5 ms·

This can work with the way you think as well. Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer

by nabbed 10mo ago

This can work with the way you think as well. Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it very uncomfortable, and I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence, but he would either raise his finger or (usually) just ignore me. This could go on for 30-60 seconds, at which point he might shrug and say "I don't know" or, more likely, have a pretty well formed idea of how to move ahead. I used to joke to my co-workers that during those silent interludes, he was swapping in the solution from a remote disk. This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.

godelski 10mo ago
> he might shrug and say "I don't know" I have far more trust for people willing to say this. > I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence I find that I'm more likely to do this but try to make an effort to stop. There's times to spitball but we should also spend time thinking. And let's be real 30-60s is not that long > This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code. I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. Plus, while typing is when I'm doing my best debugging and best simplifying.
- bigiain 10mo ago
  If shrug-guy is anything like me, he sat there blurting out half-baked ideas and then shooting them down all in his internal monologue, instead of out loud. For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem. From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"
  - godelski 10mo ago
    Sure, but isn't there still an advantage to this? If two people are silently doing this then they don't influence one another as much, helping find a wider range of solutions as well as identify issues with certain solutions that the other might not have seen. Instead if you're blurting out your thinking more in unison. Naturally you'll stray less, exploring less. Of course you want collaboration but I find the magic is going back and forth between alone and together. I even find this helpful when just working by myself, stepping away from the problem or context switching, allowing the problem to distill.
    - jaredsohn 10mo ago
      Another way to think of it is if you're blurting out your thinking you're reducing redundant work and perhaps inspiring the other person to think of additional solutions that are offshoots of what you're dismissing. I see merits to both ways of looking at this.
      - godelski 10mo ago
        Yeah I agree but that's why I think there's a balance. But the context here is the more nervous blurting which I think is going too much in the other direction. We should be comfortable with some silence and thinking. But everyone has their own personal preferences. Which is perfectly fine too. But I think it's worth mentioning that, as illustrated by the comment, it's typically more acceptable to blurt than think silently. And there's the bias that blurting makes it harder to think silently by thinking silently doesn't make blurting harder (the uncomfortable with some silence part is not healthy imo. Of course long silence is a different issue but we're talking 30-60s)
      - vnorilo 10mo ago
        Probably true for many. When thinking about hard problems I'm usually not thinking in language, at least not the kind we speak between us humans, so it can be incredibly distracting if I have to "translate" back and forth while both thinking and communicating.
    - 10mo ago
- rgoulter 10mo ago
  > I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. It's always possible to go slower for practically no cost. -- So, any benefit from going slower is obtainable for everyone. Whereas, typing faster takes discipline and effort. There are diminishing benefits to putting in more effort to type faster. The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.
  - godelski 10mo ago
    > typing faster takes discipline and effort. >> ***typing isn't the bottleneck*** I believe you read too fast > The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information. You've missed the critical part of what I was saying. While typing I'm doing other things in parallel. Those other things are things that require you to scrutinize and look at each character. I think the vacuum analogy from the OP is quite apt here. It's much harder to debug other people's code and more so an LLMs.
- jimmaswell 10mo ago
  > typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. I find it absolutely is much of the time - I'll determine the architecture/overall solution, know exactly what needs to go in a multitude of files, and now actualizing all that isn't really thinking anymore, just donkey work. Getting AI to do this has been incredible now that it's finally good enough. I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass, and when I introduced bugs by changing it by hand, it found them instantly from stack traces without even having symbols, saving me hours. I see a future where writing a large codebase all by hand is seen like raising a barn the Amish way with no powertools - impressive and maybe there's something to be said for it philosophically, but just not practical otherwise.
  - anhner 10mo ago
    > I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass Lmao, please tell me what products you're working on so I can avoid them
    - anhner 10mo ago
      Oh my, the AI bros got upset! You must be cranky from having to fix all those bugs your agent keeps throwing up in your "flawless 500+ LOC" code they keep writing.
  - typewithrhythm 10mo ago
    How often are you actually doing this though? I think I probably work in something greenfield about once a decade. The hard part is always going down a rabbit hole in established code bases. I can do the boilerplate in a few days. It saves time, but not really even one hairy issue a year.
    - bornfreddy 10mo ago
      > The hard part is always going down a rabbit hole in established code bases. Actually, I found that this is exactly where they shine (I wouldn't trust them with greenfield implementation myself). Exploring existing code is so much easier when you can ask them how something works. You can even ask them to find problems - you can't trust them to be correct, of course, but at least you get some good brainstorming going. And, incredibly, they often do find actual problems in the code. Pretty impressive for language models.
- Quothling 10mo ago
  > I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. Plus, while typing is when I'm doing my best debugging and best simplifying. As you sort of point out between the lines, it depends on what you work on. I had an AI agent rewrite some ancient (and terrible code) which had stopped working because the v1 of an api on v3 was sunset. It took around 5 minutes out of my day, and most of those were having two people explaining to me where the code was and what they thought had happened to make it break. It would've like taken me a full day to fix without AI because I would have needed to understand things first, and because it was quite a lot of code. The result wasn't very good, but it was better than what was before, and since that had run for years without anyone tuching it, well... good enough. Heck, it might've taken me more than a day because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good". Aside from this anecdote I think AI writes a good 80% of my code these days. I'm not sure I buy the whole "bottleneck or not" discussion around typing. I think for a lot of people, myself included, AI does 10x part of the process of writing software. Where it doesn't help is when you need to do computer science, and as you point out, those parts AI don't speed up. I sometimes still use AI for computer science parts, but in those situations the AI will be a rubber duck because I tend to think by talking out my own ideas, and at least the AI duck pretends to answer. Even if the answer is more useless than what the actual rubber duck comes up with, which it usually is, it's more immersive for me.
  - godelski 10mo ago
    > because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good". Which creates an interesting question. Would that extra time be worth it because your version would break less, do more, and/or last longer? Don't get me wrong, we all write sloppy code and often not our best. It's one of the difficulties of being an engineer, deciding what exactly is good enough.
chrisfosterelli 10mo ago
I often do this in meetings and have gotten into the habit of saying "I'm thinking". It's not much but it gives both of us time to think and explicitly makes it clear I don't expect the person to say something. I think that helps.
- fgonzag 10mo ago
  I just blurt out "processing" when they start looking at me weird. People tend to take it well.
  - refulgentis 10mo ago
    Fair enough, I do like parent’s a bit better, “blurting processing” feels like a too high default setting right after seeing “I’m thinking” :) - not that any of it matters anyways, communicating _something_ gets you there. Rest it just triaging around the edges what people will call you weird for, and if they are, they were going to anyway.
  - underdeserver 10mo ago
    I read this at first as "I just blurt out "processing" and people look at me weird", which made me smile.
- oldestofsports 10mo ago
  ”Thinking longer for a better answer”
- elxr 10mo ago
  "Give me a second" is something I say when someone just has to break the silence with some unproductive comment. Having 20-30 seconds to think silently should be a completely normal thing.
teaearlgraycold 10mo ago
I that once in a technical interview and got the job (just paused for 30 seconds until the answer came to me). I think they expected a 15 minute process of problem solving. If I recall correctly the question was something like: You are sitting recording cars by their license plate as they drive down a road. You only have N spots on your worksheet. You can overwrite spots as many times as you need to. By the end of the day you must have an unbiased sampling of cars that have driven by you. How do you record the cars?
- bart__ 10mo ago
  Nice statistical problem! I only thought of a solution that is valid for many cars and few worksheet spots. Were you able to fully solve it on the spot?
  - teaearlgraycold 10mo ago
    What other situations are you concerned with that your solution doesn’t handle?
    - bart__ 10mo ago
      The best solution I could think of on the spot was this: First write down every license place until it fills up. Then for each time a car drives by, give it a 1/2 chance to write it down. Moving down the list regardless of the outcome. Then once the bottom is reached, do it again but with 1/3 a chance. Over and over again, decreasing the chance each time. I checked for which situations it is valid, and it surprisingly was when there are many more cars than the list size. But it is not valid when there are just a few more cars than the list size.
      - teaearlgraycold 10mo ago
        Mine was to roll a number between 1 and N once N is greater than M (N being cars seen so far, M your slots available). If you get a number that is less than or equal to M, replace that slot. If it is greater than M, that sample is dropped.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
barrell 10mo ago
I do this a lot as well. I have a bad habit of just freezing physically when I start to think. Since my work is conducted over video, my colleagues will often think I dropped off the call XD Personally I find it a bad habit of mine, I have no idea how people gracefully take time to think. Whenever I do say something like “hold on, let me just think for a moment” my brain completely freezes and I get no thinking done.
ErigmolCt 10mo ago
I think it gets at something we've collectively trained ourselves out of: tolerating silence while thinking
avalys 10mo ago
I worked with a guy that operated like this, a technical expert in a very specialized domain. You'd ask him a question - he'd just stare at you in silence for 60s or more, and then give a very well-considered answer that you couldn't get from anyone else in the world. His manager was used to this and sort of enjoyed the mystique of this monk-like expert that he was responsible for. I once was in a meeting where we had to talk to the great expert on the phone. Let's just say his name was Otto. Of course, he worked remote quite often, in the days before Zoom. His manager calls him and puts the phone on speakerphone for the room to hear. Manager: Otto, we need your input on <long technical problem>. <60 seconds of silence> Otto: Yes, I think that might work, but you'll run into <other problems>. Manager: Well, yes, we've considered that, but <explanation> A few minutes of reasonably normal conversation ensues between the assembled group and Otto. Then: Manager: Well, I think then that this is a pretty good solution, as long as Otto agrees. Manager looks around the table, clearly waiting for Otto's concurrence <60 seconds of silence> <90 seconds of silence> <120 seconds of silence> People are starting to get uncomfortable. The manager makes a reassuring face. This is normal for those of us that work closely with the great expert, do not lose faith. <240 seconds of silence> Manager briefly lets slip a concerned look, then quickly hides it <360 seconds of silence> Manager: Um, Otto? Otto: Oh, I thought I was waiting for you.

by nabbed 10mo ago

godelski 10mo ago

> he might shrug and say "I don't know" I have far more trust for people willing to say this. > I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence I find that I'm more likely to do this but try to make an effort to stop. There's times to spitball but we should also spend time thinking. And let's be real 30-60s is not that long > This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code. I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. Plus, while typing is when I'm doing my best debugging and best simplifying.

bigiain 10mo ago
If shrug-guy is anything like me, he sat there blurting out half-baked ideas and then shooting them down all in his internal monologue, instead of out loud. For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem. From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"
- godelski 10mo ago
  Sure, but isn't there still an advantage to this? If two people are silently doing this then they don't influence one another as much, helping find a wider range of solutions as well as identify issues with certain solutions that the other might not have seen. Instead if you're blurting out your thinking more in unison. Naturally you'll stray less, exploring less. Of course you want collaboration but I find the magic is going back and forth between alone and together. I even find this helpful when just working by myself, stepping away from the problem or context switching, allowing the problem to distill.
  - jaredsohn 10mo ago
    Another way to think of it is if you're blurting out your thinking you're reducing redundant work and perhaps inspiring the other person to think of additional solutions that are offshoots of what you're dismissing. I see merits to both ways of looking at this.
    - godelski 10mo ago
      Yeah I agree but that's why I think there's a balance. But the context here is the more nervous blurting which I think is going too much in the other direction. We should be comfortable with some silence and thinking. But everyone has their own personal preferences. Which is perfectly fine too. But I think it's worth mentioning that, as illustrated by the comment, it's typically more acceptable to blurt than think silently. And there's the bias that blurting makes it harder to think silently by thinking silently doesn't make blurting harder (the uncomfortable with some silence part is not healthy imo. Of course long silence is a different issue but we're talking 30-60s)
    - vnorilo 10mo ago
      Probably true for many. When thinking about hard problems I'm usually not thinking in language, at least not the kind we speak between us humans, so it can be incredibly distracting if I have to "translate" back and forth while both thinking and communicating.
  - 10mo ago
rgoulter 10mo ago
> I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. It's always possible to go slower for practically no cost. -- So, any benefit from going slower is obtainable for everyone. Whereas, typing faster takes discipline and effort. There are diminishing benefits to putting in more effort to type faster. The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.
- godelski 10mo ago
  > typing faster takes discipline and effort. >> ***typing isn't the bottleneck*** I believe you read too fast > The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information. You've missed the critical part of what I was saying. While typing I'm doing other things in parallel. Those other things are things that require you to scrutinize and look at each character. I think the vacuum analogy from the OP is quite apt here. It's much harder to debug other people's code and more so an LLMs.
jimmaswell 10mo ago
> typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. I find it absolutely is much of the time - I'll determine the architecture/overall solution, know exactly what needs to go in a multitude of files, and now actualizing all that isn't really thinking anymore, just donkey work. Getting AI to do this has been incredible now that it's finally good enough. I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass, and when I introduced bugs by changing it by hand, it found them instantly from stack traces without even having symbols, saving me hours. I see a future where writing a large codebase all by hand is seen like raising a barn the Amish way with no powertools - impressive and maybe there's something to be said for it philosophically, but just not practical otherwise.
- anhner 10mo ago
  > I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass Lmao, please tell me what products you're working on so I can avoid them
  - anhner 10mo ago
    Oh my, the AI bros got upset! You must be cranky from having to fix all those bugs your agent keeps throwing up in your "flawless 500+ LOC" code they keep writing.
- typewithrhythm 10mo ago
  How often are you actually doing this though? I think I probably work in something greenfield about once a decade. The hard part is always going down a rabbit hole in established code bases. I can do the boilerplate in a few days. It saves time, but not really even one hairy issue a year.
  - bornfreddy 10mo ago
    > The hard part is always going down a rabbit hole in established code bases. Actually, I found that this is exactly where they shine (I wouldn't trust them with greenfield implementation myself). Exploring existing code is so much easier when you can ask them how something works. You can even ask them to find problems - you can't trust them to be correct, of course, but at least you get some good brainstorming going. And, incredibly, they often do find actual problems in the code. Pretty impressive for language models.
Quothling 10mo ago
> I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. Plus, while typing is when I'm doing my best debugging and best simplifying. As you sort of point out between the lines, it depends on what you work on. I had an AI agent rewrite some ancient (and terrible code) which had stopped working because the v1 of an api on v3 was sunset. It took around 5 minutes out of my day, and most of those were having two people explaining to me where the code was and what they thought had happened to make it break. It would've like taken me a full day to fix without AI because I would have needed to understand things first, and because it was quite a lot of code. The result wasn't very good, but it was better than what was before, and since that had run for years without anyone tuching it, well... good enough. Heck, it might've taken me more than a day because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good". Aside from this anecdote I think AI writes a good 80% of my code these days. I'm not sure I buy the whole "bottleneck or not" discussion around typing. I think for a lot of people, myself included, AI does 10x part of the process of writing software. Where it doesn't help is when you need to do computer science, and as you point out, those parts AI don't speed up. I sometimes still use AI for computer science parts, but in those situations the AI will be a rubber duck because I tend to think by talking out my own ideas, and at least the AI duck pretends to answer. Even if the answer is more useless than what the actual rubber duck comes up with, which it usually is, it's more immersive for me.
- godelski 10mo ago
  > because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good". Which creates an interesting question. Would that extra time be worth it because your version would break less, do more, and/or last longer? Don't get me wrong, we all write sloppy code and often not our best. It's one of the difficulties of being an engineer, deciding what exactly is good enough.

chrisfosterelli 10mo ago

I often do this in meetings and have gotten into the habit of saying "I'm thinking". It's not much but it gives both of us time to think and explicitly makes it clear I don't expect the person to say something. I think that helps.

fgonzag 10mo ago
I just blurt out "processing" when they start looking at me weird. People tend to take it well.
- refulgentis 10mo ago
  Fair enough, I do like parent’s a bit better, “blurting processing” feels like a too high default setting right after seeing “I’m thinking” :) - not that any of it matters anyways, communicating _something_ gets you there. Rest it just triaging around the edges what people will call you weird for, and if they are, they were going to anyway.
- underdeserver 10mo ago
  I read this at first as "I just blurt out "processing" and people look at me weird", which made me smile.
oldestofsports 10mo ago
”Thinking longer for a better answer”
elxr 10mo ago
"Give me a second" is something I say when someone just has to break the silence with some unproductive comment. Having 20-30 seconds to think silently should be a completely normal thing.

teaearlgraycold 10mo ago

I that once in a technical interview and got the job (just paused for 30 seconds until the answer came to me). I think they expected a 15 minute process of problem solving. If I recall correctly the question was something like: You are sitting recording cars by their license plate as they drive down a road. You only have N spots on your worksheet. You can overwrite spots as many times as you need to. By the end of the day you must have an unbiased sampling of cars that have driven by you. How do you record the cars?

bart__ 10mo ago
Nice statistical problem! I only thought of a solution that is valid for many cars and few worksheet spots. Were you able to fully solve it on the spot?
- teaearlgraycold 10mo ago
  What other situations are you concerned with that your solution doesn’t handle?
  - bart__ 10mo ago
    The best solution I could think of on the spot was this: First write down every license place until it fills up. Then for each time a car drives by, give it a 1/2 chance to write it down. Moving down the list regardless of the outcome. Then once the bottom is reached, do it again but with 1/3 a chance. Over and over again, decreasing the chance each time. I checked for which situations it is valid, and it surprisingly was when there are many more cars than the list size. But it is not valid when there are just a few more cars than the list size.
    - teaearlgraycold 10mo ago
      Mine was to roll a number between 1 and N once N is greater than M (N being cars seen so far, M your slots available). If you get a number that is less than or equal to M, replace that slot. If it is greater than M, that sample is dropped.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

barrell 10mo ago

I do this a lot as well. I have a bad habit of just freezing physically when I start to think. Since my work is conducted over video, my colleagues will often think I dropped off the call XD Personally I find it a bad habit of mine, I have no idea how people gracefully take time to think. Whenever I do say something like “hold on, let me just think for a moment” my brain completely freezes and I get no thinking done.

ErigmolCt 10mo ago

I think it gets at something we've collectively trained ourselves out of: tolerating silence while thinking

avalys 10mo ago

I worked with a guy that operated like this, a technical expert in a very specialized domain. You'd ask him a question - he'd just stare at you in silence for 60s or more, and then give a very well-considered answer that you couldn't get from anyone else in the world. His manager was used to this and sort of enjoyed the mystique of this monk-like expert that he was responsible for. I once was in a meeting where we had to talk to the great expert on the phone. Let's just say his name was Otto. Of course, he worked remote quite often, in the days before Zoom. His manager calls him and puts the phone on speakerphone for the room to hear. Manager: Otto, we need your input on <long technical problem>. <60 seconds of silence> Otto: Yes, I think that might work, but you'll run into <other problems>. Manager: Well, yes, we've considered that, but <explanation> A few minutes of reasonably normal conversation ensues between the assembled group and Otto. Then: Manager: Well, I think then that this is a pretty good solution, as long as Otto agrees. Manager looks around the table, clearly waiting for Otto's concurrence <60 seconds of silence> <90 seconds of silence> <120 seconds of silence> People are starting to get uncomfortable. The manager makes a reassuring face. This is normal for those of us that work closely with the great expert, do not lose faith. <240 seconds of silence> Manager briefly lets slip a concerned look, then quickly hides it <360 seconds of silence> Manager: Um, Otto? Otto: Oh, I thought I was waiting for you.