[HN Gopher] Some things just take time
___________________________________________________________________
Some things just take time
Author : vaylian
Score : 434 points
Date : 2026-03-21 14:46 UTC (8 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (lucumr.pocoo.org)
| vaylian wrote:
| Speed is useful, when you have a good idea or a hypothesis you
| want to test. But if you are running in the wrong direction,
| speed is of very little value. With LLMs it might be even harder
| to stop and realize that you are creating the wrong thing,
| because you are not spending effort to create the wrong thing.
| binsquare wrote:
| I can relate to this, when time and effort of coding is a
| limiting factor it forces people to be more thoughtful about
| what to create.
| allenu wrote:
| > But if you are running in the wrong direction, speed is of
| very little value.
|
| I think of it differently. Speed is great because it means you
| can change direction very easily, and being wrong isn't as
| costly. As long as you're tracking where you're going, if you
| end up in the wrong place, but you got there quickly and
| noticed it, you can quickly move in a different direction to
| get to the right place.
|
| Sometimes we take time mostly because it's expensive to be
| wrong. If being wrong doesn't cost anything, going fast and
| being wrong a lot may actually be better as it lets you explore
| lots of options. For this strategy to work, however, you need
| good judgment to recognize when you've reached a wrong
| position.
| julenx wrote:
| I'm seeing this cultural pattern where developers have started
| accepting LLM output with very little scrutiny. This ends up
| code that works on the surface, but most of the times problems
| are not addressed at their source.
|
| Creating these wrong things is only cheaper with LLMs. Since
| developers now spend less time and effort to create that wrong
| thing, they don't feel the need validate or reflect on them so
| much.
|
| The risk is not the tool itself, but the over-reliance on it
| and forgoing feedback loops that have made teams stronger, e.g.
| debugging, testing, and reasoning why something works a
| particular way.
| Swizec wrote:
| > everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic
| tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall
| into a trap where we're immediately filling it with more things
|
| You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks.
|
| But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space
| for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills
| that void.
|
| Make sure you fit the rocks first.
| big-chungus4 wrote:
| You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you
| remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if
| you remove the fish, it will have less water than before.
|
| You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish
| in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first
| half, you will end up with more water.
| auggierose wrote:
| What?
| ghurtado wrote:
| Psilocybin?
|
| Not sure, I used to be better at diagnosing this type of
| episode.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I assume post used extreme example to demonstrate that
| wise-sounding metaphors may not have inherent point or
| value.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| They're talking about Archimedes' principle, displacement
| of water. The fish makes the water bottle overflow, so be
| careful when you add the fish so that it doesn't. It's a
| counter analogy to the rocks one above.
| spencerflem wrote:
| They're pointing out that if the jar was _filled_ with
| sand, then of course you can't fit any rocks in because
| it's full. It's cute but misunderstands the original
| metaphor I think.
| sritchie wrote:
| Hahah, I just have to reply and say I loved the original
| comment and was happy for the laugh. Obviously this is the
| answer to the riddle of
|
| > Given a 3-liter container and a 5-liter container, both
| initially empty, and access to tap water, how can you
| measure exactly 4 liters of water without using any
| additional containers
|
| I've offered and received some convoluted metaphors
| recently, love leaning hard into this one.
| ghurtado wrote:
| In a more advanced civilisation, you would be put in the
| pillory for the townsfolk to throw rotten cabbage at you
| until the Lord fixed whatever made you say that.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| you fill the 3 liter bottle up to the top, and pour the
| contents into the 5 liter bottle
|
| then you fill 3 liter bottle again, and pour the contents
| into the 5 liter bottle until the 5 liter one is full
|
| empty the 5 liter bottle, and pour the 1 liter in the 3 liter
| bottle into the 5 liter bottle
|
| fill the 3 liter bottle again and pour that into the 1 liter
| already in the 5 liter bottle to get 4 liters of water
| wiml wrote:
| Then you bring the fox back, take the hen across the river,
| ...
| hedayet wrote:
| > You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, [some
| water overflows], you remove half of water...
|
| That water overflow step is missing / implicit. But that's an
| observable event.
| otterley wrote:
| You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out, you
| put your right foot in, and you shake it all about.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| The point of the metaphor is not to say "spending time is
| mechanically similar to putting things in a container". It is
| to look at spending time from a new angle, and see if it
| helps you understand it better. A wise person sees a metaphor
| as a launching point for thought, not as an expression of a
| metaphysical connection.
|
| Yes, there are bad metaphors, and people who take metaphors
| too seriously. That you can conjure a bad metaphor with
| somewhat similar to semantics to some other metaphor does not
| mean that said metaphor is bad.
| hk__2 wrote:
| You write a metaphore in a comment, you remove half of it,
| you add another one in the middle, you add the half of the
| first one, and... nobody understands anything.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| If that ain't the secret to solving an np complete problem I
| don't know what is!
| d0liver wrote:
| I think that's kind of the point though: AI is the sand, but
| it's the rocks that hold all of the value; the further you get
| away from using AI the more real value you obtain. Like, a few
| of the rocks have gold deposits in them, and the sand is just
| infinitely copious but never holds anything valuable. And
| you've got a bunch of people running around saying, "Behold my
| mountains of sand!"
| titanomachy wrote:
| > We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermes bags and old
| properties precisely because of the time embedded in them
|
| Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because
| they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long
| time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the
| sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to
| zero.
| simonw wrote:
| I would say that wearing a sweater knitted by one's grandmother
| is its own kind of status symbol. I'm more impressed by that
| (someone having a grandmother willing to invest that much
| effort in a gift for them) than someone spending $1000 on an
| item of clothing.
|
| The fact that those items took a long time to make is part of
| what makes them status symbols though, because if you pay a lot
| of money for something that took no time to make at all (see
| most NFTs) you look like an idiot to a lot of people.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I like the sweater, and some people like you might recognize
| it as special, but it doesn't have the universal cachet of a
| Rolex or something. It's also a bit chunky and funny-looking
| (but I guess so are some Rolexes).
| daveguy wrote:
| "universal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > status symbol.
|
| This sort of thing was done at a time when everybody did it,
| and now that it's not done, nobody does it
|
| No kid ever said "did you see the sweater that Timmy's
| grandma knitted for him? That kid is so cool! "
|
| Mostly because they all had grams sweaters as well.
|
| I don't know what term you were looking for, but a handmade
| present for someone dear is about the furthest thing from a
| "status symbol" that I can think of:
|
| - it can't be bought
|
| - it can't be transferred without losing almost all value
| (ie: it's only valuable to you, or at most your family, eBay
| doesn't want it)
|
| - it provides no improvement whatsoever in one's social
| standing
| simonw wrote:
| I don't care about the opinion of kids.
|
| I'm also completely unimpressed by someone wearing a Rolex
| though, so different mileage for different people.
| ghurtado wrote:
| You should be able to understand the definition of a
| common term such as "status symbol" though.
|
| Understanding words does not require being impressed by
| anything, nor caring about the opinion of kids.
| daveguy wrote:
| If most people are thinking "whoopdedoo... you clearly
| have more money than sense" when they see your status
| symbol, is it still a status symbol?
| Avicebron wrote:
| It depends, if someone fundamentally believes that having
| more money than someone else means that person is of
| higher status, then it is.
|
| If people don't consider that someone with more money is
| of a higher status then symbols of that wealth aren't
| meaningful.
|
| I think a lot of people have an ingrained belief that
| "more money == more status"
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Status symbols signal different status in different
| contexts. Some contexts (mostly lower middle class and
| below) are impressed by Rolex watches because they are
| expensive and the struggle for money forms a collective
| experience.
|
| The old rich doesn't give a shit about Rolex watches
| beyond noticing the newb rich using them to tell on
| themselves.
| daveguy wrote:
| And some people just don't give a shit about a fancy
| watch no matter how much money they have or don't have.
| simonw wrote:
| Different mileage for different people.
| NiloCK wrote:
| What are you referring to with the phrase "status symbol"?
|
| I can't connect it at all to your listed points. An Olympic
| medal is about obvious a status symbol as I can imagine but
| it can't (meaningfully) be bought or transferred.
|
| The status signified with a knit sweater is membership (and
| good standing!) in a caring family with elders not yet
| fully subsumed into their phones.
|
| People, acquaintances and strangers alike, frequently
| comment on the knit socks I often wear, ask after who made
| them, and all of a sudden we're on "how's your mom" terms.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > it can't (meaningfully) be bought or transferred.
|
| https://www.ebay.com/b/Olympic-
| Medal/27291/bn_55191416?_sop=...
|
| > People, acquaintances and strangers alike, frequently
| comment on the knit socks I often wear,
|
| Ok, that explains pretty much everything about your line
| of thought.
|
| Thanks.
| NiloCK wrote:
| (edited for clarity)
|
| > https://www.ebay.com/b/Olympic-
| Medal/27291/bn_55191416?_sop=...
|
| Of course you can buy an Olympic medal. You can't buy the
| _status_ conferred by the medal (of Olympic champion /
| nth runner up).
|
| > Ok, that explains pretty much everything about your
| line of thought.
|
| I don't understand this either. Are you insulting me?
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| Buying someone else's medal is not a status symbol. That
| is why they included the word meaningfully.
| cineticdaffodil wrote:
| To be worthy that much time is the statussymbol of love. Its
| a rare thing, money can't buy. Somebody gifts part of his
| finite time on the planet to you bundled in an artifact.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe the analogy was wrong but more and more, I believe that
| some of a value was implicitly about how many organs/industries
| did it touch.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yes, Veblen goods, and there are examples of cloning Hermes
| bags for example (still by hand) where they're much cheaper yet
| took the same amount of time to create.
|
| https://youtu.be/02CjWIkTy-M
| airstrike wrote:
| Reads like a feel good article to signal virtue and feel
| validated in the wake of the Delve scandal. But ultimately
| obvious, opportunistic, and mid.
| doe88 wrote:
| I feel you, I guess i succeeded in not being lost and keep
| reading by solving the conendrum in telling myself: it
| certainly should take time to grow the cows for the bags.
| Nonetheless I'm glad i finished reading it, it was a good
| essay.
| cambrianentropy wrote:
| I clicked the back button exactly when I got to that line haha.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It would be more accurate to say "we value these things
| highly". Most people don't give a damn about your sweater, but
| it's probably _extremely_ valuable to you precisely because of
| the time your grandmother put into it.
| vessenes wrote:
| The point of the essay is good. You called out exactly my
| reaction; we value those things because of the marketing
| dollars that went in to them. As a wealthy friend from Geneva
| said to me once, "Look around this dinner party - the Swiss
| here have either an Apple watch or nothing on their wrist."
| Swiss watches are an export good, and Hermes is a luxury brand.
| Both of generally good quality. And much, much better
| marketing.
| andyhedges wrote:
| > We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking
| because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience.
|
| Not true, we do this because the 99% of the time it's true,
| however there are people who would be perfectly competent and
| responsible to drive without living to the age of 16-18. Same
| with voting, there are humans who have a deep understanding and
| intelligence about politics at a younger age than suffrage.
| Equally there are people who will be reckless drivers at 40 and
| vote on whim at 60.
|
| We have these rules not because sophistication only comes through
| lived experience, we have them because it's strongly correlated
| and covers of most error cases.
|
| To take this to AI, run the model enough times with a higher
| enough temperature, then perhaps it can solve your challenges
| with a high enough quality - just a thought.
| abnry wrote:
| The guiding analogy of the piece is that of planting a tree and
| waiting for it to mature.
|
| The reason we need to wait is that it takes time for some
| things to mature.
| andyhedges wrote:
| Yes, I'm saying it's not a good analogy
| dminor wrote:
| On the contrary, you can solve the tree problem with money. There
| are nurseries that sell mature trees -- most people though will
| not choose to spend $20k on a tree.
| hshsiejensjsj wrote:
| This is nitpicking his point.
|
| But anyhow, you can buy large-ish burlapped trees but they
| aren't as healthy, often die, and nothing close to a 100+ yr
| old estate oak tree or a decades old rose garden. You just
| can't make it faster, transplanting plants that old will kill
| them.
| dminor wrote:
| You're moving the goalposts on his poor analogy :)
|
| Most of the trees do just fine, and these nurseries will
| typically provide a warranty.
| johnthedebs wrote:
| Besides nitpicking, even your original point isn't even
| true. You cannot transplant a 100 year old tree (which has
| not been constrained in size dramatically) and expect it to
| survive for any reasonable length of time.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| > everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic
| tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall
| into a trap where we're immediately filling it with more things
|
| I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or
| if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more
| projects and burn ourselves out?
| agumonkey wrote:
| A blend of both. You do create more, but the goalposts are
| always one more step away.
|
| ps: it's strange that YouTubers are talking about the same
| thing. People in different dev circles. Agentic feels like doom
| ide scroll.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Sounds similar to a slot machine. How odd...
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone
| up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on
| more projects and burn ourselves out?
|
| It definitely hasn't for me. I spent about an hour today trying
| to use AI to write something fairly simple and I'm still no
| further forward.
|
| I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in
| software development.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in
| software development.
|
| When Russians invaded Germany during WWII, some of them (who
| had never seen a toilet) thought that toilets were advanced
| potato washing machines, and were rightfully pissed when
| their potatoes were flushed away and didn't come back.
|
| Sounds like you're feeling a similar frustration with your
| problem.
| lawn wrote:
| Russians invading Ukraine had some, let's say interesting,
| reactions to modernities like toilets and washing machines
| ghurtado wrote:
| Which begs the question: how many of those Russians
| stealing the appliances also took a potato washer or two?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| I don't really see where that comparison is relevant.
|
| Why is AI supposed to be good?
| Philpax wrote:
| Apologies for the obligatory question, but what did you try
| to do, and with which AI did you try to do it with?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Well following advice from folk on here earlier, I thought
| I'd start small and try to get it to write some code in Go
| that would listen on a network socket, wait for a packet
| with a bunch of messages (in a known format) come in, and
| split those messages out from the packet.
|
| I ended up having to type hundreds of lines of description
| to get thousands of lines of code that doesn't actually
| work, when the one I wrote myself is about two dozen lines
| of code and works perfectly.
|
| It just seems such a slow and inefficient way to work.
| timacles wrote:
| Hate to pull the skill issue card here, but that is a
| trivial problem that can be one shotted with almost any
| model with
| smj-edison wrote:
| tbh that's not a helpful thing to say. I think a more
| productive thing would be to ask "What model are you
| using?" "Are you using it in chat mode or as a dedicated
| agent?" "Do you have an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md?"
|
| I've also been underwhelmed with its ability to iterate,
| as it tends to pile on hacks. So another useful question
| is "did you try having it write again with what you/it
| learned?"
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > I think a more productive thing would be to ask "What
| model are you using?" "Are you using it in chat mode or
| as a dedicated agent?" "Do you have an AGENTS.md or
| CLAUDE.md?"
|
| In my case I'd have to say "Don't know, whatever VS
| Code's bot uses", and "no idea what those are or why I
| have to care".
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Okay, tell you what then. Help me learn.
|
| The problem is that I want something that listens on a
| TCP connection for GD92 packets, and when they arrive
| send appropriate handshaking to the other end and parse
| them into Go structs that can be stuffed into a channel
| to be dealt with elsewhere.
|
| And, of course, something to encode them and send them
| again.
|
| How would I do that with whatever AI you choose?
|
| I'm pretty certain you can't solve this with AI because
| there is literally no published example of code to do it
| that it can copy from.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up
|
| Here's the thing: we never had a remotely sane way to measure
| productivity of a software engineer for reasons that we all
| understand, and we don't have it now.
|
| Even if we had it, it's not the sort of thing that management
| would even use: they decide how productive you are based on
| completely unrelated criteria, like willingness to work long
| hours and keeping your mouth shut when you disagree.
|
| If you ask those types whether productivity has gone up with
| AI, they'll probably say something like "of course, we were
| able to let go a third of our programmers and nothing really
| seems to have changed"
|
| "Productivity" became a poisoned word the moment that the suits
| realized what a useful weapon it was, and that it was
| impossible to challenge.
| timacles wrote:
| What society and America is about to realize is that it really
| doesn't matter how productive you are at software and
| technological innovations when systemic things outside of the
| economic system are eroding.
|
| It doesn't matter how fast we can make our widgets and chatbots
| when what you need is to have a self sufficient workforce. We
| have outsourced everything material and valuable for society.
| Now we are left with industries of gambling, ad machines and
| pharmaceuticals with a government that is functionally bankrupt
| and politicians that have completely sold out
| lapcat wrote:
| > I'm also increasingly skeptical of anyone who sells me
| something that supposedly saves my time.
|
| Imagine a world in which the promise of AI was that workers could
| keep their jobs, at the same compensation as before, but work
| fewer hours and days per week due to increased productivity.
|
| What could you do with those extra hours and days? Sleep better.
| Exercise more. Prepare healthy meals. Spend more time with family
| and friends. The benefits to physical and mental well-being are
| priceless. Even if you happened to earn extra money for the same
| amount of work, your time can be infinitely more valuable than
| money.
|
| Unfortunately, that's not this world. Which is why the "increased
| productivity" promise doesn't seem to benefit workers at all.
|
| If you look at the technological utopias that people imagined 50,
| 60+ years ago, they involved lives of leisure. If you would have
| told them that advances in technology would not reduce our
| working hours at all, maybe they would have started smashing the
| machines back then. Now we're supposed to be happy with more
| "stuff", even if there's no more time to enjoy stuff.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _We know this intuitively. We pay premiums for Swiss watches,
| Hermes bags and old properties precisely because of the time
| embedded in them. Either because of the time it took to build
| them or because of their age._
|
| Oh, I thought it was because they're a way to show off about
| being rich.
|
| > _We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking
| because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience._
|
| Even if she could reach the pedals, my 4yo doesn't have the
| attention span to drive. This isn't a "lived experience" thing,
| it's a physical brain development thing. IIRC the are effects
| with learning math, where starting earlier had limited impact on
| being able to move to certain more advanced topics earlier; ie
| there's more going on than just hours of experience.
|
| The standard age for voting is also the age for being a legal
| adult. There are sound logical reasons that these ages should
| match.
|
| The standard drinking age is due to pressure by activists, and
| AIUI is lower in other countries.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| > Oh, I thought it was because they're a way to show off about
| being rich.
|
| Maybe for some. I think these examples were carefully chosen.
| Hermes are made in France, "Swiss watch" doesn't automatically
| mean Rolex, though in that case Rolex does own most of their
| manufacturing (though there is a whole world of carefully made
| watches out there that don't cost 10K). As for old
| properties... there is a huge range there, but unless you are
| living in a castle, most people, at least my city, are likely
| silently thinking: "I'm so sorry for them that they have to
| live in that old house."
| cdevries wrote:
| https://simplytrees.com/
| sledgehammers wrote:
| Also you know, for programmers, say a 3 day work week is right
| there up for grabs. Even still employers would see big
| productivity increases.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Programmers no longer have any leverage now they can all be
| replaced by machines. It doesn't matter how productive you are,
| the system will always demand more.
| OtomotO wrote:
| This hype too will pass. It's always ebb and flood...
| hedayet wrote:
| you know what most of us end up doing on those other days? we
| start side tech projects that require even more effort for even
| little return.
|
| You can't trust us with self-care. There's just too many shiny
| toys out there!
| mrknmc wrote:
| Speak for yourself!
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| "The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much
| by the possessor, and often without any attention to the
| imperfection of the performance."
| alexpotato wrote:
| I've been working on a clone of Sid Meier's Pirates but with a
| princess theme (for my daughters).
|
| I've been using AI to help me write it and I've come to a couple
| conclusions:
|
| - AI can make working PoCs incredibly quickly
|
| - It can even help me think of story lines, decision paths etc
|
| - Given that, there is still a TON of decisions to be made e.g.
| what artwork to use, what makes sense from a story perspective
|
| - Playtesting alone + iterating still occurs at human speed b/c
| if humans are the intended audience, getting their opinions takes
| human time, not computer time
|
| I've started using this example more and more as it highlights
| that, yes, AI can save huge amounts of time. However, as we
| learned from the Theory of Constraints, there is always another
| bottleneck somewhere that will slow things down.
| simonw wrote:
| I've tried a few game projects with coding agents - having
| never worked on a game before in my life - and the main thing I
| learned is that the hard part is designing it to be _fun_.
|
| Coming up with a genuinely interesting gameplay loop with
| increasing difficulty levels and progressively revealed
| gameplay mechanics is a fascinating and extremely difficult
| challenge, no matter how much AI you throw at the problem.
| potro wrote:
| I have very similar experience. I vibecoded a foreign language
| practice app for myself. It works decent from functional
| perspective and I don't see too many bugs. But the biggest
| productivity constraint I see is the time I need to spend using
| it in order to understand what is working and where the issues
| are.
| ozim wrote:
| My newest joke is:
|
| ,,I was able to vibecode those 5 apps I always wanted but
| never had time to code them myself ... it is so different now
| because -- I don't have time to use them".
| zzleeper wrote:
| LMK if you finish it, sounds like something my daughter would
| enjoy!
| thn-gap wrote:
| I work at FAANG, and leadership is successfully pushing the urge
| for speed by stablishing the new productivity expectations, and
| everyone is rushing as much as they can, as the productivity gain
| doesn't really match the expectations, and people overwork to
| make up for this difference. This works very well with internal
| competition and a quota system for performance ratings, with some
| extra fear due to the bad job market.
|
| I feel this new world sucks. We have new technology that boosts
| the productivity of the individual engineer, and we could be
| doing MUCH better work, instead of just rushed slop to meet
| quotas.
|
| I feel I'm just building my replacement, to bring the next level
| of profits to the c-suite. I just wish I wasn't burning out while
| doing so.
| an0malous wrote:
| I've noticed this dynamic acutely working at YC startups the
| last 5ish years. Coding has become like a sweatshop.
|
| I don't think it's exclusive to startups or tech either, it
| seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact that
| there's no real innovation anymore. Capitalism demands constant
| growth, and when there are real technological improvements you
| can achieve that growth through higher productivity. If there
| are none, you have to achieve that growth through other means
| like forcing employees to work longer or cutting costs. The
| alpha is all coming from squeezing the labor force right now.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| > it seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact
| that there's no real innovation anymore
|
| This doesn't sound right to me. We are currently getting
| smacked upside the head by an enormous technological
| innovation. I believe that, even within the framework of
| capitalism, this problem has social and political roots. The
| "robber baron" period late 19th century America has strong
| similarities to what we are seeing today, and technological
| stagnation was not the cause.
| Chris_Newton wrote:
| With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often
| seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased
| speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also
| heading in the right direction. If we're far enough off course,
| increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking
| longer to get where we want to be.
|
| I've been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all
| of both the good and the bad that I hear about LLM-based coding
| tools. Using AI for research or to spin up a quick demo or
| prototype is using it to help plot a course. A lot of the multi-
| stage agentic workflows also come down to creating guard rails
| before doing the main implementation so the AI can't get too far
| off track. Most of the success stories I hear seem to be in these
| areas so far. Meanwhile, probably the most common criticism I see
| is that an AI that is simply given a prompt to implement some new
| feature or bug fix for an existing system often misunderstands or
| makes bad assumptions and ends up repeatedly running into dead
| ends. It moves fast but without knowing which direction to move
| in.
| skydhash wrote:
| > It moves fast but without knowing which direction to move in.
|
| It also moves fast with a tendency to pick the wrong direction
| (according to the goal of the prompter) at every decision point
| (known or unknown).
| tombert wrote:
| I've definitely gotten it into contexts where it will never
| stop going into the wrong direction, even when I tell it to
| forget everything it did before, and told it a correct path
| forward. Usually restarting the entire session fixes it, but
| not always.
| FrankRay78 wrote:
| Shrewd context management is the go here.
| gopalv wrote:
| > Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we
| are also heading in the right direction.
|
| This is a real problem when the "direction" == "good feedback"
| from a customer standpoint.
|
| Before we had a product person for every ~20 people generating
| code and now we're all product people, the machines are writing
| the code (not all of it, but enough of it that I will -1 a
| ~4000 line PR and ask someone to start over, instead of digging
| out of the hole in the same PR).
|
| Feedback takes time on the system by real users to come back to
| the product team.
|
| You need a PID like smoothing curve over your feature changes.
|
| Like you said, Speed isn't velocity.
|
| Specifically if you have a decent experiment framework to keep
| this disclosure progressive in the customer base, going the
| wrong direction isn't a huge penalty as it used to be.
|
| I liked the PostHog newsletter about the "Hidden dangers of
| shipping fast", I can't find a good direct link to it.
| Ezra wrote:
| This is the article you referred to:
|
| https://newsletter.posthog.com/p/the-hidden-danger-of-
| shippi...
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Thanks! Great link.
| nabbed wrote:
| >Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we
| are also heading in the right direction.
|
| I suppose there is an argument that if you _are_ building the
| wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more
| quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate
| more quickly.
| roughly wrote:
| It's still faster and cheaper to just build the right thing
| to begin with. As the old saying goes, spend your time
| sharpening your ax.
| mgfist wrote:
| Yes, but only if you have an ax to sharpen. With a lot of
| things it takes trial and error to make progress. You can
| take this pretty up high too - sometimes it takes building
| multiple products or companies to get it right
| Jare wrote:
| > With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make
| progress
|
| Way too often that is used as an excuse for various forms
| of laziness; to not think about the things you can
| already know. And that lack of thinking repeats in an
| endless cycle when, after your trial and error, you don't
| use what you learned because "let's look forward not
| backward", "let's fail fast and often" and similar
| platitudes.
|
| Catchy slogans and heartfelt desires are great but you
| gotta put the brains in it too.
| overfeed wrote:
| > I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the
| wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more
| quickly that you built the wrong thing,
|
| A lot of people are so enamored by speed, they are not even
| taking the time to carefully consider the full picture of
| what they are building. Take the HN frontpage story on
| OpenCode: IIRC, a maintainer admitted they keep adding many
| shallow features that are brittle.
|
| Speed cannot replace product vision and discipline.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The outcome of that approach depends entirely on the broader
| process. Imagine golf but you refuse to swing with anything
| less than maximum strength to avoid wasting time.
|
| Discovery is great and all but if what you discover is that
| you didn't aim well to begin with that's not all that useful.
| siddboots wrote:
| I've been working on a side project for ~10 years (very
| intermittently) that involves a tricky combination of
| mathematics, classical AI algorithms, and programming language
| design, and I've gone though this very slow but rewarding
| journey to work out how all of the pieces should fit together
| properly.
|
| In the last year or so I've been able to prototype it and
| accelerate the development quite significantly using Claude and
| pals, and now it is very close to a finished product. One one
| hand there's no doubt in my mind that the LLM tools can make
| this sort of thing faster and let you churn through ideas until
| you find the right ones, but on the other hand, if I hadn't had
| that slow burn of mostly just thinking about it conceptually
| for 10 years, I would have ended up vibe coding a much worse
| product.
| TheJord wrote:
| 10 years of thinking before shipping is actually the move.
| The AI just becomes a power tool -- useless if you don't know
| what you're building, unstoppable if you do
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Ah, metaphors. Abstract concepts are not moving objects. You
| don't actually need to "turn it around" or "sail past it". You
| can break the laws of physics (because they don't apply). You
| can teleport around.
|
| Speed actually just wins, because we are usually constrained by
| time.
| 3121aksj8p wrote:
| Yes, AI can emit BS at a faster rate than ever. We can also
| produce more blog posts than ever.
|
| Working or useful software? AI hasn't produced any at all
| since 2023.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Wow, an account, just for that? I feel honored and slightly
| suspicious.
| jsisto wrote:
| great article. reminds me of the saying "9 women can't make a
| baby in a month"
| felubra wrote:
| "So welcome to the machine"
|
| I'm reading Against The Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, and now
| reading this blog piece is hard not to make connections with the
| points of the book: the usage of the tree as a counter-argument
| for the machine's automation credo exposed in the blog post very
| much aligns with I've read so far.
| wazHFsRy wrote:
| Sounds familiar, for most of my life I have tried to remove all
| "friction" from life - applying that engineering mindset to make
| everything as efficient as possible. Only then I realized that
| life somehow is about that "friction".
| tablet wrote:
| Indeed. Without friction you can't steer.
| ghywertelling wrote:
| All of our current systems are currently designed keeping in
| mind the restrictions of costs and human working speed. What if
| we remove those friction using software, The remaning friction
| will be all due to physical reality. Then humanity's focus will
| shift in removing friction in physical domain. Currently it
| takes some time for a support person to triage a bug request,
| what if that flow takes seconds now.
|
| Think about the analogy of transaction speed of money transfer
| vs actual delivery of good. With AI, we would make all digital
| tasks instantaneous, but the physical world will hum along at
| its own speed unless we speed it up with dark factories and
| what not.
| jspaetzel wrote:
| Was hoping this wasn't ai related, disappointed
| svessi wrote:
| I'm also searching for non-AI content these days. Have you
| found anything since your comment?
| gz5 wrote:
| >Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak. And nobody is
| going to conjure trust, or quality, or community out of a weekend
| sprint.
|
| absolutely although i wonder how different 'trust' is in the
| culture of tomorrow? will it 'matter' as much, be as cherished,
| as earned over the fullness of time?
|
| i suspect it is a pendulum - and we are back to oak trees at some
| point - but which way is the pendulum swinging right now?
| fullstackchris wrote:
| I don't see the problem - everything the author describes has,
| and will always be, true. You can't vibe code anything of value
| in a weekend exactly because anyone _else_ with the same level of
| experience can do the exact same thing in the same weekend! This
| has always been true across all trades and technologies. Once
| again, the domain expertise, wisdom, and simply _time_ of doing
| something always win. LLMs literally don't change that at all.
| bushido wrote:
| I feel for the larger companies and the people who started 10
| years ago, though.
|
| They have spent the last decade building processes and guardrails
| for getting consistent average performance from people. But now,
| some talented people who worked at those companies are building
| their own new companies without the overhead and moving much,
| much more quickly.
|
| I think what we assume is "vibe slop at inference speed" is not
| as simple as people make it out to be. From a perspective, I
| think generally it might be people trying to save jobs.
|
| I'm seeing more slop come out of larger, older companies than the
| new ones (with experienced operators).
|
| And the speed is somewhat scary. For smaller team it doesn't take
| as much effort to build deep, beautiful product anymore.
|
| The bottleneck was never the ability for a engineer to code. It
| was the 16 layers between the customer and the programmer which
| has vanished in smaller companies and is forcing larger ones to
| produce slop.
| locusofself wrote:
| I love this, and it applies to a lot more than software and trees
| :)
| andwaal wrote:
| I think it's hard to argue with the idea that we should slow down
| and think more, and that AI is pushing us to do the opposite. But
| time is limited, it's very limited. And at least in a
| professional setting, to spend time on the correct things is key.
|
| What AI allow us is to do those things we would not have been
| able to prioritize before. To "write" those extra tests, add that
| minor feature or to solve that decade old bug. Things that we
| would never been able to prioritize are we noe able to do. It's
| not perfect, it's sometimes sloppy, but at least its getting shit
| done. It does not matter if you solve 10% of your problem perfect
| if you never have time for the remaining 90.
|
| I do miss the coding, _a lot_, but productivity is a drug and I
| will take it.
| w10-1 wrote:
| What's faster now are the time-dependent factors of production -
| product development, go-to market, etc.
|
| What's slower now are threats to production - even minor
| regulations take years or decades, and often appear only when
| workarounds have surfaced.
|
| So what changed in the last 40+ years are the many tools for
| businesses to shape the conditions of their business -the
| downstream market, upstream suppliers, and regulatory
| support/constraints. This is extremely patient work over
| generations of players, sometimes by individuals, but usually by
| coalitions of mutual corporate self-interest, where even the
| largest players couldn't refuse to participate.
|
| It's evolution.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I've been hearing similar things from a lot of different
| directions. The underlying issue about "you cannot replace time"
| is one that is good to internalize early. A number of people I
| know who "missed" their kids growing up because they were working
| hard to make lots of money. You can't go buy "time with my kids
| when they were growing up."
|
| Agentic coding very much feels like a "video game" in the sense
| of you pull the lever and open the loot box and sometimes it's an
| epic +10 agility sword and sometimes its just grey vendor trash.
| Whether or not it generates "good" or even "usable" code fades to
| the background as the thrill of "I just asked for a UI to
| orchestrate micro services and BLAMMO there it was!" moves to the
| fore.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I think the signals that
| we use to determine whether we're doing the right things are
| different with the new AI enhanced toolsets.
|
| Refactoring decent sized components are an order of magnitude
| easier than it was, but the more important signal is still, why
| are you refactoring? What changed in your world or your world-
| view that caused this?
|
| Good things still take time, and you can't slop-AI code your way
| to a great system. You still need domain expertise (as the
| EXCELLENT short story from the other day explained, Warranty Void
| if Regenerated (https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-
| regenerated) ). The decrease in friction does definitely allow
| for more slop, but it also allows for more excellence. It just
| doesn't _guarantee_ excellence.
| whateveracct wrote:
| lots of things take days, not hours. And idt AI changes that
| much. It does let you (or - let's be real - your middle
| management) try to make it happen with hours tho :P
| bytefish wrote:
| As for the tree analogy and open source.
|
| Yes, you cannot build years of community and trust in a weekend.
| But sometimes it's totally sufficient to plant a seed, give it
| some small amounts of water and leave it on its own to grow. Go
| ask my father having to deal with a huge maple tree, that I've
| planted 30 years ago and never cared for it.
|
| Open Source projects sometimes work like this. I've created a
| .NET library for Firebase Messaging in a weekend a few years
| ago... and it grew on its own with PRs flowing in. So if your
| weekend project generates enough interest and continues to grow a
| community without you, what's the bad thing here? I don't get it.
|
| Sometimes a tree dies and an Open Source project wasn't able to
| make it.
|
| That said, I've just finished rewriting four libraries to fix
| long standing issues, that I haven't been able to fix for the
| past 10 years.
|
| It's been great to use Gemini as a sparring partner to fix the
| API surface of these libraries, that had been problematic for the
| past 10 years. I was so quick to validate and invalidate ideas.
|
| Once being one of the biggest LLM haters I have to say, that I
| immensely enjoy it right now.
| imilev wrote:
| Awesome article, I feel a lot of people have also forgotten that
| good projects take iteration not 100 new features. To get few
| features to an excelent state it requires multilpe iterations at
| multiple stages. 1) The developer who does a task validates that
| their thinking was the correct one, they see how they changes
| impact the system, is it scalable? Does it need to be scalable?
| While you are working and thinking on it you get more and more
| context which simply wasn't there at the begining. 2) A feature
| done once (even after my perfect ClaudeCode plan) is not done
| forever, people will want to make it better/faster/smoother/etc.
| But instead of taking the time to analyze and perfect it we go
| onto the next feature, and if we have to iterate on the current
| one, we don't iterate we redo...
|
| Really like the article I think it is awesome, and I strongly
| believe AI for coding will stay, but I also beleive that we need
| to still have a strong understanding of why we are building
| things and what they look like.
| scuff3d wrote:
| We're gonna have to learn some lessons from other engineering
| fields in this regard. Electrical, civil, mechanical,
| aerospace... They've all had to put processes in place to
| intentionally slow things down for a long time. I could throw a
| circuit board layout together 1000x faster then a team of
| engineers could have 50 years ago, but that industry has
| developed a culture of rigorous review processes to ensure
| quality, which means I couldn't actually move nearly as fast as
| possible.
|
| Undoubtedly a lot of that comes down to production cost and
| safety. A plane is far more likely to kill people and it costs a
| shitload more to produce then an app (though plenty of software
| is mission critical). But now in software we can move quick
| enough up front that if we don't start applying some discipline
| it's going to bite us in the ass in the long run.
| keiferski wrote:
| One of my favorite ideas from Nietzsche [1] is that civilizations
| take millennia to "digest" or integrate concepts. It seems a
| little obvious, maybe, until you look at the modern world and
| realize the baseline assumption is something like, "every problem
| is just a question of resources."
|
| An example being the common attitude that [advanced tech] is just
| a math problem to be solved, and not a process that needs to play
| itself out in the real world, interacting with it and learning,
| then integrating those lessons over time.
|
| Another way to put this is: experience is undervalued, and
| knowledge is overvalued. Probably because experience isn't
| fungible and therefore cannot be quantified as easily by market
| systems.
|
| 1. Probably not his original idea, and now that I think about it
| this is kind of more Hegelian. I'm not familiar enough with Hegel
| to reference him though.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I have no problem with people treating advanced tech like a
| math problem. I have a _big goddamned problem_ with the tech
| world seeing things like creativity, expression, exploration,
| imagination, experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun,
| beauty, inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a
| goddamned math problem to be solved. It's just so sad and most
| people resent it being shoved down their throats by tech
| companies abusing their societal leverage.
| loandbehold wrote:
| Knowledge is a distilled experience.
| iafiaf wrote:
| shouldnt it be the other way around?
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| We value human ingenuity and effort. If there was a button
| "create an Oscar-worty movie" anyone could press it would make a
| paradox. The trick is that this won't render film industry
| useless, since we watch movies only when we believe they're worth
| our time, which is not true for zero-effort content.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Isn't it only of late that the Oscars panel have to watch the
| films?
| fuzzy_biscuit wrote:
| Some of the items listed in the "takes time" list say the
| beginning are not great examples. They are better emblems of
| artificial scarcity, especially Hermes bags.
| bambax wrote:
| > _Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago
| planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land,
| you have something that no amount of money or effort can
| replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old
| gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to
| start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that._
|
| This is a bad start. Louis XIV at Versailles and Marly famously
| made while forests appear or disappear overnight, to the utter
| dismay of Saint-Simon, the memorialist, who thought this was an
| unacceptable waste of money and energy.
|
| And this was before the industrial revolution. Today I'm sure
| many more miracles happen every day.
| aantix wrote:
| Everyone is obsessed with speed.
|
| But no one wants to go out of their house.
|
| Social connections. Trust. Facetime. All matter more than ever.
|
| Want a moatable software business? Know your customers on a
| personal level. Have a personal relationship. Know the people
| that sign the contracts, know their kids names, where they
| vacationed last winter, their favorite local restaurant.
|
| Get out of the house.
| ICodeSometimes wrote:
| It's worth noting that just because something takes time doesn't
| mean it's automatically worth doing.
|
| Vibe slop-ing at supersonic speeds and waiting years to grow
| aren't the only options, there's something in between where you
| have enough signal to keep going and enough speed to not waste
| years on the wrong thing.
|
| I feel that today's VCs have completely disregarded the middle
| and are focused on getting as big as possible as fast as possible
| without regard to the effect it's having on the ecosystem.
| mocamoca wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 what Earandil purpose is?
| mayukh wrote:
| Go slow to go fast.
| Lerc wrote:
| Is this not an observation bias?
|
| Consider the idea of trying to determine how quickly an unknown
| number of timers will go ping, It could be 10,000 timers that go
| ping when finished or 1,000,000 timers that go ping when
| finished. I don't know when they are going to go ping, just that
| they all the timers are running at different speeds spread over
| some distribution.
|
| After one time period, 5,000 pings have been detected. Should you
| conclude that timers are pinging fairly quickly?
|
| You cannot tell the overall duration of timers if you don't know
| the number of timers there are out there. Your only data that the
| timer exists is the ping, consequently you cannot tell if a small
| population is at high speed or a large population is at a
| moderate speed. In both cases the data you receive are the
| fastest of the population.
|
| In other words we haven't yet seen what the 10 year project made
| using these tools is like (or even if it exists/will exist),
| because they haven't been around for 10 years.
| erelong wrote:
| yes, we want to avoid counterproductive things that are done too
| quickly
|
| no we don't want to miss genuine ways to speed things up to
| improve our productivity so we can do other or more things
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I find myself sympathetic to the author's PoV, but I am
| incorporating LLMs into my workflow, with a resultant jaw-
| dropping (to me) increase in velocity.
|
| But I am not just dispatching to agents. I work interactively
| with a chat interface, and sometimes, I will just bin a whole
| hour's worth of back-and-forth, because we're not getting
| anywhere (in fact, I did exactly that, about 30 minutes ago).
|
| But that hour is peanuts, compared to the ten hours that I would
| have spent, trying to figure it out on my own. With an LLM (and
| git), I can "run something up the flagpole, and see who salutes."
| I can afford to experiment with very large code bases, and toss
| out a whole bunch of stuff, if need be.
|
| That said, I know damn well, that quite a few folks here, would
| sneer at my methodology, as "awkward, stodgy, and slow."
| Nevertheless, I am pretty chuffed with the results. Yeah, it's
| slower than some folks would do it, but the Quality is really
| high, and I'm happy with the results.
|
| My favorite thing to do, is (for example) toss all 5 of my SDK
| files into the LLM, paste in the JSON server interaction,
| describe the bug, and ask it to help me figure it out.
|
| Nine times out of ten, it finds the bug quickly. The real bug. I
| am not always happy with the proposed solutions, but finding the
| root cause is always the time-consuming part.
| FrankRay78 wrote:
| A perfectly good methodology with the right guardrails in place
| imho.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Some things take time
|
| And time takes money
|
| Enough money to pay one's bills while one tends the growing tree
|
| And if we have a society that ensures everyone is given the
| dignity of time
|
| We also get a society that reaps what some create with that time
|
| But if we have a society that only rewards pushing money back up
| the hierarchy
|
| Then we all lose our time and our nest eggs to those who have the
| most.
| Animats wrote:
| "Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak."
|
| Mass production of engineered structural lumber.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCYn3xQ0yS8
| nchmy wrote:
| I've been slowly working on something for a decade, and I'm
| always comforted by this poem by Mary Oliver
|
| Things take the time they take.
|
| Don't worry.
|
| How many roads did St. Augustine follow
|
| before he became St. Augustine?
| triwats wrote:
| Sometimes to move fast - we have to go slow.
|
| That's a mantra I learned when getting into technology.
|
| Asking questions about how things work, why it is a certain way,
| or why a shortcut was made often give you far better insights
| than anything else.
|
| Slowing down and understandng is great. With AI this is even
| easier. But choose wisely, brains get full.
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