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Multiple contexts is hard, and often counter-productive. It used to be popular on HN to talk about keeping your "flow", and railing against everything that bro
by bryanlarsen 1y ago
Multiple contexts is hard, and often counter-productive. It used to be popular on HN to talk about keeping your "flow", and railing against everything that broke a programmer's flow. These slow AI's constantly break flow.
- solumunus 1y agoThe new flow is cycling between 5 concurrent agent sessions while watching YouTube.
- handfuloflight 1y agoas they say, "few"
- theshrike79 1y agoAnd my ADHD brain loves it :D Except no YouTube, I just watch my shows off Plex.
- joquarky 1y agoThis is why one-size-fits-all doesn't work if a company legitimately cares about productivity.
- hamdingers 1y agoThe ideal for me as a flow-seeker is the quick-edit feature of Void and presumably other editors. It saves me the context switching to google or docs to find the right syntax and method names for what I want to express, without requiring I waste my time waiting for the LLM to figure out what I already know (the what and the where).
- bryanlarsen 1y agoThe auto complete provided by your lsp server to your editor does a much better job of this than LLM's do, in my opinion.
- theshrike79 1y agoMy LLM-powered autocomplete can guess complete functions within 80-95% correctness. No LSP server autocomplete has managed to do that.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoFlow sacredness made sense when we could only do our work serially and juggling tasks just meant switching around one thing at a time. Now we can parallelize more of our activities, so it's time to reevaluate the old wisdom.
- zahlman 1y agoI disagree. Nothing has changed about how human brains work. Try to read something while listening to something else at the same time, and see how much you absorb, for example. We can still, in large part, only do our work serially.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoI don’t think you understand. I’m not suggesting you try to do two tasks at the same time. The old wisdom isn’t that we shouldn’t do two things at once with our hands/minds directly. It’s that we shouldn’t put another task into WIP while an existing task is still pending completion, if theres work we can do on that already WIP task. (Lean methodology) But now we can start the tasks and rest while they are ongoing, and wait until a later point to evaluate their result. So you have choices: do you avoid delegating any tasks because you think you can do them faster? Do you rest and do nothing or get distracted with non-work while you wait? Or do you begin parallel async work and interleave orchestration and evaluation tasks (performed serially as individual pieces)? None of this is about breaking human psychology. It’s about how to adapt processes within lean methodologies that became pervasive in our industry.
- solumunus 1y agoYou still work serially. It’s just while you’re reviewing output or working on the next prompt you have other agent sessions doing work. It’s entirely possible to be in a flow state cycling between concurrent agent sessions constantly reviewing output, building context and honing prompts. The context switching may be difficult for some. Those that can manage it and excel at these new skills will undoubtedly become more productive than those who cannot and do not.
- 1y ago