Constraints foster creativity and creation, and from that experience learning and pride in one’s achievements springs.

Before it was a dumpster fire Twitter’s 140 character constraint made it fun. An infinity of possibility leaves most of us motionless.

Are they petitioning to bring back the Chinese spy too or is it just Jensen? Whatever international espionage the man wishes to dabble in in his own private time should be his own damn business. Are they willing to take them on as a job lot? Questions need to be answered

If they are copying and pasting the answers and replies how will it "pull up people's thinking"?

It seems obvious--and correct me if I'm wrong--that using AI requires less mental effort; and a less exerted mind is a weaker mind. A weaker mind will continue to create more and more fragile code.

Well, it's a nice thought-stopper by now, but IME it requires more and I can see the oldschool devs struggling with it every day.

Every once in a while I go "manual". It's restful and entertaining to write syntax by hand. It has this peculiar dare I say autistic delight, sorting the colored blocks and getting a little kick out of it. I understand the nostalgia but the progress is breathtakingly slow - as expected. You cannot do 6502 assembly by hand and expect to be fast in any meaningful sense of the word.

I usually juggle four, five active projects at a time and make days worth of manual progress on them in a morning. Support calls and colleagues questions interject occasionally. It's much more work than before, but I like it because dev work is super boring and now it's getting more interesting.

Like many people try to say AI is raising the bar. What we call normal software now will be childrens' toys tomorrow. The world expects ambitious projects, stuff that is hard and stands out.

And using AI's favourite phrase, a deep dive, is also offputting.

(I mean, is he grading the dive?)

A Mathematicians Lament mentions students explaining rather than reciting the equations, too, to correctly learn them

Well, people aren’t coding to keep their skills and knowledge fresh.

And they’re not even learning from their AI agents since they’re not closely reviewing the code.

The chance of code quality increasing seems remote.

And that’s not to mention the new generation—having rarely coded enough to properly review code.

Nor to mention the AI learning from AI coded slop: mad cow disease for AI.

What do we have, no programmers, no one knowing what’s going on inside the test passing slopy black box, except a caretaker guy who’s kept their skills sharp by not using AI—with their time taken up trying to understand constantly rewritten code?

I tried to write a little project the way an AI would, going gung-ho and not stopping to ask if this is a good design. It actually went okay and now I have a silly thing that wouldn't exist otherwise. It was still slower than an AI, but only took a few days and now I know how the thing works inside, which I wouldn't if I used AI. I don't think programmers can't match AI, I think we don't want the associated responsibility of knowing we might be building a pile of shit. I think we want to avoid writing a pile of shit so we slow way the heck down.

This is also the way I wrote programs when I barely knew how to program btw and I got stuff done then.

Think about doing carpentry by nailing planks together in roughly the pattern you want, rather than meticulously drawing and then cutting outlines - which I have also done. The first iteration (of that carpentry project) fell apart the moment I tried to use it and was a miserable experience because I still had to complete the task with the pieces, and didn't have the opportunity to go back to fix it. The second iteration, which still just took a couple of days to build, was much stronger and was awesome. It can be fun and get results that are obviously acceptable because they are what the AI would have output anyway.

Actually, just for curiosity, I just asked ChatGPT how to make the thing I made, and ironically it's doing a big design up front process where it wants to know all sorts of parameters first before it will tell me anything. So my "AI mode" was more direct than an actual AI! It also wanted me to buy a welding machine even though the thing can be made just fine, better even, out of wood. Maybe that's that new product advertisement feature.

I think some people have a tendency to forget that you can half-ass things because some things only actually need half of an ass (actually a surprising number of things, though it can be difficult to predict that completely accurately!).

I've yet to see a well-loved widely-used vibe-coded (rather than just AI-assisted) app that has gone live, and then gone through multiple feature additions and remained secure and used.

"Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing"

Ron Swanson

This is exactly how people were told to build MVPs for their startups, I'd have expected HN, being on YC, of all places to understand this, so it's good that you're keeping the culture alive.

Smoking, drinking, watching adult films. Arguing that adding another to think list leads to "everything" is rather a stretch

These kind of incidents would leave me and you in trouble with the police then?

Is mathematics deprived of the associated knowledge that comes from a human first deriving a proof, how exploring the problem domain including the dead-ends has changed the mathematician's thinking, when a proof is given by AI? It seems that the solving rather than just the solution gave much to mathematics.

> It seems that the solving rather than just the solution gave much to mathematics

The whole discourse of past few weeks has been mathematicians claiming the opposite.