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There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

204 points · 156 comments · robin_reala

  1. Arubis · · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, and: the most important time to use your brain isn't in the loop.

    That _is_ valuable, and will remain so, but the temptation to turn it off is there because the loop is good and getting better at what it does. Once you're in the loop, with the rare high-value exception of catching total mistakes nad redirecting, you're mostly choosing between similar-yet-reasonable options. This isn't so much right-vs-wrong as relativistic optimization. Letting the loop do the work will get you a mediocre result quickly, and that's usually fine.

    The most important time to use your brain is _before the prompt_. Once you engage with your LLM and agent, you start biasing yourself, and its reasonable suggestions constrain your visibility into other options, other worlds.

    First, use your brain. Then write the prompt.

    1. xendo · · focus · HN ↗
      I don't agree. I'm recently a huge believer in Programming as Theory Building. The software creation itself is the part that makes you understand what you are building. It's impossible to understand things before you start building them, initial prompt can help you explore, but the idea that after that you can lean back is ridiculous. Most or maybe even all successful software projects are still heavily relying on the best software engineers. That's why anthropic and others are still hiring SDEs.
      1. bunderbunder · · focus · HN ↗
        I somewhat agree with your point, but also I find that the major agent harnesses work really hard at tricking you into leaning back and not letting a proper understanding of what you are building to develop.

        This isn't a new problem. I had it when working with outsource developers, too. In both cases, it seemed that just sitting back and describing what I wanted in plain English prevented me from properly wrapping my head around the problem. Which then meant I failed to develop the insight needed to find the really good improvements. Those usually consisted of identifying and removing the bits that were making things worse.[1] It's incredibly difficult for me to think of anything other than just adding more stuff on top of what's already there if I'm not getting my own hands dirty.

        So I've been moving away from plan mode and letting the spin away on building large chunks, and back toward working in small increments and typing out the important code with my own hands. That seems to be the sweet spot. I'm still getting a productivity boost because there's more than enough boilerplate and trivial function definitions to farm out. (Easy prompt, too: "Implement `someFunctionStub`.") But I'm also not letting Plan Mode drag me back into the waterfall development pit of insanity.

        1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;No_Silver_Bullet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;No_Silver_Bullet

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