. It's always money. It was always money.
| nunez wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. AI as it's designed today is very heavy
| on the "f u; got mine" vibe.
| rune-dev wrote:
| Tech in general, I remember when I was younger thinking the
| tech world was so cool and different.
|
| I still love the work, but to say I'm disillusioned by the
| industry is an understatement.
| saulpw wrote:
| You might like Penelope Scott's Rat:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoPyqPXxtAg
| sph wrote:
| The personification of the quote "your scientists were so
| preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't
| stop to think if they should"
|
| I feel the existential problem for a world that follows the
| religion of science and technology to its extreme, is that most
| people in STEM have no foundation in humanities, so ethical and
| philosophical concerns never pass through their mind.
|
| We have signed a pact with the devil to help us through boring
| tasks, and no one thought to ask what we would give in
| exchange.
| lstodd wrote:
| Yeah, lawyers, politicians and MBA types all usually have
| solid foundation in humanities. Not exactly known for
| concerning themselves with ethics or philosophy though.
| rune-dev wrote:
| I find it fascinating how the "true believers" of AI and AGI,
| have essentially been manipulated by capitalists to undermine
| the value of their own labor.
| aeblyve wrote:
| This is a more honest comment than the many around it making
| overly intellectualized arguments.
|
| But I would sooner compare this engineer class to something of
| a small bourgeoisie swallowed by a yet larger one, especially
| in the United States.
| midtake wrote:
| Based comment
| LoganDark wrote:
| Every time I try to use LLMs for coding, I completely lose touch
| with what it's doing, it does everything wrong and it can't seem
| to correct itself no matter how many times I explain. It's so
| frustrating just trying to get it to do the right thing.
|
| I've resigned to mostly using it for "tip-of-my-tongue" style
| queries, i.e. "where do I look in the docs". Especially for Apple
| platforms where almost nothing is documented except for random
| WWDC video tutorials that lack associated text articles.
|
| I don't trust LLMs at all. Everything they make, I end up
| rewriting from scratch anyway, because it's always garbage. Even
| when they give me ideas, they can't apply them properly. They
| have no standards, no principle. It's all just _slop_.
|
| I hate this. I hate it because LLMs give so many others the
| impression of greatness, of speed, and of huge productivity
| gains. I must look like some grumpy hermit, stuck in their ways.
| But I just can't get over how LLMs all give me the major ick.
| Everything that comes out of them feels _awful_.
|
| My standards must be unreasonably high. Extremely, unsustainably
| high. That must also be the reason I hardly finish any projects
| I've ever started, and why I can never seem to hit any deadlines
| at work. LLMs just can't reach my exacting, uncompromising
| standards. I'm surely expecting far too much of them. Far too
| much.
|
| I guess I'll just keep doing it all myself. Anything else really
| just doesn't sit right.
| duskdozer wrote:
| There's clearly a gap in how or for what LLM-enthusiasts and I
| would use LLMs. When I've tried it, I've found it just as
| frustrating as you describe, and it takes away the elements of
| programming that make it tolerable for me to do. I don't even
| think I have especially high standards - I can be pretty lazy
| for anything outside of work.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I don't view LLMs as a substitute for thinking; I view them
| as an aid to research and study, and as a translator from
| pseudocode to syntax. That is, instead of trawling through
| all the documentation myself and double-checking everything
| manually, an LLM can pop up a solution of some quality, and
| if that agrees with how my mental model assumes it should
| work, I'll accept it or improve on it. And if I know what I
| want to do but don't know some exact syntax, like has
| happened in Swift recently as I explore macOS development, an
| LLM can translate my implementation ideas into something that
| compiles.
|
| More to the point of the article, though, LLM-enthusiasts
| _do_ seem to view it as a substitute for thinking. They 're
| not augmenting their application of knowledge with shortcuts
| and fast-paths; they're entirely trusting the LLM to engineer
| things on its own. LLMs are great at creating the impression
| that they are suitable for this; after all, they are trained
| on tons of perfectly reasonable engineering data, and start
| to show all the same signals that a naive user would use to
| tell quality of engineering... just without the quality.
| saturatedfat wrote:
| I think for days at a time still.
|
| I don't think you can get the same satisfaction out of these
| tools if what you want to do is not novel.
|
| If you are exploring the space of possibilities for which there
| are no clear solutions, then you have to think hard. Take on
| wildly more ambitious projects. Try to do something you don't
| think you can do. And work with them to get there.
| andyferris wrote:
| My solution has been to lean into harder problems - even as side
| projects, if they aren't available at work.
|
| I too am an ex-physcist used to spending days thinking about
| things, but programming is a gold mine as it is adjacent to
| computer science. You can design a programming language (or
| improve an existing one), try to build a better database (or
| improve an existing one), or many other things that are quite
| hard.
|
| The LLM is a good rubber duck for exploring the boundaries of
| human knowledge (or at least knowledge common enough to be in its
| training set). It can't really "research" on its own, and
| whenever you suggest something novel and plausable it gets
| sycophantic, but it can help you prototype ideas and
| implementation strategies quite fast, and it can help you explore
| how existing software works and tackles similar problems (or help
| you start working on an existing project).
| dhananjayadr wrote:
| The author's point is, If you use AI to solve the problem and
| after the chat gives you the solution you say "oh yes, ok, I
| understand it, I can do it"(and no, you can't do it).
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| There's an irony here -- the same tools that make it easy to skim
| and summarize can also be used to force deeper thinking. The
| problem isn't the tools, it's the defaults.
|
| I've found that the best way to actually think hard about
| something is to write about it, or to test yourself on it. Not
| re-read it. Not highlight it. Generate questions from the
| material and try to answer them from memory.
|
| The research on active recall vs passive review is pretty clear:
| retrieval practice produces dramatically better long-term
| retention than re-reading. Karpicke & Blunt (2011) showed that
| practice testing outperformed even elaborative concept mapping.
|
| So the question isn't whether AI summarizers are good or bad --
| it's whether you use them as a crutch to avoid thinking, or as a
| tool to compress the boring parts so you can spend more time on
| the genuinely hard thinking.
| userbinator wrote:
| In my experience you will need to think even harder with AI if
| you want a decent result, although the problems you'll be
| thinking about will be more along the lines of "what the hell did
| it just write?"
|
| The current major problem with the software industry isn't
| quantity, it's quality; and AI just increases the former while
| decreasing the latter. Instead of e.g. finding ways to reduce
| boilerplate, people are just using AI to generate more of it.
| johanvts wrote:
| I dont think LLMs really took away much thinking, for me they
| replaced searching stackexchange to find incantations. Now I can
| get them instantly and customized to my situation. I miss
| thinking hard too, but I dont blame that on AI, its more that as
| a dev you are paid to think the absolute minimal amount needed to
| solve an issue or implement a feature. I dont regret leaving
| academia, but being paid to think I will always miss.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I think it's just another abstraction layer, and moves the
| thinking process from "how do I solve this problem in code?" to
| "how do I solve this problem in orchestration?".
|
| I recently used the analogy of when compilers were invented. Old-
| school coders wrote machine code, and handled the intricacies of
| memory and storage and everything themselves. Then compilers took
| over, we all moved up an abstraction layer and started using
| high-level languages to code in. There was a generation of
| programmers who hated compilers because they wrote bad,
| inelegant, inefficient, programs. And for years they were right.
|
| The hard problems now are "how can I get a set of non-
| deterministic, fault-prone, LLM agents to build this feature or
| product with as few errors as possible, with as little oversight
| as possible?". There's a few generic solutions, a few good
| approaches coming out, but plenty of scope for some hard thought
| in there. And a generic approach may not work for your specific
| project.
| mightymosquito wrote:
| While I see where you are coming from but I think what has really
| gone for a toss is the utility of thinking hard.
|
| Thinking hard has never been easier.
|
| I think AI for an autodidact is a boon. Now I suddenly have a
| teacher who is always accessible and will teach me whatever I
| want for as long as I want exactly the way I want and I don;t
| have to worry about my social anxiety kicking in.
|
| Learn advanced cryptography? AI, figure out formal verification -
| AI etc.
| d--b wrote:
| Why not think hard about what to build instead of how to build
| it?
| rozumem wrote:
| I can relate to this. Coding satisifies my urge to build and ship
| and have an impact on the world. But it doesn't make me think
| hard. Two things which I've recently gravitated to outside of
| coding which make me think: blogging and playing chess.
|
| Maybe I subconsciously picked these up because my Thinker side
| was starved for attention. Nice post.
| tietjens wrote:
| I wish the author would give some examples of what he wants to
| think hard about.
| jsattler wrote:
| I had similar thoughts recently. I wouldn't consider myself "the
| thinker", but I simply missed learning by failure. You almost
| don't fail anymore using AI. If something fails, it feels like
| it's not your fault but the AI messed up. Sometimes I even get
| angry at the AI for failing, not at myself. I don't have a
| solution either, but I came up with a guideline on when and how
| to use AI that has helped me to still enjoy learning. I'm not
| trying to advertise my blog and you don't need to read it, the
| important part is the diagram at the end of "Learning & Failure":
| https://sattlerjoshua.com/writing/2026-02-01-thoughts-on-ai-....
| In summary, when something is important and long-term, I heavily
| invest into understanding and use an approach that maximizes
| understanding over speed. Not sure if you can translate it 100%
| to your situation but maybe it helps to have some kind of
| guideline, when to spend more time thinking instead of directly
| using and AI to get to the solution.
| scionni wrote:
| I have a very similar background and a very similar feeling when
| i think of programming nowadays.
|
| Personally, I am going deeper in Quantum Computing, hoping that
| this field will require thinkers for a long time.
| yehoshuapw wrote:
| have a look at https://projecteuler.net/
|
| for "Thinker" brain food. (it still has the issue of not being a
| pragmatic use of time, but there are plenty interesting enough
| questions which it at least helps)
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| If you feel this way, you arent using AI right.
|
| For me, Claude, Suno, Gemini and AI tools are pure bliss for
| creation, because they eliminate the boring grunt work. Who cares
| how to implement OAuth login flow, or anything that has been done
| 1000 times?
|
| I do not miss doing grunt work!
| smy20011 wrote:
| I miss entering flow state when coding. When vibe coding, you are
| in constant interruption and only think very shallow. I never see
| anyone enter flow state when vibe coding.
| krzat wrote:
| Same here, waiting for response destroys any focus I have had.
| fragmede wrote:
| The two ways I get into flow state these days are in setting up
| agentic loops, so I can get out of the way by letting AI check
| the results for itself, and by doing more things. I've got ~4
| Claude Code instances working on problems, per project, and
| I've got multiple projects I'm working on at the same time.
| fatfox wrote:
| Just sit down and think hard. If it doesn't work, think harder.
| lxgr wrote:
| I've had the completely opposite experience as somebody that also
| likes to think more than to build: LLMs take much of the legwork
| of actually implementing a design, fixing trivial errors etc.
| away from me and let me validate theories much more quickly than
| I could do by myself.
|
| More importantly, thinking and building are two very different
| modes of operating and it can be hard to switch at moment's
| notice. I've definitely noticed myself getting stuck in "non-
| thinking building/fixing mode" at times, only realizing that I've
| been making steady progress into the wrong direction an hour or
| two in.
|
| This happens way less with LLMs, as they provide natural time to
| think while they churn away at doing.
|
| Even when thinking, they can help: They're infinitely patient
| rubber ducks, and they often press all the right buttons of
| "somebody being wrong on the Internet" too, which can help
| engineers that thrive in these kinds of verbal pro/contra
| discussions.
| BoostandEthanol wrote:
| I'd been feeling this until quite literally yesterday, where I
| sort of just forced myself to not touch an AI and grappled with
| the problem for hours. Got myself all mixed up with trig and
| angles until I got a headache and decided to back off a lot of
| the complexity. I doubt I got everything right, I'm sure I
| could've had a solution with near identical outputs using an AI
| in a fraction of the time.
|
| But I feel better for not taking the efficient way. Having to be
| the one to make a decision at every step of the way, choosing the
| constraints and where I cut my losses on accuracy, I think has
| taught me more about the subject than even reading literature
| would've directly stated.
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| I think the heart of the matter is this section in the blog:
|
| > Yes, I blame AI for this.
|
| > I am currently writing much more, and more _complicated_
| software than ever, yet I feel I am not growing as an engineer
| at all. [...] (emphasis added by me)
|
| AI is a force multiplier for accidental complexity in the
| Brooks sense. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet)
| practal wrote:
| I see the current generation of AI very much as a thing in
| between. Opus 4.5 can think and code quite well, but it cannot do
| these "jumps of insight" yet. It also struggles with
| straightforward, but technically intricate things, where you have
| to max out your understanding of the problem.
|
| Just a few days ago, I let it do something that I _thought_ was
| straightforward, but it kept inserting bugs, and after a few
| hours of interaction it said itself it was running in circles. It
| took me a day to figure out what the problem was: an invariant I
| had given it was actually too strong, and needed to be weakened
| for a special case. If I had done all of it myself, I would have
| been faster, and discovered this quicker.
|
| For a different task in the same project I used it to achieve a
| working version of something in a few days that would have taken
| me at least a week or two to achieve on my own. The result is not
| efficient enough for the long term, but for now it is good enough
| to proceed with other things. On the other hand, with just one
| (painful) week more, I would have coded a proper solution myself.
|
| What I am looking forward to is being able to converse with the
| AI in terms of a hard logic. That will take care of the
| straightforward but technically intricate stuff that it cannot do
| yet properly, and it will also allow the AI to surface much
| quicker where a "jump of insight" is needed.
|
| I am not sure what all of this means for us needing to think
| hard. Certainly thinking hard will be necessary for quite a
| while. I guess it comes down to when the AIs will be able to do
| these "jumps of insight" themselves, and for how long we can jump
| higher than they can.
| capl wrote:
| That's funny cause I feel the opposite: LLMs can automate, in a
| sloppy fashion, building the first trivial draft. But what
| remains is still thinking hard about the non trivial parts.
| 7777332215 wrote:
| Seems like a lot of people use AI to code in their private
| commercial IP and products. How are people not concerned with the
| fact that all these ai companies have the source code to
| everything? Your just helping them destroy your job. Code is not
| worthless, you cannot easily duplicate any complex project with
| equal features, quality, and stability.
| practal wrote:
| I think that is a very good point. Code is definitely not
| worthless, but I don't think that capitalism has the right
| tools for pricing it properly. I think it will become a lot
| like mathematics in that way.
| msephton wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. Actually, I don't agree. You only stop
| thinking hard if you decide to stop thinking hard. Nobody, no
| tool, is forcing you to stop thinking, pushing, reaching. If the
| thinking ceiling has changed, which I think it has, then it's
| entirely up to you to either move with it or stay still.
| m0rc wrote:
| I think the article has a point. There seem to be two reactions
| among senior engineers atound me these days.
|
| On one side, there are people who have become a bit more
| productive. They are certainly not "10x," but they definitely
| deliver more code. However, I do not observe a substantial
| difference in the end-to-end delivery of production-ready
| software. This might be on me and my lack of capacity to exploit
| the tools to their full extent. But, iterating over customer
| requirements, CI/CD, peer reviews, and business validation takes
| time (and time from the most experienced people, not from the
| AI).
|
| On the other hand, soemtimes I observe a genuine degradation of
| thinking among some senior engineers (there aren't many juniors
| around, by the way). Meetings, requirements, documents, or
| technology choices seem to be directly copy/pasted from an LLM,
| without a grain of original thinking, many times without insight.
|
| The AI tools are great though. They give you an answer to the
| question. But, many times making the correct question, and
| knowing when the answer is not correct is the main issue.
|
| I wonder if the productivity boost that senior engineers actually
| need is to profit from the accumulated knowledge found in books.
| I know it is an old technology and it is not fashionable, but I
| believe it is mostly unexploited if you consider the whole
| population of engineers :D
| nasretdinov wrote:
| > This might be on me and my lack of capacity to exploit the
| tools to their full extent. But, iterating over customer
| requirements, CI/CD, peer reviews, and business validation
| takes time (and time from the most experienced people, not from
| the AI).
|
| Yeah, you're certainly not the only one. For me the
| implementation part has always been a breeze compared to all
| the "communication overhead" so to speak. And in any mature
| system it easily takes 90% of all time or more.
| ertucetin wrote:
| It's the journey, not the destination, but with AI it's only the
| destination, and it takes all the joy.
| thorum wrote:
| > but the number of problems requiring deep creative solutions
| feels like it is diminishing rapidly.
|
| If anything, we have more intractable problems needing deep
| creative solutions than ever before. People are dying as I write
| this. We've got mass displacement, poverty, polarization in
| politics. The education and healthcare systems are broken.
| Climate change marches on. Not to mention the social consequences
| of new technologies like AI (including the ones discussed in this
| post) that frankly no one knows what to do about.
|
| The solution is indeed to work on bigger problems. If you can't
| find any, look harder.
| lccerina wrote:
| "Oh no, I am using a thing that no one is forcing me to use, and
| now I am sad".
|
| Just don't use AI. The idea that you have ship ship ship 10X ship
| is an illusion and a fraud. We don't really need more software
| wtetzner wrote:
| > We don't really need more software
|
| Yeah, we need better software.
| tomquirk wrote:
| The answer to this is to shift left into product/design.
|
| Sure, I'm doing less technical thinking these days. But all the
| hard thinking is happening on feature design.
|
| Good feature design is hard for AI. There's a lot of hidden
| context: customer conversations, unwritten roadmaps,
| understanding your users and their behaviour, and even an
| understanding of your existing feature set and how this new one
| fits in.
|
| It's a different style of thinking, but it is hard, and a new
| challenge we gotta embrace imo.
| margorczynski wrote:
| > Good feature design is hard for AI
|
| For now. Go back a year and take a look how the AI/LLM coding
| tools looked and worked back then.
| foxes wrote:
| I think I miss my thinking..
| defraudbah wrote:
| another AI blame/praise/adapt.. you definitely didn't think hard
| about this one, did you
| charcircuit wrote:
| If you are thinking hard I think you are software engineering
| wrong. Even before AI. As an industry all the different ways of
| doing things have already played out. Even doing big reactors or
| performance optimizations often can not be 100% predicted in
| their effectiveness. You will want to just go ahead and implement
| these things over spending more time thinking. And as AI gets
| stronger the just try a bunch of approaches will beat the think
| hard approach by an even bigger margin.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Why do anything at all then? It's all been done before. This
| line of thinking sounds like depression to me. Why decorate my
| house? I know I _could_ do it, but it 's all been done before,
| why bother?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Just because we know the best way to add 2 ints together that
| doesn't mean it's pointless to do addition with ints. We
| don't need people trying to spend a lot of extra time to come
| up with alternate ways to do it. The right function using
| addition may be valuable to a certain population.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I specifically spend my evenings reading Hegel and other hard
| philosophy as well as writing essays just to force myself to
| think hard
| ccppurcell wrote:
| In my experience, the so-called 1% are mostly just thinkers and
| researchers who have dedicated a lot more time from an earlier
| age to thinking and/or researching. There are a few geniuses out
| there but it's 1 in millions not in hundreds.
| tbs1980 wrote:
| I read something similar here
| https://open.substack.com/pub/strangeloopcanon/p/on-thinkers...
| hpone91 wrote:
| Just give Umineko a play/readthrough to get your deep thinking
| gray cells working again.
| cladopa wrote:
| I believe the article is wrong in so many ways.
|
| If you think too much you get into dead ends and you start having
| circular thoughts, like when you are lost in the desert and you
| realise you are in the same place again after two hours as you
| have made a great circle(because one of your legs is dominant
| over the other).
|
| The thinker needs feedback on the real world. It needs constant
| testing of hypothesis on reality or else you are dealing with
| ideology, not critical thinking. It needs other people and
| confrontation of ideas so the ideas stay fresh and strong and do
| not stagnate in isolation and personal biases.
|
| That was the most frustrating thing before AI, a thinker could
| think very fast, but was limited in testing by the ability to
| build. Usually she had to delegate it to people that were better
| builders, or else she had to be builder herself, doing what she
| hates all the time.
| macmac_mac wrote:
| reading this made me realize i used to actually think hard about
| bugs and design tradeoffs because i had no choice
| voidUpdate wrote:
| If you miss the experience of not using LLMs, then just... don't?
| Is someone forcing you to code with LLM help?
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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 having another spin. Everyone needs to go and
| see the depressed people at slot machines at least once to
| understand where this ends.
| freshbreath wrote:
| "I don't want to have to write this for the umpteenth time" --
| Don't let it even reach a -teenth. Automate it on the 2nd
| iteration. Or even the 1st if you know you'll need it again. LLMs
| can help with this.
|
| Software engineers are lazy. The good ones are, anyway.
|
| LLMs are extremely dangerous for us because it can easily become
| a "be lazy button". Press it whenever you want and get that
| dopamine hit -- you don't even have to dive into the weeds and
| get dirty!
|
| There's a fine line between "smart autocomplete" and "be lazy
| button". Use it to generate a boilerplate class, sure. But save
| some tokens and fill that class in yourself. _Especially_ if you
| don 't want to (at your own discretion; deadlines are a thing).
| But get back in those weeds, get dirty, remember the pain.
|
| We need to constantly remind ourselves of what we are doing and
| why we are doing it. Failing that, we forget the how, and
| eventually even the why. We become the reverse centaur.
|
| And I don't think LLMs are the next layer of abstraction -- if
| anything, they're preventing it. But I think LLMs can help build
| that next layer... it just won't look anything like the weekly
| "here's the greatest `.claude/.skills/AGENTS.md` setup".
|
| If you have to write a ton of boilerplate code, then abstract
| away the boilerplate _in code_ (nondeterminism is so 2025). And
| then _reuse that abstraction_. Make it robust and thoroughly
| tested. Put it on github. Let others join in on the fun. Iterate
| on it. Improve it. Maybe it 'll become part of the layers of
| abstraction for the next generation.
| tevli wrote:
| Exactly what I've been thinking. outsourcing tasks and thinking
| of problems to AI just seems easier these days; and you still get
| to feel in charge because you're the one still giving
| instructions.
| kovkol wrote:
| I mean I spent most of my career been being pressured to move
| from type 3 to any one of the other 2 so I don't blame AI for
| this (it doesn't help, though, especially if you delegate to much
| to it).
| zepesm wrote:
| That's why i'm still pushing bytes on C64 demoscene (and
| recommend such a niche as a hobby to anyone). It's great for the
| sanity in modern ai-driven dev-world ;)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| man, setting up worktrees for parallelized agentic coding is
| hard, setting up _containerized_ worktrees is hard so you can run
| with dangerous permissions on without nuking host system
|
| deciding whether to use that to work on multiple features on the
| same code base, or the same feature in multiple variations is
| hard
|
| deciding whether to work on a separate project entirely while all
| of this is happening is hard and mentally taxing
|
| planning all of this up for a few hours and watching it go all at
| once autonomously is satisfying!
| muyuu wrote:
| this also used to happened to me when I in a position that
| involved a lot of research earlier on and then after the product
| was a reality, and it worked, it tapered off to be small
| improvements and maintenance
|
| I can imagine many positions work out this way in startups
|
| it's important to think hard sometimes, even if it means taking
| time off to do the thinking - you can do it without the
| socioeconomic pressure of a work environment
| noodleweb wrote:
| I miss this too, I have had those moments of reward where
| something works and I want to celebrate. It's missing too for me.
|
| With AI the pros outweigh the cons at least at the moment with
| what we collectively have figured out so far. But with that
| everyday I wonder if it's possible now to be more ambitious than
| ever and take on much bigger problem with the pretend smart
| assistant.
| martin1975 wrote:
| I've been writing C/C++/Java for 25 years and am trying to learn
| forex disciplined, risk managed forex trading, It's a whole new
| level of hard work/thinking.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| You can't change the world, you can change yourself. Many people
| don't like change. So, people get frustrated when the world
| inevitably changes and they fail to adapt. It's called getting
| older. Happens to us all.
|
| I'm not immune to that and I catch myself sometimes being more
| reluctant to adapt. I'm well aware and I actively try to force
| myself to adapt. Because the alternative is becoming stuck in my
| ways and increasingly less relevant. There are a lot of much
| younger people around me that still have most of their careers
| ahead of them. They can try to whine about AI all they want for
| the next four decades or so but I don't think it will help them.
| Or they can try to deal with the fact that these tools are here
| now and that they need to learn to adapt to them whether they
| like it or not. And we are probably going to see quite some
| progress on the tool front. It's only been 3 years since ChatGPT
| had its public launch.
|
| To address the core issue here. You can use AI or let AI use you.
| The difference here is about who is in control and who is setting
| the goals. The traditional software development team is
| essentially managers prompting programmers to do stuff. And now
| we have programmers prompting AIs to do that stuff. If you are
| just a middle man relaying prompts from managers to the AI, you
| are not adding a lot of value. That's frustrating. It should be
| because it means apparently you are very replaceable.
|
| But you can turn that around. What makes that manager the best
| person to be prompting you? What's stopping them from skipping
| that entirely? Because that's your added value. Whatever you are
| good at and they are not is what you should be doing most of your
| time. The AI tools are just a means to an end to free up more
| time for whatever that is. Adapting means figuring that out for
| yourself and figuring out things that you enjoy doing that are
| still valuable to do.
|
| There's plenty of work to be done. And AI tools won't lift a
| finger to do it until somebody starts telling them what needs
| doing. I see a lot of work around me that isn't getting done. A
| lot of people are blind to those opportunities. Hint: most of
| that stuff still looks like hard work. If some jerk can one shot
| prompt it, it isn't all that valuable and not worth your time.
|
| Hard work usually involves thinking hard, skilling up, and
| figuring things out. The type of stuff the author is complaining
| he misses doing.
| petterroea wrote:
| I've missed the same even since before AI because I've done far
| too much work that's simple but time intensive. It's frustrating,
| and I miss problems that keep me up all night.
|
| Reverse engineering is imo the best way of getting the experience
| of pushing your thinking in a controlled way, at least if you
| have the kind of personality where you are stubborn in wanting to
| solve the problem.
|
| Go crack an old game or something!
| Underqualified wrote:
| This resonates with me, but I quit programming about a decade ago
| when we were moving from doing low level coding to frameworks. It
| became no longer about figuring out the actual problem, but
| figuring out how to get the framework to solve it and that just
| didn't work for me.
|
| I do miss hard thinking, I haven't really found a good
| alternative in the meantime. I notice I get joy out of helping my
| kids with their, rather basic, math homework, so the part of me
| that likes to think and solve problems creatively is still there.
| But it's hard to nourish in today's world I guess, at least when
| you're also a 'builder' and care about efficiency and
| effectiveness.
| thegrim000 wrote:
| You know, I was expecting what the post would say and was
| prepared to dunk on it and just tell them to stop using ai then,
| but the builder/thinker division they presented got me thinking.
| How ai/vibe coding fulfills the builder, not the thinker, made me
| realize that I'm basically 100% thinker, 0% builder, and that's
| why I don't really care at all about ai for coding.
|
| I'll spend years working on a from scratch OS kernel or a vulkan
| graphics engine or whatever other ridiculous project, which never
| sees the light of day, because I just enjoy the thinking / hard
| work. Solving hard problems is my entertainment and my hobby.
| It's cool to eventually see results in those projects, but that's
| not really the point. The point is to solve hard problems. I've
| spent decades on personal projects that nobody else will ever
| see.
|
| So I guess that explains why I see all the ai coding stuff and
| pretty much just ignore it. I'll use ai now as an advanced form
| of google, and also as a last ditch effort to get some direction
| on bugs I truly can't figure out, but otherwise I just completely
| ignore it. But I guess there's other people, the builders, where
| ai is a miraculous thing and they're going to crazy lengths to
| adopt it in every workflow and have it do as much as possible.
| Those 'builder' types of people are just completely different
| from me.
| jatora wrote:
| Absolutely nah. I know it feels good to jump into the 'thinker'
| camp and lump the users of AI into a non-thinker group, but
| this dichotomy is very poorly suited. Builders/engineers want a
| great tool to build faster with. Coders want to write code and
| find elegance in the prose. Both are thinkers.
| quenix wrote:
| This just sounds like a boring definitional issue. 'Thinker'
| is a loaded word.
|
| You are advocating for a particular (more inclusive)
| definition for 'thinker' which clashes with the author's, but
| his is equally valid. You're both just gesturing at different
| concepts and suggesting they should be tagged to that word.
|
| OP raises a particular way to classify _something_ about
| personalities, says he finds it quite interesting
| /discriminative, and calls that kind of personality a
| "thinker". You instead consider a "thinker" a broader
| category.
|
| That feels like an empty disagreement (nobody is right on
| such matters) - the real debatable question of substance is
| whether the _concept_ OP is gesturing at has interesting
| discriminative power. That concept is something like
| "personalities which seem to value the act of thinking
| through a problem/problem solving itself rather than
| downstream result".
| Bengalilol wrote:
| Cognitive debt lies ahead for all of us.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| Man, this resonates SO MUCH with me. I have always loved being
| confronted with a truly difficult problem. And I always had that
| (obviously misguided, but utterly motivating) feeling that, with
| enough effort, no problem could ever resist me. That it was just
| a matter of grinding a bit further, a bit longer.
|
| This is why I am so deeply opposed to using AI for problem
| solving I suppose: it just doesn't play nice with this process.
| Thanemate wrote:
| I am one of those junior software developers who always struggled
| with starting their own projects. Long story short, I realized
| that my struggle stems from my lack of training in open-ended
| problems, where there are many ways to go about solving
| something, and while some ways are better than others, there's no
| clear cut answer because the tradeoffs may not be relevant with
| the end goal.
|
| I realized that when a friend of mine gave me Factorio as a gift
| last Christmas, and I found myself facing the exact same
| resistance I'm facing while _thinking_ about working on my
| personal projects. To be more specific, it 's a fear and urge of
| closing the game and leaving it "for later" the moment I discover
| that I've either done something wrong or that new requirements
| have been added that will force me to change the way my factories
| connect with each other (or even their placement). Example:
| Tutorial 4 has the players introduced to research and labs, and
| this feeling appears when I realize that green science requires
| me to introduce all sorts of spaghetti just to create the mats
| needed for green science!
|
| So I've done what any AI user would do and opted to use chatGPT
| to push through the parts where things are either overwhelming,
| uncertain, too open-ended, or everything in between. The result
| works, because the LLM has been trained to Factorio guides, and
| goes as far as suggesting layouts to save myself some headache!
|
| Awesome, no? Except all I've done is outsource the decision of
| how to go about "the thing" to someone else. And while true, I
| could've done this even before LLM's by simply watching a youtube
| video guide, the LLM help doesn't stop there: It can alleviate my
| indecisiveness and frustration with dealing with open-ended
| problems for personal projects, can recommend me project
| structure, can generate a bullet pointed lists to pretend that I
| work for a company where someone else creates the spec and I just
| follow it step by step like a good junior software engineer would
| do.
|
| And yet all I did just postponed the inevitable exercise of a
| very useful mental habit: To navigate uncertainty, pause and
| reflect, plan, evaluate a trade-off or 2 here and there. And
| while there are other places and situations where I can exercise
| that behavior, the fact remains that my specific use of LLM
| removed that weight off my shoulders. I became objectively
| someone who builds his project ideas and makes progress in his
| Factorio playthrough, but the trade-off is I remain the same
| person who will duck and run the moment resistance happens, and
| succumb to the urge of either pushing "the thing" for tomorrow or
| ask chatGPT for help.
|
| I cannot imagine how someone would claim that removing an
| exercise from my daily gym visit will not result in weaker
| muscles. There are so many hidden assumptions in such statements,
| and an excessive focus of results in "the new era where you
| should start now or be left behind" where nobody's thinking how
| this affects the person and how they ultimately function in their
| daily lives across multiple contexts. It's all about output,
| output, output.
|
| How far are we from the day where people will say "well, you
| certainly don't need to plan a project, a factory layout, or even
| decide, just have chatGPT summarize the trade-offs, read the
| bullet points, and choose". We're off-loading portion of the
| research AND portion of the execution, thinking we'll surely be
| activating the neurosynapses in our brains that retains habits,
| just like someone who lifts 50% lighter weights at the gym will
| expect to maintain muscle mass or burn fat.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| This is just the kind of thing that Dr David Burns' work on
| TEAM-CBT therapy deals with.
|
| > " _Long story short, I realized that my struggle stems from
| my lack of training_ "
|
| you say, and then you explain exactly where your struggle is,
| and it's not lack of training:
|
| > " _it 's a fear and urge of closing the game and leaving it
| "for later" the moment I discover that I've either done
| something wrong_"
|
| There you are. It's that fear. Fear comes from your brain
| modeling the world and predicting the future, and predicting a
| bad future and generating fear (or anxiety, or other bad
| feelings) to change your behaviour and avoid that future. So
| find why "doing something wrong" is making you predict a bad
| future, what bad future, and then find a way to fix that where
| you can be wrong but it isn't the end of your world, and then
| this fear and urge won't appear anymore.
|
| 1) one of those things like "finding out I've done something
| wrong" happens, or you imagine it happening.
|
| 2) you imagine some kind of negative future event that follows
| on from doing something wrong, this is a habit of thinking that
| you learned so it might be fast, almost sub-conscious, flicker
| of ideas and thoughts.
|
| 3) from those, your brain generates bad feelings (feelings are
| a high level sweeping way to change our behaviour without
| thinking about tons of details).
|
| 4) you get the urge to push it away and close the game, so you
| can avoid those future events happening, so that can save you
| from future badness, bad feelings calm down (but different ones
| may appear like guilt, shame, inadequacy, etc).
|
| 5) you don't consciously notice this happening, so you make up
| some other reason that sounds nice and plausible and doesn't
| involve changing anything ("lack of training").
|
| 6) repeat this mental habit for a long time, maybe the rest of
| your life.
|
| > " _postponed the inevitable exercise of a very useful mental
| habit: To navigate uncertainty, pause and reflect, plan,
| evaluate a trade-off or 2 here and there._ "
|
| That's not where your problem is, you aren't lacking the
| ability to evaluate a trade-off, you're lacking the ability to
| go wrong. Being able to evaluate any situation so you _never
| ever go wrong_ isn 't possible, that can't be the answer. The
| only answer can be from becoming okay with going wrong [I hope
| you will feel an automatic rejection here, how can it possibly
| be OK to be wrong and screw something up? I don't want to be OK
| with going wrong! See?].
|
| Step one of a fix is to focus your attention on " _it 's a fear
| and urge of closing the game and leaving it "for later" the
| moment I discover that I've either done something wrong_" and
| push into that. Remember or find a specific example of that
| which makes the feeling come up - what task were going wrong
| brings up that feeling - write it down.
|
| Step two, look at your thoughts at that moment, what are you
| telling yourself will happen next that is so automatic and
| habitual and reflex and fast that you can barely notice it
| happening, but is basically the horrible future you're always
| worrying about? [If it helps, imagine a cartoon character who
| is just like you, in that "oh no I screwed up" situation with a
| thought bubble above their head, and write in what they are
| thinking which is oh so very relatable to you].
|
| It will be some typical human thing like "it will prove I'm not
| smart and my fiance or parents won't love me" or "I will become
| unemployed and homeless and get sick on the streets and die" or
| "it will prove my lifelong fear that I don't deserve respect
| and am inferior to everyone else" but the details will be
| unique to you and what you fear and worry about.
|
| And the next Dr Burns specific step is that you need to see why
| you are holding onto that pattern of thought, it's not just
| stopping you from making progress in projects, it's got some
| silver lining that is protecting and upholding some other
| ideals you value, and you don't want to let this pattern change
| and let go of the fear if it means losing something else
| equally or more valuable (e.g. "if I don't fear becoming
| homeless then I won't push myself to work harder and will waste
| my life as a drifter", or what I said earlier "I don't _want_
| to be okay with going wrong, people who screw things up and don
| 't care are LOSERS who make everything worse!", again, the
| details will be specific to you).
|
| And then to do some therapy techniques to work out how to
| unpick all this, and change it, in a way that keeps the ideals
| you want, and releases the sticking points you don't want.
|
| > " _I cannot imagine how someone would claim that removing an
| exercise from my daily gym visit will not result in weaker
| muscles._ "
|
| If you do weighted abs exercises first, then you can't do good
| squats because your abs hurt, removing the abs work might be an
| overall gain. If you do too much everyday so you can't recover
| properly in one night of rest, removing some more intense work
| might be an overall gain. If you try to do too many exercises
| in a rush so you can't do a good job on any of them, removing
| one so you can do fewer, better quality, might be an overall
| gain. If you hate one exercise and it puts you in a bad mood
| and every month or two you get a minor injury from it that
| knocks your progress back, removing it might be a mood boost
| and an overall gain. If you remove a small targetted exercise
| and replace it with a larger compound exercise, it might be an
| overall gain.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I feel tired working with AI much faster than I did when I used
| to code, dunno if it's just that I don't really need to think
| much at all other than keep in mind the broad plan and have an
| eye out if a red flag of the wrong direction shows in the
| transcript, don't even bother reading the code anymore since Opus
| 4.5 I haven't felt the need to.
|
| Manually coding engaged my brain much more and somehow was less
| exhausting, kinda feels like getting out of bed and doing
| something vs lazing around and ending up feel more tired despite
| having to do less.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| Something that people underestimate a lot is that we aren't
| "brains in a jar" and the elevated states of consciousness,
| such as "flow", require a deep involvement of the body. As such
| manual coding is much more likely to bring you into the zone
| than irregular interactions with an LLM.
|
| I actually believe that there are much better ways to
| incorporate AI into software development than any of the
| mechanisms we've seen so far. For instance, it would make a lot
| more sense that you actually write the software manually and
| get the usual autocomplete suggestions, along with some on the
| fly reviews, an extension proposals, such as writing the body
| of a function that you're calling from the core function you're
| writing now.
| Meneth wrote:
| I knew this sort of thing would happen before it was popular.
| Accordingly:
|
| Never have I ever used an LLM.
| frgturpwd wrote:
| It seems like what you miss is actually a stable cognitive regime
| built around long uninterrupted internal simulation of a single
| problem. This is why people play strategy video games.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| > the number of times I truly ponder a problem for more than a
| couple of hours has decreased tremendously
|
| Isn't that a good thing? If you're stuck on the same problem
| forever, then you're not going to get past it and never move on
| to the next thing... /shrug
| wtetzner wrote:
| Just because a problem takes more than a few hours doesn't mean
| you'll never get past it. And those are the problems that
| really grow your abilities.
| enthus1ast_ wrote:
| When I wrote nimja's template inheritance. I thought about it
| multiple days, until, during a train commute, it made click and I
| had to get out my notebook and write it, directly in the train.
| Then some month later I found out, I had the same bug that jinja2
| had fixed years ago. So I felt kinda like a brothers in hard
| thinking :)
| est wrote:
| I wrote a blog about this as well
|
| Hard Things in Computer Science, and AI Aren't Fixing Them
|
| https://blog.est.im/2026/stderr-04
| cbdevidal wrote:
| It's possible to be both.
|
| The last time I had to be a Thinker was because I was in Builder
| mode. I've been trying to build an IoT product but I've been
| wayyyy over my head because I knew maybe 5% of what I needed to
| be successful. So I would get stuck many, many times, for days or
| weeks at a time.
|
| I will say though that AI has made the difference in the last few
| times I got stuck. But I do get more enjoyment out of Building
| than Thinking, so I embrace it.
| fattybob wrote:
| Thinking hard and fast with positive results is like a drug, ah
| those were good and rewarding days in my past, would jump back
| into that work framework any time ( that was running geological
| operations in an unusually agile oil exploration programme )
| pyreal wrote:
| The author clearly loves coding more than the output from coding.
| I'm thinking harder than ever and so grateful I can finally think
| hard about the output I really want rather than how to resolve
| bugs or figure out how to install some new dependency.
| Sammi wrote:
| I'm thinking much more than ever, now that the coding agent is
| building for me.
|
| I strongly experience that coding agents are helping me think
| about stuff I wasn't able to think through before.
|
| I very much have both of these builder and thinker personas
| inside me, and I just am not getting this experience with "lack
| of thinking" that I'm seeing so many other people write about. I
| have it exactly the other way around, even if I'm a similar arch
| type of person. I'm spending less time building and more time
| thinking than ever.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| I find I think harder with AI programming. It generates the code,
| but I have to approve the overall design and then approve every
| single line. I will edit and rearrange the code until it is
| correct.
|
| But since the AI is generating a lot of code, it is challenging
| me. It also allows me to tackle problems in unfamiliar areas. I
| need to properly understand the solutions, which again is
| challenging. I know that if I don't understand exactly what the
| code is doing and have confidence in the design and reliability,
| it will come back and bite me when I release it into the wild. A
| lesson learnt the hard way during many decades of programming.
| felipelalli wrote:
| Me: I put your text into AI and ask it to summarize. We really do
| have a critical problem of mental laziness.
| levitatorius wrote:
| The post resonates deeply with me. I am a health professional in
| diagnostics and through the years I have observed different
| extremes in approaches to solving diagnostic challenges - the one
| extreme is to rely on "knowing", the other on
| "thinking/reasoning". The former is usually very fast, but not
| easily explainable - just like pattern recognition. The latter
| was slow, but could give a solution from "first principles" and
| possibly not described before. Of course it's a spectrum and the
| thinking part requires and includes the deep enough "knowing"
| part. One usually uses both approaches on daily work, but I have
| seen some people who relied much more on knowing than
| thinking/reasoning, sometimes to the extreme (as in refusing to
| diagnose a condition on their own because they "have not seen
| this before").
| kypro wrote:
| Maybe this is just me, but I don't miss thinking so much. I
| personally quite like knowing how to do things and being able to
| work productively.
|
| For me it's always been the effort that's fun, and I increasingly
| miss that. Today it feels like I'm playing the same video game I
| used to enjoy with all the cheats on, or going back to an early
| level after maxing out my character. In some ways the game play
| is the same, same enemies, same map, etc, but the action itself
| misses the depth that comes from the effort of playing without
| cheats or with a weaker character and completing the stage.
|
| What I miss personally is coming up with something in my head and
| having to build it with my own fingers with effort. There's
| something rewarding about that which you don't get from just
| typing "I want x".
|
| I think this craving for effort is a very human thing to be
| honest... It's why we bake bread at home instead just buying it
| from a locally bakery that realistically will be twice as good.
| The enjoyment comes from the effort. I personally like building
| furniture and although my furniture sucks compared to what you
| might be able buy at store, it's so damn rewarding to spend days
| working on something then having a real physical thing that you
| can use that you build from hand.
|
| I've never thought of myself as someone who likes the challenge
| of coding. I just like building things. And I think I like
| building things because building things is hard. Or at least it
| was.
| okokwhatever wrote:
| I get it and somehow also agree with the division
| (thinker/builder) but I feel this is only the representation of a
| new society where less humans are necessary to think deeply. No
| offense here, it's just my own unsatisfacted brain trying to
| adapt to a whole new era.
| chuliomartinez wrote:
| I guess it depends on what you build, i feel the most complex
| part of the deal, that makes me think the hardest, is to figure
| out what to build. Eg understanding the client, and creating a
| solution that fits between their needs and abilities. The rest is
| often a technical detail, yes sometimes you need to deep dive to
| optimize. Anyway if you miss debugging try debugging people;)
| keiferski wrote:
| This title and the first half of the post (before the AI
| discussion) just makes me miss the intellectual environment of
| college.
|
| So I'm tempted to say that this is just a part of the economic
| system in general, and isn't specifically linked to AI. Unless
| you're lucky enough to grab a job that requires deep intellectual
| work, your day job will probably not challenge your mental
| abilities as much as a difficult college course does.
|
| Sad but true, but unfortunately I don't think any companies are
| paying people to think deeply about metaphysics (my personal
| favorite "thinking hard subject" from college.)
| makerdiety wrote:
| If you don't have to think, then what you're building isn't
| really news worthy.
|
| So, we have an inflation of worthless stuff being done.
| moorebob wrote:
| My mindset last year: I am now a mentor to a junior developer
|
| My mindset this year: I am an engineering manager to a team of
| developers
|
| If the pace of AI improvement continues, my mindset next year
| will need to be: I am CEO and CTO.
|
| I never enjoyed the IC -> EM transition in the workplace because
| of all the tedious political issues, people management issues and
| repetitive admin. I actually went back to being an IC because of
| this.
|
| However, with a team of AI agents, there's less BS, and less
| holding me back. So I'm seeing the positives - I can achieve
| vastly more, and I can set the engineering standards, improve
| quality (by training and tuning the AI) and get plenty of
| satisfaction from "The Builder" role, as defined in the article.
|
| Likewise I'm sure I would hate the CEO/CTO role in real life.
| However, I am adapting my mindset to the 2030s reality, and
| imagining being a CEO/CTO to an infinitely scalable team of
| Agentic EMs who can deliver the work of hundreds of real people,
| in any direction I choose.
|
| How much space is there in the marketplace if all HN readers
| become CEOs and try to launch their own products and services?
| Who knows... but I do know that this is the option available to
| me, and it's probably wise to get ahead of it.
| emsign wrote:
| I miss hard thinking people.
| gethly wrote:
| Skill issue
| getnormality wrote:
| If you miss challenge, the world has plenty more. Maybe it's not
| all your comfort zone, but if you try being a little ambitious
| and maybe use AI to understand a field you're not already deeply
| familiar with, you can continue to grow.
| jbrooks84 wrote:
| You are doing something wrong. Ai has not taken away thinking
| hard
| spacecadet wrote:
| Every day man... Thinking hard on something is a conscious
| choice.
| ahyangyi wrote:
| In most research areas, if a few days thinking is good enough to
| reach a worthwhile conclusion, it's not "thinking hard". It's
| "low-hanging fruit".
| lukewarmdaisies wrote:
| Then think hard? Have a level of self discipline and don't
| consistently turn to AI to solve your problems. Go to a library
| if you have to! People act like victims to the machine when it
| comes to building their thinking muscles and AI and it confuses
| me.
| Thanemate wrote:
| The crowd that counterpoints with "just don't use it then" miss
| the point: The general population lacks the ability to judge when
| should use it and when they shouldn't. The average person will
| always lean towards the less effortful option, without awareness
| of the long term consequences.
|
| On top of that, the business settings/environments will always
| lean towards the option that provides the largest productivity
| gains, without awareness of the long term consequences for the
| worker. At that environment, not using it is not an option,
| unless you want to be unemployed.
|
| Where does that leave us? Are we supposed to find the figurative
| "gym for problem solving" the same way office workers workout
| after work? Because that's the only solution I can think of:
| Trading off my output for problem solving outside of work
| settings, so that I can improve my output _with_ the tool at
| work.
| alex-moon wrote:
| > Are we supposed to find the figurative "gym for problem
| solving" the same way office workers workout after work?
|
| That's it, yeah. It sucks but it's part of the job. It makes
| you a better engineer.
|
| You're absolutely right that this isn't sustainable however. In
| one of my earlier jobs - specifically, the one that trained me
| up to become the senior engineer I am now - we had "FedEx
| Fridays" (same day delivery, get it?). In a word, you have a
| single work day to work on something non-work related, with one
| condition: you had to have a deliverable by the end of the day.
| I cannot overstate how useful having something like this in
| place in the place of business is for junior devs. The trick is
| convincing tech businesses that this kind of "training" is a
| legitimate overhead - the kinds of businesses that are run by
| engineers get this intuitively. The kind that have a non-
| technical C-suite less so.
| sebastianmestre wrote:
| I did competitive programming seriously between '17 and '24, then
| kept on coaching people
|
| As a beginner I often thought about a problem for days before
| finding a solution, but this happened less and less as I improved
|
| I got better at exploiting the things I knew, to the point where
| I could be pretty confident that if I couldn't solve a problem in
| a few hours it was because I was missing some important piece of
| theory
|
| I think spending days "sitting with" a problem just points at
| your own weakness in solving some class of problems.
|
| If you are making no articulable progress whatsoever, there is a
| pathology in your process.
|
| Even when working on my thesis, where I would often "get stuck"
| because the problem was far beyond what I could solve in one
| sitting, I was still making progress in some direction every
| time.
| juggy69 wrote:
| Do you mean that sitting with the problem for days is a
| weakness that you should fix since you're wasting time making
| no progress? Or that it is a necessary practice in order to
| understand your weaknesses?
| sebastianmestre wrote:
| When you're a beginner you're a beginner, no way around it.
|
| But understanding your weaknesses and working on them is
| huge, and I think most people just don't try to do it.
|
| Being stuck for days is something to be overcome.
|
| The next step would be being slow because you are trying out
| many different ideas and have no intuition for what the right
| one is.
| dchftcs wrote:
| you still can think hard but you can offload some parts to LLM
| when you're stuck. Then you can leave space for more hard-won
| inspiration. When you're faced with a high-stakes decision,
| evaluating all sorts of possibilities, it's really easy to
| maximize the utilization of your brain, so in those cases you
| have plenty of chance to think hard.
| mastermedo wrote:
| I relate to the post, but I'm not sure it's hitting the nail on
| the head _for me_.
|
| I like being useful, and I'm not yet sure how much of what I'm
| creating with AI is _me_, and how much it is _it_. It's hard to
| derive as much purpose/meaning from it compared to the previous
| reality where it was _all me_.
|
| If I compare it to a real world problem; e.g. when I unplug the
| charging cable from my laptop at my home desk, the charging cable
| slides off the table. I could order a solution online that fixes
| the problem and be done with it, but I could also think how _I_
| can solve the problem with what I already have in my spare parts
| box. Trying out different solutions makes me think and I'm way
| more happy with the end result. Every time I unplug the cable now
| and it stays in place it reminds me of _my_ labour and creativity
| (and also the cable not sliding down the table -- but that's
| besides the point).
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| That's exactly it for me. Coming up with a solution using my
| own brainpower is a large part of the pleasure of programming
| for me.
|
| A silly example to illustrate the kind of guy I am: when I'm
| watching a show or movie, I'll often wonder where I've seen an
| actor before. A "normal" person, like my wife, would just look
| it up on IMDB and be done with it. But I almost always insist
| on rifling through all the dustiest corners of my brain to
| figure it out. Even if it takes me a day or two of thinking
| about it off and on. Because to me, the satisfaction of doing
| it myself is worth it.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| This isn't the point of the piece, but I have found that the
| thinker often gets in the way of the builder, because there's
| always a better way to build, there's always some imperfect
| subsystem you just want to tear out and rewrite and then you
| realize you were all wrong about this and that, etc.
|
| More to the piece itself, I know some crusty old embedded
| engineers who feel the same way about compilers as this guy does
| about AI, it doesn't invalidate his point but it's food for
| thought
| ninadwrites wrote:
| You're extremely on point. I don't remember the last time I was
| able to sit around to think because at the back of my mind, I
| knew AI could help me generate the initial draft of ideas, logic,
| or structure that would otherwise require hours of my time.
|
| But to be honest, those hours spent structuring thoughts are so
| important to making things work. Or you might as well get out of
| the way and let AI do everything, why even pretend to work when
| all we're going to do is just copy and paste things from AI
| outputs?
| Insanity wrote:
| Advent of Code (which given my schedule runs into January).
| That's the last time thinking hard about a coding problem, I
| don't remember exactly if it was day 10 or 11 that had me
| scratching my head for a while.
|
| I intentionally do not use AI though.
|
| But I sympathize with the author. I enjoy thinking deeply about
| problems which is why I studied compsci and later philosophy, and
| ended up in the engineering field. I'm an EM now so AI is less of
| an "immediate threat" to my thinking habits than the role change
| was.
|
| That said, I did recently pick up more philosophy reading again
| just for the purpose of challenges my brain.
| ontouchstart wrote:
| After leaving my previous day job, I have some downtime to get
| back to thinking and realizing how much I love reading and
| thinking.
|
| Contemplating the old RTFM, I started a new personal project
| called WTFM and spends time writing instead of coding. There is
| no agenda and product goals.
|
| https://wtfm-rs.github.io/
|
| There are so many interesting things in human generated computer
| code and documentation. Well crafted thoughts are precious.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| I'm wondering if everyone here saying they think harder with LLM
| agents have never reached "flow state" while programming. I just
| can't imagine using 100% of my mental focus state for hours with
| an agent. Sure, I think differently when my coding is primarily
| via agent, but I've never been totally enveloped by my thoughts
| while doing so.
|
| For those who have found a "flow state" with LLM agents, what's
| that like?
| dysoco wrote:
| I believe you can enter "flow state" with something like Claude
| Code, from what I've read, but it's mostly reduced to pressing
| 1 or 2 and typing a few prompts. The reward loop is much more
| closed now though, so it's a bit more akin to reaching flow
| state playing Tetris.
| ativzzz wrote:
| I've literally never found flow state with programming. Is it
| even possible when working as a full stack web dev? I am
| constantly context switching between backend/frontend, reading
| documentation, looking at/modifying data, refreshing &
| interacting with the browser, checking/double checking feature
| requirements, asking people about things.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| For me, yes. It is possible as when working full-stack if you
| aren't being interrupted. Not all tasks, but some tasks,
| where you're pretty sure of the high-level requirements, have
| the necessary agency to stay in a bubble for a bit, and the
| task is sufficiently complex but narrow enough so you don't
| have to context switch too much.
|
| With LLM Agents I can't seem to do it, as waiting for the
| agent to finish working just doesn't tickle my brain in the
| right way. I feel... distracted, I guess?
| ativzzz wrote:
| > where you're pretty sure of the high-level requirements,
| have the necessary agency to stay in a bubble for a bit,
| and the task is sufficiently complex but narrow enough
|
| yea these kind of problems are the exact ones that claude
| code is very good at one shotting these days. If you can
| descibe in detail what needs to be done without context
| switching or research, then describe it to the LLM and bam
|
| I've also mostly worked at small companies so the high
| level requirements are never well defined :D
| the_af wrote:
| The article is interesting. I don't know how I feel about it,
| though I'm both a user of AI (no choice anymore in the current
| job environment) and vaguely alarmed by it; I'm in the camp of
| those who fear for the future of our profession, and I know the
| counterarguments but I'm not convinced.
|
| A couple of thoughts.
|
| First, I think the hardness of the problems most of us solve is
| overrated. There is a lot of friction, tuning things, configuring
| things right, reading logs, etc. But are the problems most of us
| are solving really that hard? I don't think so, except for those
| few doing groundbreaking work or sending rockets to space.
|
| Second, even thinking about easier problems is good training for
| the mind. There's that analogy that the brain is a "muscle", and
| I think it's accurate. If we always take the easy way out for the
| easier problems, we don't exercise our brains, and then when
| harder problems come up what will we do?
|
| (And please, no replies of the kind "when portable calculators
| were invented...").
| jonahrd wrote:
| Dear author, I suggest trying out a job in a niche part of the
| field like firmware/embedded. Bonus if it's a company with a
| bunch of legacy devices to maintain. AI just hasn't quite grokked
| it there yet and thinking still reigns supreme :)
| Nevermark wrote:
| i have often pondered if the (sometimes facetiously, sometimes
| seriously) postulated AI utopia scenario of humans who don't need
| to work but can devote their time to art and recreational
| pursuits, might be a hellscape for many industrious people.
|
| This essay captures that.
|
| Even the pure artist, for whom utility may not seem to matter,
| manufactures meaning not just from creative exploration directly,
| but also from the difficulty (which can take many forms) involved
| in doing something genuinely new, and what they learn from that.
|
| What happens to that when we even have "new" on tap.
| alexpotato wrote:
| I'm a DevOps/SRE and I've spent the past couple weeks trying to
| vibecode as much of what I do as possible.
|
| In some ways, it's magical. e.g. I whipped up a web based tool
| for analyzing performance statistics of a blockchain. Claude was
| able to do everything from building the gui, optimizing the
| queries, adding new indices to the database etc. I broke it down
| into small prompts so that I kept it on track and it didn't veer
| off course. 90% of this I could have done myself but Claude took
| hours where it would have taken me days or even weeks.
|
| Then yesterday I wanted to do a quick audit of our infra using
| Ansible. I first thought: let's try Claude again. I gave it lots
| of hints on where our inventory is, which ports matter etc but it
| still was grinding away for several minutes. I eventually
| Ctrl-C'ed and used a couple one liners that I wrote myself in a
| few minutes. In other words, I was faster that the machine in
| this case.
|
| After the above, it makes sense to me that people may have
| conflicting feelings about productivity. e.g. sometimes it's
| amazing, sometimes it does the wrong thing.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| I think there's an argument where if Claude had the knowledge
| map of your personal one liners and a tool for using them, it
| would often do the right thing in those cases. But it's
| definitely not as able to compress all the entropy of 'what can
| go wrong' operations wise as it is when composing code yet.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| My experience that with careful specs, Claude or Codex can whip
| up either CDK, Cloudformation, or Terraform code much quicker
| than I can and I've been using IAC for 8 years -
| developer/consultant specializing in development + cloud
| architecture
| hoppp wrote:
| All the time. Been working on my own projects, they all require
| hard thinking.
| qwertox wrote:
| AI is way less of a problem in regards to thinking than digital
| media consumption is.
|
| I used to think about my projects when in bed, now i listen to
| podcasts or watch youtube videos before sleeping.
|
| I think it has a much bigger impact than using our "programming
| calculator" as an assistant.
| DaanDL wrote:
| "I still encounter those occasionally, but the number of problems
| requiring deep creative solutions feels like it is diminishing
| rapidly."
|
| Just let it try and solve an issue with your advanced SQLAlchemy
| query and see it burn. xD
| abcde666777 wrote:
| Well, for programming work which is essentially repetition (e.g.
| making another website not unlike thousands of others), it's no
| surprise that AI programming can work wonders - you're
| essentially using a sophisticated form of copy paste.
|
| But there's still a lot of programming out there which requires
| originality.
|
| Speaking personally, I never was nor ever will be too interested
| in the former variety.
| postit wrote:
| I usually think hard. I correlate subjects with different areas
| to find similarities.
|
| What I miss is having other people who likes to think and not
| always pushing for shallow results
| melodyogonna wrote:
| I use Aider because it allows me to retain both personalities and
| still benefit from AI. It truly is the best assistant I've used.
| wendgeabos wrote:
| I love thinking hard, it's genuinely my favorite thing, but ...
| we get paid to ship.
| nate wrote:
| author obviously isn't wrong. it's easy to fall into this trap.
| and it does take willpower to get out of it. and the AI (christ
| i'm going to sound like they paid me) can actually be a tool to
| get there.
|
| i was working for months on an entity resolution system at work.
| i inherited the basic algo of it: Locality Sensitive Hashing.
| Basically breaking up a word into little chunks and comparing the
| chunk fingerprints to see which strings matched(ish). But it was
| slow, blew up memory constraints, and full of false negatives
| (didn't find matches).
|
| of course i had claude seek through this looking to help me and
| it would find things. and would have solutions super fast to
| things that I couldn't immediately comprehend how it got there in
| its diff.
|
| but here's a few things that helped me get on top of lazy mode.
| Basically, use Claude in slow mode. Not lazy mode:
|
| 1. everyone wants one shot solutions. but instead do the
| opposite. just focus on fixing one small step at a time. so you
| have time to grok what the frig just happened. 2. instead of
| asking claude for code immediately, ask for more architectural
| thoughts. not claude "plans". but choices. "claude, this sql
| model is slow. and grows out of our memory box. what options are
| on the table to fix this." and now go back and forth getting the
| pros and cons of the fixes. don't just ask "make this faster". Of
| course this is the slower way to work with Claude. But it will
| get you to a solution you more deeply understand and avoid the
| hallucinations where it decides "oh just add where 1!=1 to your
| sql and it will be super fast". 3. sign yourself up to explain
| what you just built. not just get through a code review. but now
| you are going to have a lunch and learn to teach others how these
| algorithms or code you just wrote work. you better believe you
| are going to force yourself to internalize the stuff claude came
| up with easily. i gave multiple presentations all over our
| company and to our acquirers how this complicated thing worked. I
| HAD TO UNDERSTAND. There's no way I could show up and be like "i
| have no idea why we wrote that algorithm that way". 4. get claude
| to teach it to you over and over and over again. if you spot a
| thing you don't really know yet, like what the hell is is this
| algorithm doing. make it show you in agonizingly slow detail how
| the concept works. didn't sink in, do it again. and again. ask it
| for the 5 year old explanation. yes, we have a super smart, over
| confident and naive engineer here, but we also have a teacher we
| can berate with questions who never tires of trying to teach us
| something, not matter how stupid we can be or sound.
|
| Were there some lazy moments where I felt like I wasn't thinking.
| Yes. But using Claude in slow mode I've learned the space of
| entity resolution faster and more thoroughly than I could have
| without it and feel like I actually, personally invented here
| within it.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Many times, the really hard problems that I ask AI to solve, it
| solves it not so well, and that just makes me more frustrated. If
| you're building that just need to barely work, that's one thing.
| if you need things to work securely, scale, and be really
| efficient, I don't see how AI changes things. To the contrary, it
| might spit out test-cases and sample code to test your hypothesis
| with, saving you time and frustration, letting you focus on the
| architecture and problem solving.
|
| I think perhaps moving the goal posts to demand better quality
| and performance might force people who rely on AI to "think
| hard". Like your app works fine, now make it load in under a
| second on any platform.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I don't. I miss being outside, in the sun, living my life. And if
| there's one thing AI has done it's save my time.
|
| I'm not sure how you live and work in the US, but here in Sweden,
| in my experience, it's more focused on results than sitting at
| your desk 9-5.
|
| So AI does enable me to take more free time, be outside more when
| the sun is out, because I finish my tasks faster.
|
| I'm just afraid that managers will start demanding more, demand
| that we increase our output instead of our work life balance. But
| in that case I at least have the seniority to protest.
| brisky wrote:
| Homeless people have the most sun and spend a lot of time
| outside. I hope that this is not where we are headed with AI
| chrisss395 wrote:
| I think the author has discovered that coding is not what they
| actually enjoy.
|
| I was a software and systems developer on cool shit, but I
| realized I enjoyed solving hard problems more than how I solved
| them. That led me to a role that is about solving hard problems.
| Sometimes I still use coding to do it, but that's just one tool
| of many.
| csummers wrote:
| I definitely identify with the "Thinker" described in this post,
| but I am routinely mulling over ideas and problems (multiple
| hours, days, and weeks) with the help of LLMs now.
|
| One of the benefits of LLM usage is to figure out the boundaries
| of your own knowledge and that of humanity's existing knowledge--
| at least for the LLM's training data.
|
| Enumerating through existing options and existing solutions to
| problems gets you to the knowledge boundary sooner--where the
| real work begins! While faster with LLMs, I don't see this
| process as much different than bouncing ideas off of colleagues
| (and critiquing your own thoughts).
|
| However, the difference is likely human's unpredictable ability
| to apply creativity throughout the process...such that a new
| solution may arise at any point and leap-frog existing
| solutions/explanations. (Think Einstein taking known data from
| Lorentz, Michelson, Morley plus Maxwell's equations on light and
| coming up with special relativity.)
| MrDrDr wrote:
| I also recognise 'thinking' as a valuable and enjoyable activity
| - and have also obsessed about problems for days (even in my
| sleep)to reach a deeper understanding. But I think the issue here
| is the impact of AI on just that - 'understanding'. It might be
| true that with AI we no longer need to have as deeper
| understanding in order to 'ship'. And even if that is true I
| think there are plenty of other domains you can think deeply
| about without AI getting in the way e.g. mathematics or
| philosophy - where is object is often to understand in and of
| itself, not just the products it may generate.
| swah wrote:
| What are some thoughts for someone just getting into thinking?
| 3squaredcircles wrote:
| I've found that AI still makes me think. Yes I use it as my 10x,
| but I still have to plan what I am going to do, call it on its
| bull, and keep it on track. AI just saves me from the tedium of
| typing (and lets be real, mistyping). I can't specialize in 13
| different languages, but I can bring good architecture, and good
| practices to bear.
|
| It's a different type of thinking in my opinion, more "systems"
| thinking.
| m132 wrote:
| LLMs haven't changed how hard it is to truly invent. What LLMs do
| instead is painfully rub it in that most problems already have
| their solutions.
|
| There's no need to create another serialization format or a
| JavaScript framework. You now have more time to direct your focus
| onto those problems that haven't yet been solved, or at least
| haven't been solved well.
|
| A question that might be hard to digest: was that "thinker"
| really a thinker, or a well-disguised re-inventor?
| imsohotness wrote:
| Maybe we get AI to handle the lightwork while we go on to think
| about different things?
| indycliff wrote:
| Do some leetcode hard... you're welcome.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| In reality, us thinkers will have to find other things to think
| about. Maybe not right now, but in the not-too-distant future
| we'll have to find other things that make us think and scratch
| that bit of our brains that need itching from learning new stuff
| and thinking hard about it.
|
| It might be difficult to figure out what that is, and some folks
| will fail at it. It might not be code though.
| agentultra wrote:
| You don't use it, you lose it.
|
| Not every programming task needs to be a research project. There
| are plenty of boring business problems that needs the application
| of computing to automate. And it's been a decent way to make a
| living for a while.
|
| It's great getting a good problem to chew on.
|
| I try to keep a small percentage of my time occupied by one or
| two good ones. If I'm always bored it's a sign I could be doing
| better. And I like being at my best.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Do you miss thinking hard or do you missing typing? GenAI can
| save you from lots of typing and stack overflow copy/paste but
| it's not going to think for you. Further, think as hard as you
| want you're perfectly free to do so. I get the feeling a lot of
| people are deep down upset that knowledge and speed with code
| that use to be theirs and theirs alone is now much more
| accessible to the unwashed masses.
| jakewindle47 wrote:
| > If I can get a solution that is "close enough" in a fraction of
| the time and effort, it is irrational not to take the AI route.
| And that is the real problem: I cannot simply turn off my
| pragmatism.
|
| I've not seen this take yet, but this is exactly how I feel. I do
| not yet know what I want to do, and my parts of my personality
| are no longer satisfied by coding. I'm thinking we need some kind
| of community of people like us where we can discuss these things.
|
| I bring these up with others, and I find that most people around
| me are just builders.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > If I can get a solution that is "close enough" in a fraction
| of the time and effort, it is irrational not to take the AI
| route.
|
| I think this is context dependent. Over time, within a single
| code base or ecosystem, incompatibilities between "close
| enough" solutions can add up and create a lot of problems and
| complexity, kinda like floating point inaccuracies. Especially
| if you're not going back and revisiting the
| structure/abstractions you've already got when you're
| adding/changing something.
|
| There's another angle too, which is that time taken to improve
| your abilities isn't necessarily irrational, especially because
| that improvement is usually applicable in many different ways.
| It can be an investment.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| There are many difficult problems involved in building LLMs that
| I have to think about on a regular basis, which the models
| themselves cannot help me with. I think that just because the
| cognitive load has been taken off of some tasks does not mean
| that there is nothing that requires serious thinking anymore.
| pelasaco wrote:
| I do every day.
|
| I dont write just code, i do as well network engineering, network
| architecture. There is stuff that, at least until now, i cannot
| vibe.
|
| I have a pet project where I dont use AI. It moves slowly but, to
| code, is my hobby.
| Arubis wrote:
| I, too, miss thinking hard, before I had children.
|
| AI isn't the only thing that changes how you attend to life.
| delbronski wrote:
| My favorite part of programming is thinking about the whole
| system before I write a single line of code. How will my data be
| structured? What does the UI look like? How do I structure the
| project? What tools do I use? What do I need to take out to make
| this simpler? Etc.
|
| I think hard about this with a notebook and a pencil and a
| coffee. And I spend weeks and sometimes months thinking about
| this. I go deep. And then the actual coding is just the grunt
| work. I don't hate it but I don't love it. I couldn't care less
| what language is written in as long as it accomplishes my goal.
| So AI works great for me in this step.
|
| I think you can still use AI and think deeply. It just depends on
| your mindset and how you use it.
| ossicones wrote:
| 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 credited with posing the question. This is because the framing
| of a fundamentally new question lies, by definition, beyond what
| we can expect within our frame of knowledge: while answering a
| question relies upon logic, coming up with a new question often
| rests on an illogical leap into the unknown."
| flpm wrote:
| I heard this interesting quote about AI (paraphrasing): "We
| invented a cure for exercise, we should not be surprised later
| when we realize that we quickly run out of breath".
| fl0ki wrote:
| It really bothers me how many comments on this topic (here and
| elsewhere) draw a false parallel between LLM-based coding as an
| abstraction and frameworks and compilers as an abstraction.
| They're not the same thing and it matters.
|
| Frameworks and compilers are designed to be leak-proof
| abstractions. Any way in which they deviate from their abstract
| promise is a bug that can be found, filed, and permanently fixed.
| You get to spend your time and energy reasoning in terms of the
| abstraction because you can trust that the finished product works
| exactly the way you reasoned about at the abstract level.
|
| LLMs cannot offer that promise by design, so it remains your job
| to find and fix any deviations from the abstraction you intended.
| If you fell short of finding and fixing any of those bugs, you've
| just left yourself a potential crisis down the line.
|
| [Aside: I get why that's acceptable in many domains, and I hope
| in return people can get why it's not acceptable in many other
| domains]
|
| All of our decades of progress in programming languages,
| frameworks, libraries, etc. has been in trying to build up leak-
| proof abstractions so that programmer intent can be focused only
| on the unique and interesting parts of a problem, with the other
| details getting the best available (or at least most widely
| applicable) implementation. In many ways we've succeeded, even
| though in many ways it looks like progress has stalled. LLMs have
| not solved this, they've just given up on the leak-proof part of
| the problem, trading it for exactly the costs and risks the
| industry was trying to avoid by solving it properly.
| Stefan-H wrote:
| Your comment gets to the crux of my thinking about LLM coding.
| The way I think of what LLM coding is doing is decompressing
| your prompt into code based on the statistical likelihood of
| that decompression based on training data. Basically "Build me
| an IOS app" -> a concrete implementation of an iOS app. The
| issue here is that the user supplying the prompt needs to
| encode all of the potential variables that the AI needs to work
| with into the prompt, or else the implementation will just be
| based on the "bog-standard" iOS app based on the training
| corpus, although with potential differences in the app based on
| other tokens in the prompt. Is natural language the right way
| to encode that information? Do we want to rely on input tokens
| to the context of a model successfully making it into the
| output to guarantee accuracy? I think the Kiro Spec driven
| development starts to get at addressing the inherent issues in
| LLM based coding assistance, but it is an early step.
| ericmcer wrote:
| That is a good point because your brain interacts with them
| differently as well.
|
| If my C compiler sometimes worked and sometimes didn't I would
| just mash compile like an ape until it started working.
| archagon wrote:
| Exactly. It's a bit startling how many programmers don't seem
| to know the meaning of "abstraction."
| tshadley wrote:
| > LLMs cannot offer that promise by design, so it remains your
| job to find and fix any deviations from the abstraction you
| intended.
|
| LLMs are clumsy interns now, very leaky. But we know human
| experts can be leak-proof. Why can't LLMs get there, too,
| better at coding, understanding your intentions, reviewing
| automatically for deviations, etc.?
|
| Thought experiment: could you work well with a team of human
| experts just below your level? Then you should be able to work
| well with future LLMs.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Another way in which their different is that, because they are
| non-deterministic, we check in the output, not the input. It's
| the equivalent of checking machine code into our source control
| instead of the input language. It's not abstraction, its non-
| deterministic code generation.
| LordHumungous wrote:
| I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I totally feel what this
| author is saying. On the other hand , I love that I am now able
| to push into areas that I could have never touched before, and
| complete successful projects in them.
| grishka wrote:
| The use of AI is a choice. _You_ make that choice, no one else
| does it for you. I myself chose to act like AI does not exist.
| The author, evidently, did not. So it 's odd, then, that they're
| complaining about the consequences of their own choices.
| its-kostya wrote:
| > skipping the process of creation you trade the thing you could
| have learned
|
| Most comments in the thread are missing that critical point. Yes
| you are achieving the end goal, perhaps faster. And yes, built
| projects (perhaps worse quality) are still better than not built
| projects.
|
| But take the home cooking vs ordering at restaurant example:
|
| At a restaurant you can prompt for exactly what you want to eat
| and it will be made for you without you actually having to do it.
| When the food comes out you can taste it and notice it is missing
| some flavor. Problem is, you don't know what is missing. If you
| are knowledgeable about the dish, you can prompt for additional
| spices or flavours.
|
| When I cook, I try all the ingredients before I add them and then
| taste the result so I know how an addition changes the final
| result.
|
| I am now a much better cook because of this because I can make
| substitutions on the fly. Dish missing sweetness? Carrots, baby
| red peppers, beets etc can all substitute - never even reach for
| sugar. Already added a lot of salt but still feels like more
| needed? Add sour flavours like lemon juice.
|
| Sure, reliance on AI will end up with more things built but
| you'll have a generation of "cooks" that don't know why you add a
| bay leaf or two to soup, except that it's always in recipes.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| _" I always felt that deep prolonged thinking was my superpower.
| I might not be as fast or naturally gifted as the top 1%, but
| given enough time, I was confident I could solve anything. I felt
| a deep satisfaction in that process."_
|
| In psychological terms, he's saying he has a need to solve hard
| problems in order to validate his identity and make himself feel
| good. At some point in his past he experienced some psychological
| trauma, and this hard-problem-defeating became his coping
| mechanism.
|
| _" That satisfaction is why software engineering was initially
| so gratifying."_
|
| He became a software engineer to gratify his need to solve hard
| problems, to validate his identity, and make himself feel good.
| If he stops needing to engineer difficult software, there goes
| his identity, his self-worth, his good feeling.
|
| _" But recently, the number of times I truly ponder a problem
| for more than a couple of hours has decreased tremendously. Yes,
| I blame AI for this."_
|
| When he runs up against something that takes _away_ this thing
| that validates him, he feels de-valued. Rather than recognize
| that AI is making his life easier, freeing him up from mental
| labor, he 's experiencing it as a loss, almost an attack.
|
| _" If I can get a solution that is "close enough" in a fraction
| of the time and effort, it is irrational not to take the AI
| route. And that is the real problem: I cannot simply turn off my
| pragmatism."_
|
| Now this link of hard work with his identity is becoming a
| problem. He's going to feel bad because he doesn't know how to
| deal with his life being _easier_ now. This is a reason to
| address it head on with therapy, and a re-evaluation of what
| gives him value as a person, so that having an easier life doesn
| 't feel bad.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Maybe. But I don't have trauma that causes me to tie my self
| worth to physical exercise. Yet when I can get myself to
| actually do it, I feel better. I'm not sure deep thinking is
| that different.
| eggy wrote:
| I've been coding since the late 70s (Commodore PET 2001), and
| I've always paired it with real-world physical work--mechanical
| engineering, rigging, technical diving, hydraulics, welding,
| electronics, controls, you name it. Programming was just one of
| the tools, never the whole job. What I've learned is that the
| best thinking almost never happens staring at a screen. It
| happens when you're away from it: reading something deep,
| building something with your hands, debugging why the thing you
| designed doesn't work in reality. I love the updated saying:
| "Jack of all trades, master of none--but often better than a
| master of one." In a world obsessed with hyper-specialization,
| that range is a real advantage. What bothers me most is how
| quickly people--especially younger ones--now reach for a phone
| the second there's any friction. Forgotten a name? Phone. Stuck
| on a small logic puzzle? Phone. A group of engineers at the lunch
| table can't remember an actor and within seconds everyone's just
| silently googling instead of laughing and piecing it together
| from their collective memory. Where's the fun in that? Yeah, you
| get the answer instantly. But you skip the actual mental workout
| --and the fun of it. Remembering and reasoning are muscles. Use
| them or lose them. And honestly, the shared back-and-forth is
| usually the best part.
| bachittle wrote:
| The friction didn't disappear with AI tools. It just shifted.
| It's now more so about knowing when to trust an AI system versus
| when to dig into things yourself. The key insight is this: don't
| devalue learning things on your own. AI is a tool, but if the
| tool messes up, you need other tools in your toolbox. If you've
| only ever leaned on the AI, you're in trouble the moment it fails
| on something subtle.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| One of the best programmers I know is a self declared thinker
| that also is loving this new wave of agentic coding.
|
| What he told me is that he loves thinking about the design of the
| code in his head, picking the best piece for each part of "the
| machine" and assembling it design in his head.
|
| After doing that he loathed the act of translating that pure
| design into code. He told me it felt like pushing all that design
| through a thin tube through sheer force against syntax, wrong
| library versions, compiler errors, complex IDEs...
|
| So for him, this is the best scenario possible.
|
| I'm more a of a builder but after talking with him and reading
| the OP post maybe thinkers come in various shapes.
| Psillisp wrote:
| You can do all your thinking and minimal prompting.
|
| I know Ralphs like to do all the prompting and no thinking.
| eleveriven wrote:
| AI doesn't remove difficulty so much as it removes friction, and
| friction was often what forced me into deeper conceptual
| understanding. When the path of least resistance is always "ask
| the model", my brain never has to build the scaffolding it used
| to
| ge96 wrote:
| Last weekend, was struggling with traversing nested
| trees/recursion was funny. I did eventually solve it but probably
| shows my tier as a dev, not FAANG tier for sure.
| jkkramer wrote:
| Just yesterday I noticed I was mentally EXHAUSTED after building
| out a feature with Claude Code.
|
| I actually had to think really, really hard to keep up with the
| idiot savant as it cranked out code.
|
| Correctness was extremely important for this feature. Claude
| would consistently make subtle mistakes, and I needed to catch
| them to keep things from going off the rails. I could have done
| it myself, but it would have taken MUCH longer.
|
| I essentially compressed a week's worth of work into a few hours,
| and my brain paid the price.
|
| So yeah. You can use AI to replace your thinking, or you can use
| it to push yourself to your max potential.
| svieira wrote:
| So today are you doing it again? Or did you compress a week's
| worth of work into a few hours and the rest of the week is shot
| because _you_ don 't expand?
| throw876987696 wrote:
| My current workplace has a new mandate: All the new code must be
| 100% AI generated code by the end of Q1.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Best part is getting paid for that!
| justavo wrote:
| The closing quotation from Philipp Mainlander introduces a
| serious conceptual mismatch with the argument it is meant to
| reinforce.
|
| Mainlander's statement--"God has died and his death was the life
| of the world"--is not a metaphor for cultural decline, cognitive
| atrophy, or the loss of intellectual depth. It is a literal
| metaphysical claim. In Mainlander's philosophy, the Absolute
| unity of being actively annihilates itself, and the existence of
| the world is the irreversible consequence of that ontological
| self-destruction. The death he speaks of is not contingent,
| regrettable, or historically situated; it is necessary, total,
| and final. There is no nostalgia in Mainlander, no sense of loss
| that might have been avoided, and no implied call to recover what
| was lost. On the contrary, preservation, striving, depth, and
| effort are all expressions of the same will-to-be that Mainlander
| ultimately rejects.
|
| By contrast, the argument being made in the essay is explicitly
| contingent and experiential. It concerns a personal and cultural
| shift in how intellectual work is done: the replacement of
| prolonged cognitive struggle with tools that optimize for speed,
| efficiency, and "good enough" solutions. The author is not
| claiming that deep thinking had to die for progress to occur, nor
| that its disappearance is metaphysically necessary. Quite the
| opposite: the tone is one of regret, ambivalence, and unresolved
| tension. Something valuable has been eroded, perhaps
| unnecessarily, and the loss feels meaningful precisely because it
| might have been otherwise.
|
| This is where the quote fails. Mainlander's framework leaves no
| room for lament. If "God" dies in his system, that death is the
| very condition of possibility for everything that follows. To
| mourn it would be incoherent. Using this quote to frame a loss
| that is psychological, cultural, and potentially reversible
| imports an apocalyptic metaphysics that undermines the author's
| own point. It elevates a specific, historically situated concern
| into a cosmic necessity--and in doing so, distorts both.
|
| What the essay is really circling is not the death of an
| absolute, but the displacement of a mode of attention: slow,
| effortful, internally transformative thinking giving way to
| instrumental cognition. That intuition has a long and well-
| matched philosophical lineage, but it is not Mainlander's.
|
| Two examples of quotes that align far more precisely with what
| the author seems to want to express:
|
| 1. "The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking
| time is that we are still not thinking." --Martin Heidegger This
| captures exactly the concern at stake: not the impossibility of
| thought, but its quiet displacement by modes of engagement that
| no longer demand it.
|
| 2. "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
| --Simone Weil Here, the loss is not metaphysical annihilation but
| ethical and cognitive erosion--the fading of a demanding inner
| posture that once shaped understanding itself.
|
| Either of these frames the problem honestly: as a tension between
| convenience and depth, productivity and transformation, speed and
| understanding. Mainlander's quote, powerful as it is, belongs to
| a radically different conversation--one in which the value of
| effort, preservation, and even thinking itself has already been
| metaphysically written off.
|
| The quote sounds right because it is dramatic, but it means
| something far more extreme than what the author is actually
| claiming. The result is rhetorical force at the expense of
| conceptual fidelity.
| opem wrote:
| AI is a cheat that ruins the game
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Then work on hard problems in your free time. I've found myself
| clinging onto some fun ones after work lately, and I'm having fun
| building things in the weekends/evenings lately!
| steviedotboston wrote:
| Sometimes I miss thinking hard, but I also don't miss thinking
| really hard on a problem that seems difficult only to find out it
| was actually trivial and I was just looking at it the wrong way
| or overthinking it. We've all spent hours tracking down bugs that
| turned out to be silly syntax errors or spelling mistakes. It
| seems like that might be the trade off now.
| wtetzner wrote:
| On the other hand, those situations can be valuable learning
| experiences, and (even if subconscious) can help you learn to
| see things from more angles in the future.
|
| Unfortunately, predicting which situations are worth it and
| which aren't is as hard as predicting anything else...
| jammcq wrote:
| I've loved programming my whole life. Something happens inside my
| brain when I'm solving a problem. I think it's a release of
| endorphins or something that has a calming effect. When I was
| younger, it came easier. I used to be able to get "into the zone"
| and stay there for hours. Almost a constant stream of endorphins,
| almost a euphoria. Other things give me a similar feeling.
| Anything with numbers. I used to really love playing blackjack.
| Something about figuring out how to get to 21 just really did it
| for me. Or playing dominoes or other games that require me to
| solve something. I'm almost 65 now and it's just much more
| difficult to get there. I think I've been slow to adopt AI partly
| because I'm afraid it's going to take me further away from what
| I've loved. Friends tell me it's just a new tool to add to my
| toolbox. I'm giving it a try but I'm still skeptical.
| nphardon wrote:
| > It (Software Engineering) satisfied The Builder (feeling
| productive and pragmatic by creating useful things) and The
| Thinker (solving really hard problems).
|
| I think this is the issue, who associates really hard problems
| with Software Engineering? You should've stuck with Physics, or
| pivoted to Math (albeit you don't get so much of the physical
| building with pure math). You did Software Engineering because
| you like money, with a little bit of thinking. ;)
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| > I am currently writing much more, and more complicated software
| than ever, yet I feel I am not growing as an engineer at all.
|
| This sounds like approving bad/poor abstractions too prematurely
| and keep building on top of that.
|
| What about the satisfaction that comes not with struggling but
| from the calmness of an elegant functional model that dynamically
| covers all the flows and all the edge cases you could (deep and
| slowly [1]) think about?
|
| [1] maybe refining in different days, in the shower, after
| recovering breath in a hard set in a workout session, after a
| nap...
| softfalcon wrote:
| > My method was simply to think. To think hard and long... This
| method never failed me. I always felt that deep prolonged
| thinking was my superpower. I might not be as fast or naturally
| gifted as the top 1%, but given enough time, I was confident I
| could solve anything.
|
| This mindset is a healthy and good one. It is built on training
| yourself, learning, and practicing a discipline of problem
| solving without giving up.
|
| Persistence is something we build, not something we have. It must
| be maintained. Persistence is how most good in the world has been
| created.
|
| Genius is worthless without the will to see things through.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Just stop using AI, bro.
| zqna wrote:
| It's funny to think that all this discussion would not be
| happening if not for naive idealism embraced by software people
| fo decades, which enabled sharing everything they made after
| working hours for free and for everyone. That all it was hijacked
| by a handful of rich and not very altruistic people to enslave
| everyone comes as a big surprise. Who would have thought. I guess
| we arent that smart after all
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