I dunno man. In it's heyday, SO was pretty fucking awesome. IMHO. Just a massive amount of good information concentrated. And some bad, but a damn sight better than random Google searches even back then.
One thing to keep in mind is that anytime you punt to the LLM (or anybody) for anything, that skill is going to atrophy.
I've seen this happen to myself where suddenly I had trouble planning out the architecture for a very small project. It should have been obvious to me, and I knew that. So it was disconcerting to not be able to suddenly have the answer appear in front of me like it normally would. I thought maybe I would go to Claude and help get some ideas.
But then I stopped myself. I knew I should be able to do this! So I got out a piece of paper and I scribbled ideas until the dam burst and suddenly the entire design was obvious, like it should have been in the first place. It took about 5 minutes.
But those were an alarming 5 minutes. It was like I'd gone blind to the solution.
And I realized that when I asked Claude for a bunch of ideas and then I selected the best one based on my experience, I was exercising that exact skill. I wasn't exercising the skill of coming up with the solution from scratch.
Lots of times we're happy letting particular skills atrophy. Maybe we don't like exercising them and we just don't want to do that anymore. And I think that's valid.
5 minutes... what about 5 hours, or 5 days? Imagine spending 5 hours with a pen and paper sketching solutions. Unthinkable to spend that amount of time "unproductively" today. I feel like there's just so much pressure to make visible progress, and with these tools available it's getting harder to convince yourself to take the time to think.
It is unfathomable to me that spending 5 hours of hard mental work is deemed ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unproductive time’
I might be of the old “hammock driven development” school, but I wonder if people have any idea of what productivity and creativity consists of, how it works and how to promote a state of flow and deep work. Hint: it’s not about context switching between 15 different agents per minute.
I keep wondering if I am defending my experience in this field against the deep hubris of 19 year olds that are still figuring it all out (programming but also system design and how to tackle hard problems efficiently)
Yep. For a lot of problems, I can build a prototypes with a few lines of bash, or spend the time to create a proper gui and have error handling. The first is not difficult’ no need for AI. And if I’m going to invest in the second, the “slow is fast” approach is often best
This is why I love working on open source (not as a part of a job) so much. No one is going to be upset with me that I took a week instead of a few hours to implement something. No one is going to pressure me to use an LLM to work faster.
On one hand I'm really afraid that in a few years, developers won't actually know how to develop software anymore, and the LLMs won't actually get good enough to make up the gap.
On the other hand, if that does come to pass, my still-sharp skills will be in even higher demand than they were pre-LLMs.
Absolutely not unthinkable! We're paid for exactly that in research, for example.
It's terrifying to hear that 5 hours of focused thinking is considered crazy. I can understand a budget battle if it's 5 months, but 5 hours?! Everyone, in every profession (or none), would be better off mentally if they "wasted" 5 hours thinking about something every now and then!
If 5 hours of thinking time to solve a problem is unthinkable to some people does that mean they have some form of Attention Deficit Disorder, be it a natural thing or introduced by an over-dependence on LLMs? Like stopping for an hour to think through a problem is unfathomable and instead they would rather hit small dopamine spikes every few minutes from talking to a chatbot?
Sometimes you gotta do things that others don’t value highly. A long career needs you to act with good judgment. Even - sometimes - when the optics are bad.
If you were in need of legal services in a high-stakes case, or if you needed brain surgery, would you want "fast visible progress" or "I need to think this through"?
I'd say both relevant professions are highly regarded.
All I read about if productivity, but where are all the products? I keep reading about a lot of work, and I still see little to show for it. Why is the vast majority of software still utter shit (and getting worse)?
I think our entire field would benefit from us taking the time to think a bit more. I have no opposition to LLM usage either.
> And I realized that when I asked Claude for a bunch of ideas and then I selected the best one based on my experience, I was exercising that exact skill. I wasn't exercising the skill of coming up with the solution from scratch.
Makes me think of Japan, where young people learn to recognize kanji. They type the sound of a word into a computer, then choose the appropriate one.
When they have to write by hand, they often draw a blank (not only children, I had a university professor I knew temporarily forget the character for "police").
An article from 2012 said that 66% of Japanese surveyed believed that they were losing the ability to write kanji.
This is why I like to come up with my own solution(s) for a problem first, and then ask AI what it recommends to see if we match up. Makes it a fun exercise, and usually ends up helping creating one ideal, combined idea.
It’s not just that, punting something to an LLM is its own skill that will push out the other skills you were using to do everything on your own. It’s like going from an IC to a tech lead manager, you go from doing things on your own to figuring out how to get a team (of agents) to do it instead.
Before LLMs I noticed I would never rethink a problem if I thought a solution could already be recalled from somewhere else. That might have been a book, a colleague, or some work I've done in the past. Only when I really needed to would I actually think and come up with something.
Now it seems like the need to think is rapidly going away. More and more I realise I'm not actually needing to think about anything. I'm not worried so much about losing my ability to program as I am about losing my ability to think. Programming without thinking is the worst kind of grunt work. I wanted more time to think and less time typing, but it's just far too tempting to not bother thinking either.
Why use AI to write at all, I wonder? Writing is the fun part. I'm not interested in having my bot eat my ice cream for me either.
I do use AI to help learn concepts, to grammar check and spell check, and to find errors. And I always tell it not to rewrite anything. I'll fix it myself, thank you.
It's always fun to see stuff I wrote decades ago get flagged as genai, though.
I am with you, AI is a tool, and it matters how you use it.
I believe overuse of AI will be detrimental to your cognitive function, because the brain, like most organs in your body needs "exercise" to function well.
Because stuff like this isn't particularly impressive to HN readers.
Deharshing this a bit, it's getting to the point where we can all make this with a little prompting. It's like when I one-shorted a cool SPA version of Dope Wars. I could have shared it, but anyone could have built the same thing with a one-sentence prompt.
Yeah, but the hard part is not the prompting, is coming up with the idea. I think the concept is interesting and well done. I don't care if it was done with AI or with an army of leprechaun coders.
hard part being the ideation is very true. i struggle with this all the time. even meditate on it for hours. but I think it is an important muscle to practice these days
let's be patient and see what the evidence in court tells us before jumping to certitudes
being investigated does not imply wrongdoing actually happened, many laws require accusations to be looked at or "investigated" at a minimal level to judge credibility for in depth investigation
"Let us build this data center in your back yard and in return you'll get..."
Conspiracies aside, this sentence still needs to be satisfactorily completed for people to buy in. Because right now people know the best case is they'll get nothing.
This is a silly standard and the reason why people make fun of NIMBYism. By this logic we shouldn't build anything at all unless it immediately benefits the people living next to it. (And I don't like how much power DCs are using either, but that should be the argument, not "it doesn't benefit me personally so don't build it".)
Alright, fair enough. I guess no factories, no power lines or pipelines, no thru highways or train tracks, no office parks, no farms other than subsistence, no radio towers or aeronautical beacons, no bus depots or railyards, no quarries, oil rigs, or mines. Heaven forbid someone is forced to live nearby something that's useful for someone other than themselves.
Sure. ChatGPT alone has a billion users. I don't particularly like AI, but it's clearly useful, and a lot of people are using it. (And even this assumes that every data center is an AI one.)
Yeah, they do, they pay for the land. That's how buying land works and it's separate from the permitting process to actually build on it. I'm not really seeing where we're going with this
That doesn't compensate affected people. It only compensates the previous landowner. In fact it usually more than compensates them, as they receive substantial profit, creating a speculative bubble market that's bad for everyone else.
if they pay for the land and pay taxes why exactly shouldn't they be able to build what they want on that land? besides that what do you mean by "compensate" affected people? does a sewage treatment plant need to compensate nearby homes?
And on higher level. "You are spending astonishing amount of maybe our collective money for ..."
Looking at those numbers. Looking at what it does now. And then simply comparing it to anything else and very reasonable some start to question what even is going on...
Regardless of what the tech can or cannot do, the business model is clearly a scam by people who get high on thinking they're smarter than everyone else. You don't promise your investors "the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars" by accident. You do it because you're a fraud who thinks you're much cleverer than you actually are.
Our class sizes at the university that I teach at have plummeted with the crash. What I'm hoping is that this means I'm just going to be teaching people who are actually interested in producing quality code.
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