17 ms·

Stepping Back

178 points by rjpower9000 1y ago

rjpower9000 1y ago
I have to assume there are some other obsessive engineers out there with reflections of their own. I'm curious how people approach the challenge of staying focused while keeping an open mind about the futility of a particular direction...
- ivape 1y ago
  I mostly concoct and go through a whole idea over days. Then I let the dysfunctional aspect of me break it down the way it usually does which roughly goes like this, "okay, that's a pretty stupid idea, nay, worthless one". Then I just wait. Days, weeks. If the idea returns, then I tell the critical side of me to shut it and pursue the idea fully. These are for big ideas. It's scalable for smaller micro problems, but I never truly observed it there since I do the programmer thing of making trade-offs. I embrace the subconscious basically.
- collinvandyck76 1y ago
  I materialize my thoughts as I obsess over the problem in my notes. I find that doing this often helps me reframe the problem and the facts that I currently know, which helps me discard branches that will be fruitless.
- RossBencina 1y ago
  Something I've been trying for the past year or so is adopting the following mindset: "I'm going to stay on this direction until I prove to myself that it's going to work or I prove that it's not going to work." By "prove" here I mean semi-formal things like characterising the problem and the chosen direction well enough to say with high certainty whether or not it's going to work or is futile. One upshot of this is that it forces me to be clear about the definitions of "going to work" and "not going to work." It's related to definition-of-done in some agile methods, and also to "imagine the problem as solved and work back from there," which is one of the heuristics Polya talks about in "How to Solve It".
camkego 1y ago
I enjoyed the article, and as a longtime developer. I certainly relate to being heads down on a problem, only to step away for a walk or a breather and realize I can maybe avoid solving the immediate problem altogether. I also don’t think it’s possible to focus at 100% on a detailed complex problem, and also concurrently question is there a better path or a way to avoid the current problem. Sometimes you just need to switch modes between focusing on the details the weeds, and popping back up to asking does this even have to be completed at all?
davidcalloway 1y ago
This reminds me of the discover and defend modes from Jonathan Haidt's latest book The Anxious Generation. On taking a break, I've often found it difficult to stick to the pomodoro technique because the breaks seem too frequent. But those breaks help avoid going down an unfruitful path for too long.
- arcanemachiner 1y ago
  I ended up just converting to a method where instead of running the pomodoro on a timer, I run a stopwatch instead. Then concept is still the same, in terms of focusing on the topic at hand. I no longer count down to my breaks, I just count up until I want/need to take a break. It's basically just a glorified time tracker, I guess, but it was my solution to the pomodoro "break" problem, i.e. sometimes I don't want to take a break.
josefrichter 1y ago
Reminded me tangentially of the legendary talk “Hammock Driven Development”.
JSR_FDED 1y ago
After taking a break I often realize I can delete all the code from the last hour and either define away the problem entirely, or fix it in a much simpler way. But it’s so scary to depend on that flash of insight, after all it’s not guaranteed to happen. So you keep grinding in an unenlightened state. If there was a Reliable way to task your subconscious with working on a problem in the background I could probably do my job in a third of the time.
- skydhash 1y ago
  The approach that always works for me is iteration and recursion. Just like drawing, where you do a loose sketch and refine it until you're happy. You're either stepping back and work on the whole, or focus on a small part to detail it[0]. So for a software project, I break it into parts recursively. Sometimes for a module, I can build some scaffolding even when I'm not sure about the full implementation. I can go up and down that tree of problems and I always have something to break away from my current thinking track. So there's always a lot of placeholder code, stubs, and various TODO comments around my codebase. And I rely heavily on refactoring (which is why I learned Vim, then Emacs as they helped me with the kind of quick navigation I need for that approach). Also REPL and/or some test frameworks. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prQH5V5inbA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prQH5V5inbA
  - JSR_FDED 1y ago
    I do something similar, and that is likely one of the ways for your subconscious to engage with the material. However I’ve noticed that too much refactoring while exploring the problem space becomes tedious for me. At that point I go back to a notepad or whiteboard. Maybe this change of medium is another way to engage the subconscious? And to your point about vim/emacs - the choice of tools no doubt impacts your engagement with the problem at hand. That’s why having AI generate teams of code doesn’t work for me - but using it to iteratively develop some PoC code whose core I then incorporate into my own code works brilliantly.
    - skydhash 1y ago
andrewstuart 1y ago
I get relentlessly obsessed until the thing works, or at least until some major milestone is met and the big problems solved. Not just for five minutes but days weeks months even years. It’s really unhealthy behavior.
- zubspace 1y ago
  I know this behavior all to well. I definitely think that this can be used to your advantage: You learn alot in the struggle and get a deep understanding of the problem. But you really need to step back once in a while and contemplate, if the thing you're doing is really worthwhile. One of the most precious resources is time. I didn't appreciate this insight a lot while I was young. But as I grew older I needed to be more careful how you I was spending it. In this regard like I like the saying "youth is wasted on the young". But this also enables you to be more focused in your approach. Fail fast is a lot better than spending years on a problem with bo end in sight
  - andrewstuart 1y ago
    I’m already old.
benjiweber 1y ago
One of the ways pair programming can be effective is one of the pair keeping more of the big picture in mind. Either thinking about alternative approaches or at least spotting the escalation of commitment to current approach and calling a pause to reflect.
jjtheblunt 1y ago
Great article and I think of this phenomenon by the term of my pilot friends, “Target Fixation”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_fixation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_fixation
Mikhail_Edoshin 1y ago
I write things down and it helps, esp. when I manage to keep it minimally structured: write down a question, then write an answer, split different topics. Generally I think it is a question of method. If I was to produce a physical thing I would know the steps. One of steps would be a drawing in a known form, with known ways to indicate what is important. With software there is no such a standard form.
evrimoztamur 1y ago
Your fixation is a result of the fact that interacting with LLM coding tools is much like playing a slot machine, it grabs and chokeholds your gambling instincts. You're rolling dice for the perfect result without much thought.
- amelius 1y ago
  I'm sure they are working hard to tell the LLM how to think and where it went wrong.
  - rjpower9000 1y ago
    It's true you're still working, but it's a different, more distracted effort: you put the LLM on something for a while and then come back. Sometimes it does it right, some times not. I can see the relation to gambling if, say, it does it right 50% of the time. If I had been taking a more scientific approach to the problem and had a clear direction of what I wanted to test, I suspect I wouldn't have gotten quite as "stuck".
- rjpower9000 1y ago
  Good insight. That's a better description than what I came up with, "Tiktok for engineers". LLMs probably compound the issue, with that hope of a magic outcome. Though I've had many problems pre-LLM where I was plowing through it myself and couldn't let up...
- munificent 1y ago
  That mixed with a dash of simulated social interaction making you not want to thwart your AI "partner" and give up.
- jimbob45 1y ago
  Is there any progress toward more deterministic AI? Like seeding with predictable values or a nanny AI that discards hallucinations? I know the smartest people in the world are working on this stuff so I’m sure they’ve thought of everything before me but I don’t know where to seek out layman’s news on cutting-edge AI developments that aren’t just “we threw more compute and tokens at it”.
mattlondon 1y ago
I read somewhere that the subconscious brain continues "working on problems" even when you are not actively working on it consciously. Hence the expression to "sleep on it" when faced with a difficult/big decision. I am not sure how much I believe that or how true it is, but I have found that many times I have come up with a better solution to a problem after going for a run or having a shower. So there might be some truth in it. But yeah it is hard to know when you are in too deep sometimes. I find that imposter syndrome usually kicks in with thoughts of "why am I finding this so complex or hard? I bet colleague would have solved this with a simple fix or a concise one-liner! There must be a better way?". TBH this is where I find LLMs most useful right now, to think about different approaches or point-out all the places where code will need to change if I make a change and if there is a less-destructive/more-concise way of doing things that I hadn't thought of.
- Phreaker00 1y ago
  > I read somewhere that the subconscious brain continues "working on problems" even when you are not actively working on it consciously. Hence the expression to "sleep on it". It's something I've actively used for almost two decades now when dealing with challenges i'm stuck on. I remember one of my professors explaining it as having a 'prepared mind'. What I do is, before I go to bed, try to summarize the problem to myself as concise as possible (like rubber ducking) and then go to sleep. Very often the next morning I wake up with a new insight or new approach that solves the problem in 10 minutes that took me hours the day before.
  - varjag 1y ago
    I wonder how much of that effect can be attributed to getting some rest.
    - stavros 1y ago
      I've had that before, and it's not (just) about the rest. I'll wake up with the solution already in my head, as if I'd been working on it in my sleep.
nixpulvis 1y ago
It's often just as difficult to make a good decision of "no" as it is to say yes and build the whole thing. By the time you understand the problem space well enough to have a somewhat confident answer, you've done a decent bit of work. It's also difficult sometimes to admit that something could be better, but we can't do it now, so we'd better come up with something that works within our own limits.
alankarmisra 1y ago
My thinking is threaded. I maintain lists (in a simple txt file and more recently, in Notes on the Mac) and add the tasks to it. Subtasks go into an indent. I have different notes for regular work/pet project/blog/learning/travel. priority-must-do-now/daily chores is separate one. Every morning I open my priority/daily chores stuff and try and wind that up. And then I just scuttle around the other lists and do whatever my brain tells me I can. I find that some days I do more from the blog notes and some days more from the regular work notes. The notes serve as goals for my brain and it invents/discoveres solutions in no particular order. This makes me more productive because I can switch when I'm bored (which to me is an indication that my brain needs more time to find solutions in this space). And if nothing is hitting the right note, I'll take a nap or read or watch a show for a bit or go for a long walk or hike - anything that's not in the to-do just to give myself the creative space. I find that giving myself problems to solve, and allowing my subconcious brain to invent solutions for it while I do other things actually works quite well for me and allows me to make steady progress.
- Labo333 1y ago
  Interesting. My process is similar, although based on the GTD method (for example with an Inbox list) and using Trello for implementation (I get syncing, task level notes, multimedia, item drag and drop, etc)
- Lerc 1y ago
  My thinking is threaded too, but it's more like the XKCD primer plot diagram. I have a churn of tasks and subtasks that I add do, my brain randomly picks one to be the most important thing in the world and I do that to the exclusion of all else. Methylphenidate didn't help much but dexamphetamine seems to improve things a bit once I get past the drowsiness it causes.
- brianzelip 1y ago
  Perhaps https://whereisalan.dev/ https://whereisalan.dev/
stephc_int13 1y ago
If you want to reach the full potential of your brain to solve a specific problem, you'll need both hard focus during intense sessions and "background" work, and yes taking a step back (during a walk, shower, coffee break or bathroom visit) is a way to trigger the switch. The key is to care deeply about solving the problem, not simply looking to get rid of it for a quick win, if you are immediately thinking about something else as soon as you can, you'll never get the best results. When using code assistants I found that a nice way to take a step back is to use the Socratic method, chatting with it about the design instead of trying to force it doing it for you. It is like chatting with a well informed but not too clever normie colleague, it can help taking a step back.
liamwire 1y ago
I’ve found this problem to be compounded by the use of stimulant medications — no matter how aware of the phenomenon one is going into a task, it can feel nigh impossible sometimes to avoid locking into whatever path I’m on as the drugs kick in. This seems true not only of the task itself but also of the individual decisions that can constitute it. I don’t think this is surprising or novel, to be sure, but frustratingly predictable.
sureglymop 1y ago
I find it interesting that no one has created a better interface for these LLMs. Two things that should be available by now in conversations are branching and history editing. Branching is somewhat trivial so let's focus on the history. Now when I last used an LLM API, the whole context was still managed manually. Meaning I had to send the API the whole conversation history as one long text for every new query. This means that I could technically change a part of the history directly. Manipulating the history though is not really a trivial problem. The LLM would need to re evaluate starting from that point. But, the re-evaluation may result in something completely different... If there are branches, perhaps it would also be desirable to let it propagate into the branches. Next, re-evaluate until where? We can assume a conversation happened until the present moment and the user may have changed their reality/state during the conversation before that point. For example, I may have changed some function based on a suggestion of the LLM. Now, for re-evaluation it would actually be nice if the LLM could also take that state change into consideration. Here it would be nice if the LLM had the concept of certain logical facts and pieces of information and how they relate to each other but with an interface so that we could see that. If such a piece of information in the conversation is then changed, that would affect the information that is related to it. We could follow a sort of sequence of logical conclusions being made to verify what happened. Just some thoughts with no conclusion. I think current LLM interfaces could be a lot better.
- dmd 1y ago
  I'm confused by what you mean by this, because most LLM interfaces other than the very very basic ones do already have branching and history editing? E.g. pretty much every third party LLM interface? Are you talking about something more than that?
  - sureglymop 1y ago
    Yes. Here is a scenario: Let's say you ask an LLM to help you with a programming task. The LLM gives you a solution and you copy that into your code. While getting to the result of this solution, spanned over multiple messages, you give it more context about your code base. You ask it to help with multiple sub problems and it answers with suitable responses containing code snippets. Now, you change your mind and want to actually write your program in a different language. You could at this point just tell that to the LLM and it would change course from here on out. Everytime it is queried the full history including the original problem is sent to it. The change in programming language is taken into account because it eventually gets to the point where you changed your mind. But instead what you'd probably want is the solution it gave you initially and all the little solutions to all the sub problems but in the newly chosen programming language! You'd like to simulate or re-evaluate the conversation but with the newly chosen programming language. I haven't seen that implemented in a usable way but as I said, this is not a trivial feature either.
untech 1y ago
I use pomodoro, and I think it helps with that problem. Every break, I also add a short record in my “log” file. I can still become obsessed, but happens more rarely, and I am more aware of the obsession, because it usually means I start ignoring the timer.
- jeremyjh 1y ago
  I had the same thought; its harder to ignore how long you've been on one task or sub-task when using this technique, and you've got a reminder to take a break. Sometimes ignoring the end of the timer to finish what you are doing while its all in your mind is the right call and so it still takes some attention and discipline.
ljlolel 1y ago
It’s why companies don’t want you doing a sabbatical. Poor return rate.
esafak 1y ago
I chuckled because stepping back is exactly what some thinking models do with their "Wait... aha!" dance.
SoftTalker 1y ago
It's also important (I would say essential) to set a hard stop time every day. No matter what you're in the middle of, no matter how close you think you are to a breakthrough, you stop for the day at that time. Tomorrow will always be there. Whether that's the traditional 5:00pm or some other schedule you need to give yourself time to relax, step away, spend time with family or friends or pets or just yourself, and keep up with all the other demands in your life.
quantadev 1y ago
All great programmers are exactly like this. We have a relentless insatiable desire to always be fixing problems, solving challenges/mysteries, and/or just creating. When you mix those psychological tendencies with the other aspect many of us share, called HFA, you end up also with extremely focused and narrow interests, as well. What I tell myself (which is true) when I notice I've perhaps done something where the effort might not be worth the pay off, is that life itself is about the journey not the destination. As they say "The Journey _is_ the Destination", which applies to my other hobby, riding motorcycles. You can always get anywhere "better" in a car, but it's more fun on two wheels.
dfissadifdoi 1y ago
[dead]
gdubs 1y ago
Been there. I often talk about how I think people should learn to code not to get a job but for the mental models it gives you. Similar to how learning a musical instrument enriches your life. Or art. And one example that feels particularly apt here is that in my art classes in college, my drawing professors really hammered-in the habit of stepping back a few feet from your canvas. It might feel like it's applicable specifically to that context, but it's amazing how much that voice comes back even when I'm working on code or 3D modeling: "take a step back."
RossBencina 1y ago
This reminds me of Richard Hamming's practice of spending time every Friday to consider the big questions of his field. Here's the first summary I found: https://nobaproject.com/blog/2018-11-01-tough-questions-and-great-thoughts-advice-from-richard-hamming https://nobaproject.com/blog/2018-11-01-tough-questions-and-... The main Hamming materials I'm aware of are: "You and your research" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw and the course, "Learning to Learn" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 The original course notes are online somewhere, can't find right now. And I just found that there is a book: https://gwern.net/doc/science/1997-hamming-theartofdoingscienceandengineering.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/science/1997-hamming-theartofdoingscie... A serious talk by British comedian John Cleese "Creativity In Management" is also relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g it touches on switching between "open" and "closed" modes of thought. Perhaps this is what we'd call switching between the DMN and TPN. Neurotypical exclusive switching between these networks is a function that is theorised to be impaired in ADHD.
- gwern 1y ago
  https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#great-thoughts-fridays https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#great-thoughts-fr... You can think of it as a RL problem, and there are some interesting algorithms which achieve good performance by periodically 'breaking out' of exploitation, but less and less: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07979 https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07979 (I expect that you can come up with an infinite hierarchy of 'wake ups' which converge to a fixed overhead and which aren't terribly far off an optimal schedule of replanning wake-ups, and that something like 'great thoughts Friday' is the first step; then you'd have 'great thoughts first-of-the-month' and 'great thoughts new year's day' etc: https://gwern.net/socks#fn10 https://gwern.net/socks#fn10 )
twodave 1y ago
What the author is describing isn’t my experience at all. I tend to operate from a lens of asking for increased feedback as my work takes me further off the “beaten path”. There’s essentially zero chance I’m going to go off screwing around porting code with an LLM unless I already bounced the idea of doing that off of another person or two that I trust. In my hobbies I think going off on tangents _is_ the experience, so I have no qualms about doing it. But when I’m working I’m almost always thinking in terms of stewardship. Is what I’m doing good for the business, our customers, my coworkers, my own professional development, etc.? Any sort of fixation on minutiae is just subservient to those questions. That said, I don’t think of a 5 minute tangent like the author describes as a heavy investment. If anything it’s just a happy little side-journey taken to better understand the nature of the problem space. For me the threshold of “this may be a waste of time” is more measured in hours than minutes.
kranner 1y ago
Previous discussions on psychonetics and deconcentration of attention seem relevant, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10028317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10028317 Personally I've found a continuous open awareness style of meditation has really helped me balance things out, as I went from someone with very little doggedness to e.g. being two weeks into cataloguing all my books with Delicious Library before realising it was kind of pointless. The open awareness practice (very different from focus-on-your-breath and also the visual deconcentration discussed in the link above) is about encouraging the recognition of this-is-how-things-are as it naturally and spontaneously occurs; doing this more and more also builds confidence in one's intuition about (in this context) whether to persevere at the current task or whether to step back. I don't think there is a foolproof system that can be developed as a substitute for this kind of intuition. Speaking for myself I can and will continue to second-guess over time any external system that may feel definitive when it is first established. But I can learn to trust the (unfortunately) indeterminate part of myself that tells me I'm doing the right thing.
RHSman2 1y ago
To grind or not to grind?

178 points by rjpower9000 1y ago

I have to assume there are some other obsessive engineers out there with reflections of their own. I'm curious how people approach the challenge of staying focused while keeping an open mind about the futility of a particular direction...

ivape 1y ago
I mostly concoct and go through a whole idea over days. Then I let the dysfunctional aspect of me break it down the way it usually does which roughly goes like this, "okay, that's a pretty stupid idea, nay, worthless one". Then I just wait. Days, weeks. If the idea returns, then I tell the critical side of me to shut it and pursue the idea fully. These are for big ideas. It's scalable for smaller micro problems, but I never truly observed it there since I do the programmer thing of making trade-offs. I embrace the subconscious basically.
collinvandyck76 1y ago
I materialize my thoughts as I obsess over the problem in my notes. I find that doing this often helps me reframe the problem and the facts that I currently know, which helps me discard branches that will be fruitless.
RossBencina 1y ago
Something I've been trying for the past year or so is adopting the following mindset: "I'm going to stay on this direction until I prove to myself that it's going to work or I prove that it's not going to work." By "prove" here I mean semi-formal things like characterising the problem and the chosen direction well enough to say with high certainty whether or not it's going to work or is futile. One upshot of this is that it forces me to be clear about the definitions of "going to work" and "not going to work." It's related to definition-of-done in some agile methods, and also to "imagine the problem as solved and work back from there," which is one of the heuristics Polya talks about in "How to Solve It".

camkego 1y ago

I enjoyed the article, and as a longtime developer. I certainly relate to being heads down on a problem, only to step away for a walk or a breather and realize I can maybe avoid solving the immediate problem altogether. I also don’t think it’s possible to focus at 100% on a detailed complex problem, and also concurrently question is there a better path or a way to avoid the current problem. Sometimes you just need to switch modes between focusing on the details the weeds, and popping back up to asking does this even have to be completed at all?

davidcalloway 1y ago

This reminds me of the discover and defend modes from Jonathan Haidt's latest book The Anxious Generation. On taking a break, I've often found it difficult to stick to the pomodoro technique because the breaks seem too frequent. But those breaks help avoid going down an unfruitful path for too long.

arcanemachiner 1y ago
I ended up just converting to a method where instead of running the pomodoro on a timer, I run a stopwatch instead. Then concept is still the same, in terms of focusing on the topic at hand. I no longer count down to my breaks, I just count up until I want/need to take a break. It's basically just a glorified time tracker, I guess, but it was my solution to the pomodoro "break" problem, i.e. sometimes I don't want to take a break.

josefrichter 1y ago

Reminded me tangentially of the legendary talk “Hammock Driven Development”.

JSR_FDED 1y ago

After taking a break I often realize I can delete all the code from the last hour and either define away the problem entirely, or fix it in a much simpler way. But it’s so scary to depend on that flash of insight, after all it’s not guaranteed to happen. So you keep grinding in an unenlightened state. If there was a Reliable way to task your subconscious with working on a problem in the background I could probably do my job in a third of the time.

skydhash 1y ago
The approach that always works for me is iteration and recursion. Just like drawing, where you do a loose sketch and refine it until you're happy. You're either stepping back and work on the whole, or focus on a small part to detail it[0]. So for a software project, I break it into parts recursively. Sometimes for a module, I can build some scaffolding even when I'm not sure about the full implementation. I can go up and down that tree of problems and I always have something to break away from my current thinking track. So there's always a lot of placeholder code, stubs, and various TODO comments around my codebase. And I rely heavily on refactoring (which is why I learned Vim, then Emacs as they helped me with the kind of quick navigation I need for that approach). Also REPL and/or some test frameworks. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prQH5V5inbA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prQH5V5inbA
- JSR_FDED 1y ago
  I do something similar, and that is likely one of the ways for your subconscious to engage with the material. However I’ve noticed that too much refactoring while exploring the problem space becomes tedious for me. At that point I go back to a notepad or whiteboard. Maybe this change of medium is another way to engage the subconscious? And to your point about vim/emacs - the choice of tools no doubt impacts your engagement with the problem at hand. That’s why having AI generate teams of code doesn’t work for me - but using it to iteratively develop some PoC code whose core I then incorporate into my own code works brilliantly.
  - skydhash 1y ago

andrewstuart 1y ago

I get relentlessly obsessed until the thing works, or at least until some major milestone is met and the big problems solved. Not just for five minutes but days weeks months even years. It’s really unhealthy behavior.

zubspace 1y ago
I know this behavior all to well. I definitely think that this can be used to your advantage: You learn alot in the struggle and get a deep understanding of the problem. But you really need to step back once in a while and contemplate, if the thing you're doing is really worthwhile. One of the most precious resources is time. I didn't appreciate this insight a lot while I was young. But as I grew older I needed to be more careful how you I was spending it. In this regard like I like the saying "youth is wasted on the young". But this also enables you to be more focused in your approach. Fail fast is a lot better than spending years on a problem with bo end in sight
- andrewstuart 1y ago
  I’m already old.

benjiweber 1y ago

One of the ways pair programming can be effective is one of the pair keeping more of the big picture in mind. Either thinking about alternative approaches or at least spotting the escalation of commitment to current approach and calling a pause to reflect.

jjtheblunt 1y ago

Great article and I think of this phenomenon by the term of my pilot friends, “Target Fixation”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_fixation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_fixation

Mikhail_Edoshin 1y ago

I write things down and it helps, esp. when I manage to keep it minimally structured: write down a question, then write an answer, split different topics. Generally I think it is a question of method. If I was to produce a physical thing I would know the steps. One of steps would be a drawing in a known form, with known ways to indicate what is important. With software there is no such a standard form.

evrimoztamur 1y ago

Your fixation is a result of the fact that interacting with LLM coding tools is much like playing a slot machine, it grabs and chokeholds your gambling instincts. You're rolling dice for the perfect result without much thought.

amelius 1y ago
I'm sure they are working hard to tell the LLM how to think and where it went wrong.
- rjpower9000 1y ago
  It's true you're still working, but it's a different, more distracted effort: you put the LLM on something for a while and then come back. Sometimes it does it right, some times not. I can see the relation to gambling if, say, it does it right 50% of the time. If I had been taking a more scientific approach to the problem and had a clear direction of what I wanted to test, I suspect I wouldn't have gotten quite as "stuck".
rjpower9000 1y ago
Good insight. That's a better description than what I came up with, "Tiktok for engineers". LLMs probably compound the issue, with that hope of a magic outcome. Though I've had many problems pre-LLM where I was plowing through it myself and couldn't let up...
munificent 1y ago
That mixed with a dash of simulated social interaction making you not want to thwart your AI "partner" and give up.
jimbob45 1y ago
Is there any progress toward more deterministic AI? Like seeding with predictable values or a nanny AI that discards hallucinations? I know the smartest people in the world are working on this stuff so I’m sure they’ve thought of everything before me but I don’t know where to seek out layman’s news on cutting-edge AI developments that aren’t just “we threw more compute and tokens at it”.

mattlondon 1y ago

I read somewhere that the subconscious brain continues "working on problems" even when you are not actively working on it consciously. Hence the expression to "sleep on it" when faced with a difficult/big decision. I am not sure how much I believe that or how true it is, but I have found that many times I have come up with a better solution to a problem after going for a run or having a shower. So there might be some truth in it. But yeah it is hard to know when you are in too deep sometimes. I find that imposter syndrome usually kicks in with thoughts of "why am I finding this so complex or hard? I bet colleague would have solved this with a simple fix or a concise one-liner! There must be a better way?". TBH this is where I find LLMs most useful right now, to think about different approaches or point-out all the places where code will need to change if I make a change and if there is a less-destructive/more-concise way of doing things that I hadn't thought of.

Phreaker00 1y ago
> I read somewhere that the subconscious brain continues "working on problems" even when you are not actively working on it consciously. Hence the expression to "sleep on it". It's something I've actively used for almost two decades now when dealing with challenges i'm stuck on. I remember one of my professors explaining it as having a 'prepared mind'. What I do is, before I go to bed, try to summarize the problem to myself as concise as possible (like rubber ducking) and then go to sleep. Very often the next morning I wake up with a new insight or new approach that solves the problem in 10 minutes that took me hours the day before.
- varjag 1y ago
  I wonder how much of that effect can be attributed to getting some rest.
  - stavros 1y ago
    I've had that before, and it's not (just) about the rest. I'll wake up with the solution already in my head, as if I'd been working on it in my sleep.

nixpulvis 1y ago

It's often just as difficult to make a good decision of "no" as it is to say yes and build the whole thing. By the time you understand the problem space well enough to have a somewhat confident answer, you've done a decent bit of work. It's also difficult sometimes to admit that something could be better, but we can't do it now, so we'd better come up with something that works within our own limits.

alankarmisra 1y ago

My thinking is threaded. I maintain lists (in a simple txt file and more recently, in Notes on the Mac) and add the tasks to it. Subtasks go into an indent. I have different notes for regular work/pet project/blog/learning/travel. priority-must-do-now/daily chores is separate one. Every morning I open my priority/daily chores stuff and try and wind that up. And then I just scuttle around the other lists and do whatever my brain tells me I can. I find that some days I do more from the blog notes and some days more from the regular work notes. The notes serve as goals for my brain and it invents/discoveres solutions in no particular order. This makes me more productive because I can switch when I'm bored (which to me is an indication that my brain needs more time to find solutions in this space). And if nothing is hitting the right note, I'll take a nap or read or watch a show for a bit or go for a long walk or hike - anything that's not in the to-do just to give myself the creative space. I find that giving myself problems to solve, and allowing my subconcious brain to invent solutions for it while I do other things actually works quite well for me and allows me to make steady progress.

Labo333 1y ago
Interesting. My process is similar, although based on the GTD method (for example with an Inbox list) and using Trello for implementation (I get syncing, task level notes, multimedia, item drag and drop, etc)
Lerc 1y ago
My thinking is threaded too, but it's more like the XKCD primer plot diagram. I have a churn of tasks and subtasks that I add do, my brain randomly picks one to be the most important thing in the world and I do that to the exclusion of all else. Methylphenidate didn't help much but dexamphetamine seems to improve things a bit once I get past the drowsiness it causes.
brianzelip 1y ago
Perhaps https://whereisalan.dev/ https://whereisalan.dev/

stephc_int13 1y ago

If you want to reach the full potential of your brain to solve a specific problem, you'll need both hard focus during intense sessions and "background" work, and yes taking a step back (during a walk, shower, coffee break or bathroom visit) is a way to trigger the switch. The key is to care deeply about solving the problem, not simply looking to get rid of it for a quick win, if you are immediately thinking about something else as soon as you can, you'll never get the best results. When using code assistants I found that a nice way to take a step back is to use the Socratic method, chatting with it about the design instead of trying to force it doing it for you. It is like chatting with a well informed but not too clever normie colleague, it can help taking a step back.

liamwire 1y ago

I’ve found this problem to be compounded by the use of stimulant medications — no matter how aware of the phenomenon one is going into a task, it can feel nigh impossible sometimes to avoid locking into whatever path I’m on as the drugs kick in. This seems true not only of the task itself but also of the individual decisions that can constitute it. I don’t think this is surprising or novel, to be sure, but frustratingly predictable.

sureglymop 1y ago

I find it interesting that no one has created a better interface for these LLMs. Two things that should be available by now in conversations are branching and history editing. Branching is somewhat trivial so let's focus on the history. Now when I last used an LLM API, the whole context was still managed manually. Meaning I had to send the API the whole conversation history as one long text for every new query. This means that I could technically change a part of the history directly. Manipulating the history though is not really a trivial problem. The LLM would need to re evaluate starting from that point. But, the re-evaluation may result in something completely different... If there are branches, perhaps it would also be desirable to let it propagate into the branches. Next, re-evaluate until where? We can assume a conversation happened until the present moment and the user may have changed their reality/state during the conversation before that point. For example, I may have changed some function based on a suggestion of the LLM. Now, for re-evaluation it would actually be nice if the LLM could also take that state change into consideration. Here it would be nice if the LLM had the concept of certain logical facts and pieces of information and how they relate to each other but with an interface so that we could see that. If such a piece of information in the conversation is then changed, that would affect the information that is related to it. We could follow a sort of sequence of logical conclusions being made to verify what happened. Just some thoughts with no conclusion. I think current LLM interfaces could be a lot better.

dmd 1y ago
I'm confused by what you mean by this, because most LLM interfaces other than the very very basic ones do already have branching and history editing? E.g. pretty much every third party LLM interface? Are you talking about something more than that?
- sureglymop 1y ago
  Yes. Here is a scenario: Let's say you ask an LLM to help you with a programming task. The LLM gives you a solution and you copy that into your code. While getting to the result of this solution, spanned over multiple messages, you give it more context about your code base. You ask it to help with multiple sub problems and it answers with suitable responses containing code snippets. Now, you change your mind and want to actually write your program in a different language. You could at this point just tell that to the LLM and it would change course from here on out. Everytime it is queried the full history including the original problem is sent to it. The change in programming language is taken into account because it eventually gets to the point where you changed your mind. But instead what you'd probably want is the solution it gave you initially and all the little solutions to all the sub problems but in the newly chosen programming language! You'd like to simulate or re-evaluate the conversation but with the newly chosen programming language. I haven't seen that implemented in a usable way but as I said, this is not a trivial feature either.

untech 1y ago

I use pomodoro, and I think it helps with that problem. Every break, I also add a short record in my “log” file. I can still become obsessed, but happens more rarely, and I am more aware of the obsession, because it usually means I start ignoring the timer.

jeremyjh 1y ago
I had the same thought; its harder to ignore how long you've been on one task or sub-task when using this technique, and you've got a reminder to take a break. Sometimes ignoring the end of the timer to finish what you are doing while its all in your mind is the right call and so it still takes some attention and discipline.

ljlolel 1y ago

It’s why companies don’t want you doing a sabbatical. Poor return rate.

esafak 1y ago

I chuckled because stepping back is exactly what some thinking models do with their "Wait... aha!" dance.

SoftTalker 1y ago

It's also important (I would say essential) to set a hard stop time every day. No matter what you're in the middle of, no matter how close you think you are to a breakthrough, you stop for the day at that time. Tomorrow will always be there. Whether that's the traditional 5:00pm or some other schedule you need to give yourself time to relax, step away, spend time with family or friends or pets or just yourself, and keep up with all the other demands in your life.

quantadev 1y ago

All great programmers are exactly like this. We have a relentless insatiable desire to always be fixing problems, solving challenges/mysteries, and/or just creating. When you mix those psychological tendencies with the other aspect many of us share, called HFA, you end up also with extremely focused and narrow interests, as well. What I tell myself (which is true) when I notice I've perhaps done something where the effort might not be worth the pay off, is that life itself is about the journey not the destination. As they say "The Journey _is_ the Destination", which applies to my other hobby, riding motorcycles. You can always get anywhere "better" in a car, but it's more fun on two wheels.

dfissadifdoi 1y ago

[dead]

gdubs 1y ago

Been there. I often talk about how I think people should learn to code not to get a job but for the mental models it gives you. Similar to how learning a musical instrument enriches your life. Or art. And one example that feels particularly apt here is that in my art classes in college, my drawing professors really hammered-in the habit of stepping back a few feet from your canvas. It might feel like it's applicable specifically to that context, but it's amazing how much that voice comes back even when I'm working on code or 3D modeling: "take a step back."

RossBencina 1y ago

This reminds me of Richard Hamming's practice of spending time every Friday to consider the big questions of his field. Here's the first summary I found: https://nobaproject.com/blog/2018-11-01-tough-questions-and-great-thoughts-advice-from-richard-hamming https://nobaproject.com/blog/2018-11-01-tough-questions-and-... The main Hamming materials I'm aware of are: "You and your research" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw and the course, "Learning to Learn" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 The original course notes are online somewhere, can't find right now. And I just found that there is a book: https://gwern.net/doc/science/1997-hamming-theartofdoingscienceandengineering.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/science/1997-hamming-theartofdoingscie... A serious talk by British comedian John Cleese "Creativity In Management" is also relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g it touches on switching between "open" and "closed" modes of thought. Perhaps this is what we'd call switching between the DMN and TPN. Neurotypical exclusive switching between these networks is a function that is theorised to be impaired in ADHD.

gwern 1y ago
https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#great-thoughts-fridays https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#great-thoughts-fr... You can think of it as a RL problem, and there are some interesting algorithms which achieve good performance by periodically 'breaking out' of exploitation, but less and less: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07979 https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07979 (I expect that you can come up with an infinite hierarchy of 'wake ups' which converge to a fixed overhead and which aren't terribly far off an optimal schedule of replanning wake-ups, and that something like 'great thoughts Friday' is the first step; then you'd have 'great thoughts first-of-the-month' and 'great thoughts new year's day' etc: https://gwern.net/socks#fn10 https://gwern.net/socks#fn10 )

twodave 1y ago

What the author is describing isn’t my experience at all. I tend to operate from a lens of asking for increased feedback as my work takes me further off the “beaten path”. There’s essentially zero chance I’m going to go off screwing around porting code with an LLM unless I already bounced the idea of doing that off of another person or two that I trust. In my hobbies I think going off on tangents _is_ the experience, so I have no qualms about doing it. But when I’m working I’m almost always thinking in terms of stewardship. Is what I’m doing good for the business, our customers, my coworkers, my own professional development, etc.? Any sort of fixation on minutiae is just subservient to those questions. That said, I don’t think of a 5 minute tangent like the author describes as a heavy investment. If anything it’s just a happy little side-journey taken to better understand the nature of the problem space. For me the threshold of “this may be a waste of time” is more measured in hours than minutes.

kranner 1y ago

Previous discussions on psychonetics and deconcentration of attention seem relevant, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10028317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10028317 Personally I've found a continuous open awareness style of meditation has really helped me balance things out, as I went from someone with very little doggedness to e.g. being two weeks into cataloguing all my books with Delicious Library before realising it was kind of pointless. The open awareness practice (very different from focus-on-your-breath and also the visual deconcentration discussed in the link above) is about encouraging the recognition of this-is-how-things-are as it naturally and spontaneously occurs; doing this more and more also builds confidence in one's intuition about (in this context) whether to persevere at the current task or whether to step back. I don't think there is a foolproof system that can be developed as a substitute for this kind of intuition. Speaking for myself I can and will continue to second-guess over time any external system that may feel definitive when it is first established. But I can learn to trust the (unfortunately) indeterminate part of myself that tells me I'm doing the right thing.

RHSman2 1y ago

To grind or not to grind?