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Comment by crinkly | Hacker News Reader

I go for a walk and have a coffee. It feels less intellectually dishonest. Best to solve human problems with human solutions.

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The best part is that you can do both. Give the agent a prompt, go for a walk, come back to see how well it did.

Going for a walk, taking a nap, stepping away from the computer is a programming super power. Don't ever think it's a bad thing.

Where in lies the dishonesty?

Having the AI just getting the wheels turning when I'm not in the mood myself has many times been a good way to make progress.

When you say progress, I wonder at what cost. The apparatus for original thought isn't used and pushing through a problem and deriving the satisfaction of doing that doesn't happen. That leads to the wrong motivational cues. The brain is lazy and likes to take the easy route. Eventually you become merely a machine operator, which is something a lot of my colleagues are starting to do. And it's very worrying.

The biased behaviour towards just asking for a solution both devalues you and leads to any innovative outcomes disappearing before they had a chance to exist.

I've ended up being the company ideas man not because I'm good but everyone else stopped thinking.

I enjoy the idea that when programming before AI I wasn't 'merely a machine operator'

I did most of my programming and thinking on paper before I committed to the machine. I still do today.

But why do you use computers at all? Isn’t it intellectually dishonest?

For communication and processing information quickly with determinism?

They aren't the best solution for everything. Thinking is one of those things.

The only time I ever wrote a program on paper was when I was 10 years old, a few months before my 11th birthday when I got my first computer. And that was in the late 1970s.

What is the niche?

I do control systems that have to work first try and after running the plant through its paces I’m out the door never to return

I agree with you both. I feel LLM kills both procrastination AND capability for original thought.

But! There are some problems that are intrinsically interesting to me and others that are boring as hell but need to be solved.

In 20 years of work I’ve not come up with any way to make those boring tasks psychologically _not_ so disagreeable they are close to painfull.

But now the LLM can do whatever crap it does for those and I _finally_ can focus just on the interesting bits.

So, a boring task - off to the LLM you go - interesting - it’s mine, all mine!

> So, a boring task - off to the LLM you go - interesting - it’s mine, all mine!

Yes! And hell, checking out how the machine solved a boring thing can still be a source of interest in itself, so the dopamine squeezing novelty keeps on flowing all day long.

I use LLMs as a conversation partner but never let it write the code for me and this feels like I get the good parts without the bad.

I agree and this is a risk. There is a balance to be found where the AI is power tool, not a black box.

The best use cases for me have been when I know the solution and what it should look like but don't want to write it all by hand myself. The AI can make the code just appear and I can verify it is up to spec.

If you review some shit code and think of a better way to do it on the spot, is that original thought?

Does the answer change if the author is an LLM as opposed to another person?

Climb down from your high horse why don't you.

But then you still haven't started.

People pay me to do quality work not look busy. Thinking happens before you start.

People most likely pay you to do valuable work, not quality work. One doesn’t necessarily mean the other.

If your coworkers can get into the groove faster than you (for whatever reason), you’ll continue to do quality work, not look busy, and no longer be paid for it.

Quality is the value here. Because low quality has a financial risk.

And good luck finding anyone these days who can do quality.

It's a nice niche.

it sounds like they're buying your confidence primarily

No you don't understand, this person writes quality code in an intellectually honest way because they use machines in a very specific way, just enough but not too much. Everyone else is just slinging shitcode. Good luck finding someone as good as this random person online you've never heard of!

I don't mean to attack this person specifically but it's a frankly pretty bad mindset that is far too prevalent in our profession - the way I do things in the Right Way, I write Good Code, very few other people write Good Code, and because I do things the way they were done 5, 10, 25 years ago means that my way is better than yours.

There's more than just me. We keep each other honest.

Looking at my salary, which is at least twice as much as my coworkers in the past 15 years at various companies, because I ship quality solutions, companies seem to think that quality is quite valuable.

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