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
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 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.
Just like my AI. They also think before and during a code refactoring. There is a gap between my prompt and them taking actions, you could call that "stopping and thinking".
A very good friend, who is not a brain surgeon, but designs and plans brain surgeries for clinical trials with the very brain surgeons doing the surgeries. So yes they do think it through and even do entire dry runs through every step.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
beej71 · · focus · HN ↗
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.
Just be careful how you use it.
pton_xd · · focus · HN ↗
vconnor · · focus · HN ↗
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)
skydhash · · focus · HN ↗
gspr · · focus · HN ↗
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!
kaffekaka · · focus · HN ↗
Fast, visible progress and delivery is the melody.
gspr · · focus · HN ↗
I'd say both relevant professions are highly regarded.
auggierose · · focus · HN ↗
gspr · · focus · HN ↗
auggierose · · focus · HN ↗
eiginn · · focus · HN ↗
auggierose · · focus · HN ↗
josephg · · focus · HN ↗
daemin · · focus · HN ↗
gspr · · focus · HN ↗
xnx · · focus · HN ↗
hirvi74 · · focus · HN ↗
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.
kelnos · · focus · HN ↗
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.
tripzilch · · focus · HN ↗
yeah, that's the dream. I do it whenever I get the opportunity to
ashkankiani · · focus · HN ↗
jckahn · · focus · HN ↗
GPerson · · focus · HN ↗
dylanhouli · · focus · HN ↗
seanmcdirmid · · focus · HN ↗
gramie · · focus · HN ↗
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.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
globular-toast · · focus · HN ↗
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.