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Small programming tricks

681 points · 294 comments · signa11

  1. behnamoh · · focus · HN ↗
    This reminded me to ask: To what extent are people still coding by hand these days? In my profession (academia), literally no one codes anymore. On one hand, it sucks because the joy and fun of programming has been replaced by constant agent orchestration tasks, but on the other hand, it's hard to go back to the way things were before because the productivity gain is so good.

    I remember learning a lot of these programming tricks over the years. They would give me happiness: learning something new about nvim, or some new shortcut in the Fish shell, or a new Vim macro, or the difference between 1 bracket or 2 brackets in Bash scripts, etc. But now it seems like all of them are irrelevant, and I wanted to see how others think about the situation.

    1. dgacmu · · focus · HN ↗
      Also in academia but I'm old and my real work is done withy students. I'm coding by hand much less than I used to (boo) but solving more problems with code myself than I used to (yay). Having an llm do things turns out to be similar to having a student do them but with fast turnaround and it's fine to have them work on your home automation system. ;)
      1. huurtehoog · · focus · HN ↗
        Another academic. LLMs are great for opening searches. I state what I would like to get into and let it get some initial paper recommendations. It seems to solves a hard problem: discoverability. Maybe I'm just getting subjected to more subtle bias but it is extremely easy and fast now to get a nice selection of relevant literature to review.

        Analysis and any artifacts are all handcrafted by me. I mean, that is the work. I have never seen papers or code as an outcome. What I want is to learn and enable other to learn. That I can only get from doing the work myself.

        1. cindyllm · · focus · HN ↗

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