20 ms·

Some things just take time

• vaylian 7mo ago
  Speed is useful, when you have a good idea or a hypothesis you want to test. But if you are running in the wrong direction, speed is of very little value. With LLMs it might be even harder to stop and realize that you are creating the wrong thing, because you are not spending effort to create the wrong thing.
  • binsquare 7mo ago
    I can relate to this, when time and effort of coding is a limiting factor it forces people to be more thoughtful about what to create.
  • allenu 7mo ago
    > But if you are running in the wrong direction, speed is of very little value. I think of it differently. Speed is great because it means you can change direction very easily, and being wrong isn't as costly. As long as you're tracking where you're going, if you end up in the wrong place, but you got there quickly and noticed it, you can quickly move in a different direction to get to the right place. Sometimes we take time mostly because it's expensive to be wrong. If being wrong doesn't cost anything, going fast and being wrong a lot may actually be better as it lets you explore lots of options. For this strategy to work, however, you need good judgment to recognize when you've reached a wrong position.
  • julenx 7mo ago
    I'm seeing this cultural pattern where developers have started accepting LLM output with very little scrutiny. This ends up code that works on the surface, but most of the times problems are not addressed at their source. Creating these wrong things is only cheaper with LLMs. Since developers now spend less time and effort to create that wrong thing, they don't feel the need validate or reflect on them so much. The risk is not the tool itself, but the over-reliance on it and forgoing feedback loops that have made teams stronger, e.g. debugging, testing, and reasoning why something works a particular way.
• Swizec 7mo ago
  > everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks. But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills that void. Make sure you fit the rocks first.
  • big-chungus4 7mo ago
    You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if you remove the fish, it will have less water than before. You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first half, you will end up with more water.
    • auggierose 7mo ago
      What?
      • ghurtado 7mo ago
        Psilocybin? Not sure, I used to be better at diagnosing this type of episode.
      • NikolaNovak 7mo ago
        I assume post used extreme example to demonstrate that wise-sounding metaphors may not have inherent point or value.
      • satvikpendem 7mo ago
        They're talking about Archimedes' principle, displacement of water. The fish makes the water bottle overflow, so be careful when you add the fish so that it doesn't. It's a counter analogy to the rocks one above.
      • spencerflem 7mo ago
• rkwtr1299 7mo ago
  [dead]
  • luxurytent 7mo ago
    I think he's learning how to effectively use the tools we now have and is sharing his experience in a thoughtful way. Madness is a stretch
  • the_mitsuhiko 7mo ago
    I admit that it’s a conflict and I don’t know if I have the right answers. I cannot help but see the good and bad in these things. Rejecting it outright is unlikely to help.
• titanomachy 7mo ago
  > We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to zero.
  • agumonkey 7mo ago
    Maybe the analogy was wrong but more and more, I believe that some of a value was implicitly about how many organs/industries did it touch.
    • ghywertelling 7mo ago
      [dead]
  • simonw 7mo ago
    I would say that wearing a sweater knitted by one's grandmother is its own kind of status symbol. I'm more impressed by that (someone having a grandmother willing to invest that much effort in a gift for them) than someone spending $1000 on an item of clothing. The fact that those items took a long time to make is part of what makes them status symbols though, because if you pay a lot of money for something that took no time to make at all (see most NFTs) you look like an idiot to a lot of people.
    • titanomachy 7mo ago
      I like the sweater, and some people like you might recognize it as special, but it doesn't have the universal cachet of a Rolex or something. It's also a bit chunky and funny-looking (but I guess so are some Rolexes).
      • daveguy 7mo ago
        "universal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
• andyhedges 7mo ago
  > We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience. Not true, we do this because the 99% of the time it's true, however there are people who would be perfectly competent and responsible to drive without living to the age of 16-18. Same with voting, there are humans who have a deep understanding and intelligence about politics at a younger age than suffrage. Equally there are people who will be reckless drivers at 40 and vote on whim at 60. We have these rules not because sophistication only comes through lived experience, we have them because it's strongly correlated and covers of most error cases. To take this to AI, run the model enough times with a higher enough temperature, then perhaps it can solve your challenges with a high enough quality - just a thought.
  • abnry 7mo ago
    The guiding analogy of the piece is that of planting a tree and waiting for it to mature. The reason we need to wait is that it takes time for some things to mature.
    • andyhedges 7mo ago
      Yes, I'm saying it's not a good analogy
• dminor 7mo ago
  On the contrary, you can solve the tree problem with money. There are nurseries that sell mature trees -- most people though will not choose to spend $20k on a tree.
  • hshsiejensjsj 7mo ago
    This is nitpicking his point. But anyhow, you can buy large-ish burlapped trees but they aren’t as healthy, often die, and nothing close to a 100+ yr old estate oak tree or a decades old rose garden. You just can’t make it faster, transplanting plants that old will kill them.
    • dminor 7mo ago
      You're moving the goalposts on his poor analogy :) Most of the trees do just fine, and these nurseries will typically provide a warranty.
      • johnthedebs 7mo ago
        Besides nitpicking, even your original point isn't even true. You cannot transplant a 100 year old tree (which has not been constrained in size dramatically) and expect it to survive for any reasonable length of time.
  • TurdF3rguson 7mo ago
    You won't find a 50 year old American Chestnut in a nursery, lol. And forget about 20k. If you find someone willing to sell their tree you're looking at at least 10x that for the logistics of moving a 20 ton root system.
    • dminor 7mo ago
      You won't find a 50 year old American Chestnut anywhere lol, they were wiped out almost entirely.
      • 7mo ago
• QuadrupleA 7mo ago
  > everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?
  • agumonkey 7mo ago
    A blend of both. You do create more, but the goalposts are always one more step away. ps: it's strange that YouTubers are talking about the same thing. People in different dev circles. Agentic feels like doom ide scroll.
    • irishcoffee 7mo ago
      Sounds similar to a slot machine. How odd…
  • ErroneousBosh 7mo ago
    > I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out? It definitely hasn't for me. I spent about an hour today trying to use AI to write something fairly simple and I'm still no further forward. I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development.
    • ghurtado 7mo ago
      > I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development. When Russians invaded Germany during WWII, some of them (who had never seen a toilet) thought that toilets were advanced potato washing machines, and were rightfully pissed when their potatoes were flushed away and didn't come back. Sounds like you're feeling a similar frustration with your problem.
      • lawn 7mo ago
• lapcat 7mo ago
  > I’m also increasingly skeptical of anyone who sells me something that supposedly saves my time. Imagine a world in which the promise of AI was that workers could keep their jobs, at the same compensation as before, but work fewer hours and days per week due to increased productivity. What could you do with those extra hours and days? Sleep better. Exercise more. Prepare healthy meals. Spend more time with family and friends. The benefits to physical and mental well-being are priceless. Even if you happened to earn extra money for the same amount of work, your time can be infinitely more valuable than money. Unfortunately, that's not this world. Which is why the "increased productivity" promise doesn't seem to benefit workers at all. If you look at the technological utopias that people imagined 50, 60+ years ago, they involved lives of leisure. If you would have told them that advances in technology would not reduce our working hours at all, maybe they would have started smashing the machines back then. Now we're supposed to be happy with more "stuff", even if there's no more time to enjoy stuff.
  • heavyset_go 7mo ago
    > Unfortunately, that's not this world. At one point, it was this world[1]: > Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual. According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers[1], the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker participating in the eight-hour movements of the late nineteenth century was "simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago." > The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks' worth of ales -- to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.[5] > The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year. [1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
• tbrownaw 7mo ago
  > We know this intuitively. We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them. Either because of the time it took to build them or because of their age. Oh, I thought it was because they're a way to show off about being rich. > We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience. Even if she could reach the pedals, my 4yo doesn't have the attention span to drive. This isn't a "lived experience" thing, it's a physical brain development thing. IIRC the are effects with learning math, where starting earlier had limited impact on being able to move to certain more advanced topics earlier; ie there's more going on than just hours of experience. The standard age for voting is also the age for being a legal adult. There are sound logical reasons that these ages should match. The standard drinking age is due to pressure by activists, and AIUI is lower in other countries.
  • sodapopcan 7mo ago
    > Oh, I thought it was because they're a way to show off about being rich. Maybe for some. I think these examples were carefully chosen. Hermès are made in France, "Swiss watch" doesn't automatically mean Rolex, though in that case Rolex does own most of their manufacturing (though there is a whole world of carefully made watches out there that don't cost 10K). As for old properties... there is a huge range there, but unless you are living in a castle, most people, at least my city, are likely silently thinking: "I'm so sorry for them that they have to live in that old house."
• cdevries 7mo ago
  https://simplytrees.com/ https://simplytrees.com/
• sledgehammers 7mo ago
  Also you know, for programmers, say a 3 day work week is right there up for grabs. Even still employers would see big productivity increases.
  • tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
    Programmers no longer have any leverage now they can all be replaced by machines. It doesn't matter how productive you are, the system will always demand more.
    • OtomotO 7mo ago
      This hype too will pass. It's always ebb and flood...
  • hedayet 7mo ago
    you know what most of us end up doing on those other days? we start side tech projects that require even more effort for even little return. You can't trust us with self-care. There's just too many shiny toys out there!
    • mrknmc 7mo ago
      Speak for yourself!
• NetMageSCW 7mo ago
  “The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.”
• alexpotato 7mo ago
  I've been working on a clone of Sid Meier's Pirates but with a princess theme (for my daughters). I've been using AI to help me write it and I've come to a couple conclusions: - AI can make working PoCs incredibly quickly - It can even help me think of story lines, decision paths etc - Given that, there is still a TON of decisions to be made e.g. what artwork to use, what makes sense from a story perspective - Playtesting alone + iterating still occurs at human speed b/c if humans are the intended audience, getting their opinions takes human time, not computer time I've started using this example more and more as it highlights that, yes, AI can save huge amounts of time. However, as we learned from the Theory of Constraints, there is always another bottleneck somewhere that will slow things down.
  • zzleeper 7mo ago
    LMK if you finish it, sounds like something my daughter would enjoy!
  • simonw 7mo ago
    I've tried a few game projects with coding agents - having never worked on a game before in my life - and the main thing I learned is that the hard part is designing it to be fun. Coming up with a genuinely interesting gameplay loop with increasing difficulty levels and progressively revealed gameplay mechanics is a fascinating and extremely difficult challenge, no matter how much AI you throw at the problem.
    • martin-t 7mo ago
      And that's why human work, not its "expression" or some other legalese should be protected by law. If LLMs (or other "AI" or even AI tools) are able to exactly replicate the behavior of a program (game or otherwise) without access to its source code, that's technologically cool. However, that means it's possible to cheaply replicate immense amounts of human work in a way the law does not cover. If you take a game and use LLMs to reimplement both its assets and code from scratch but players have the same movement, weapons do the same damage, have the same spread and projectile speed, and so on, then the "new" game is not really new, it's based on other people's work. And nobody should be allowed to profit from other people's work without their consent and without compensating them. Obviously, work is hard to quantify but that doesn't mean we should give up.
• thn-gap 7mo ago
  I work at FAANG, and leadership is successfully pushing the urge for speed by stablishing the new productivity expectations, and everyone is rushing as much as they can, as the productivity gain doesn't really match the expectations, and people overwork to make up for this difference. This works very well with internal competition and a quota system for performance ratings, with some extra fear due to the bad job market. I feel this new world sucks. We have new technology that boosts the productivity of the individual engineer, and we could be doing MUCH better work, instead of just rushed slop to meet quotas. I feel I'm just building my replacement, to bring the next level of profits to the c-suite. I just wish I wasn't burning out while doing so.
  • an0malous 7mo ago
    I’ve noticed this dynamic acutely working at YC startups the last 5ish years. Coding has become like a sweatshop. I don’t think it’s exclusive to startups or tech either, it seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact that there’s no real innovation anymore. Capitalism demands constant growth, and when there are real technological improvements you can achieve that growth through higher productivity. If there are none, you have to achieve that growth through other means like forcing employees to work longer or cutting costs. The alpha is all coming from squeezing the labor force right now.
    • Vegenoid 7mo ago
      > it seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact that there’s no real innovation anymore This doesn't sound right to me. We are currently getting smacked upside the head by an enormous technological innovation. I believe that, even within the framework of capitalism, this problem has social and political roots. The "robber baron" period late 19th century America has strong similarities to what we are seeing today, and technological stagnation was not the cause.
      • johnnyanmac 7mo ago
        When are we throwing anti-trust at the robber barons? That's the real question. And as of now, we are not having "technological innovation". We found a new jackhammer and are tearing up the entire house experimenting with it. Maybe when the "shiny new thing" effect wears off we'll get true innovation. But as of now people are just getting paid to show off jackhammers.
• ashwinnair99 7mo ago
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• Chris_Newton 7mo ago
  With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of both the good and the bad that I hear about LLM-based coding tools. Using AI for research or to spin up a quick demo or prototype is using it to help plot a course. A lot of the multi-stage agentic workflows also come down to creating guard rails before doing the main implementation so the AI can’t get too far off track. Most of the success stories I hear seem to be in these areas so far. Meanwhile, probably the most common criticism I see is that an AI that is simply given a prompt to implement some new feature or bug fix for an existing system often misunderstands or makes bad assumptions and ends up repeatedly running into dead ends. It moves fast but without knowing which direction to move in.
  • skydhash 7mo ago
    > It moves fast but without knowing which direction to move in. It also moves fast with a tendency to pick the wrong direction (according to the goal of the prompter) at every decision point (known or unknown).
    • tombert 7mo ago
      I've definitely gotten it into contexts where it will never stop going into the wrong direction, even when I tell it to forget everything it did before, and told it a correct path forward. Usually restarting the entire session fixes it, but not always.
      • FrankRay78 7mo ago
        Shrewd context management is the go here.
  • gopalv 7mo ago
    > Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. This is a real problem when the "direction" == "good feedback" from a customer standpoint. Before we had a product person for every ~20 people generating code and now we're all product people, the machines are writing the code (not all of it, but enough of it that I will -1 a ~4000 line PR and ask someone to start over, instead of digging out of the hole in the same PR). Feedback takes time on the system by real users to come back to the product team. You need a PID like smoothing curve over your feature changes. Like you said, Speed isn't velocity. Specifically if you have a decent experiment framework to keep this disclosure progressive in the customer base, going the wrong direction isn't a huge penalty as it used to be. I liked the PostHog newsletter about the "Hidden dangers of shipping fast", I can't find a good direct link to it.
• jsisto 7mo ago
  great article. reminds me of the saying “9 women can’t make a baby in a month”
• felubra 7mo ago
  "So welcome to the machine" I'm reading Against The Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, and now reading this blog piece is hard not to make connections with the points of the book: the usage of the tree as a counter-argument for the machine's automation credo exposed in the blog post very much aligns with I've read so far.
• wazHFsRy 7mo ago
  Sounds familiar, for most of my life I have tried to remove all "friction" from life – applying that engineering mindset to make everything as efficient as possible. Only then I realized that life somehow is about that "friction".
  • tablet 7mo ago
    Indeed. Without friction you can't steer.
  • ghywertelling 7mo ago
    All of our current systems are currently designed keeping in mind the restrictions of costs and human working speed. What if we remove those friction using software, The remaning friction will be all due to physical reality. Then humanity's focus will shift in removing friction in physical domain. Currently it takes some time for a support person to triage a bug request, what if that flow takes seconds now. Think about the analogy of transaction speed of money transfer vs actual delivery of good. With AI, we would make all digital tasks instantaneous, but the physical world will hum along at its own speed unless we speed it up with dark factories and what not.
  • bitwize 7mo ago
    [dead]
  • Barbing 7mo ago
    Don't tell me that… OK maybe do
• jspaetzel 7mo ago
  Was hoping this wasn't ai related, disappointed
  • svessi 7mo ago
    I'm also searching for non-AI content these days. Have you found anything since your comment?
• gz5 7mo ago
  >Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak. And nobody is going to conjure trust, or quality, or community out of a weekend sprint. absolutely although i wonder how different 'trust' is in the culture of tomorrow? will it 'matter' as much, be as cherished, as earned over the fullness of time? i suspect it is a pendulum - and we are back to oak trees at some point - but which way is the pendulum swinging right now?
• fullstackchris 7mo ago
  I don't see the problem - everything the author describes has, and will always be, true. You can't vibe code anything of value in a weekend exactly because anyone _else_ with the same level of experience can do the exact same thing in the same weekend! This has always been true across all trades and technologies. Once again, the domain expertise, wisdom, and simply _time_ of doing something always win. LLMs literally don't change that at all.
• bushido 7mo ago
  I feel for the larger companies and the people who started 10 years ago, though. They have spent the last decade building processes and guardrails for getting consistent average performance from people. But now, some talented people who worked at those companies are building their own new companies without the overhead and moving much, much more quickly. I think what we assume is "vibe slop at inference speed" is not as simple as people make it out to be. From a perspective, I think generally it might be people trying to save jobs. I'm seeing more slop come out of larger, older companies than the new ones (with experienced operators). And the speed is somewhat scary. For smaller team it doesn't take as much effort to build deep, beautiful product anymore. The bottleneck was never the ability for a engineer to code. It was the 16 layers between the customer and the programmer which has vanished in smaller companies and is forcing larger ones to produce slop.
• locusofself 7mo ago
  I love this, and it applies to a lot more than software and trees :)
• andwaal 7mo ago
  I think it's hard to argue with the idea that we should slow down and think more, and that AI is pushing us to do the opposite. But time is limited, it's very limited. And at least in a professional setting, to spend time on the correct things is key. What AI allow us is to do those things we would not have been able to prioritize before. To "write" those extra tests, add that minor feature or to solve that decade old bug. Things that we would never been able to prioritize are we noe able to do. It's not perfect, it's sometimes sloppy, but at least its getting shit done. It does not matter if you solve 10% of your problem perfect if you never have time for the remaining 90. I do miss the coding, _a lot_, but productivity is a drug and I will take it.
• w10-1 7mo ago
  What's faster now are the time-dependent factors of production - product development, go-to market, etc. What's slower now are threats to production - even minor regulations take years or decades, and often appear only when workarounds have surfaced. So what changed in the last 40+ years are the many tools for businesses to shape the conditions of their business -the downstream market, upstream suppliers, and regulatory support/constraints. This is extremely patient work over generations of players, sometimes by individuals, but usually by coalitions of mutual corporate self-interest, where even the largest players couldn't refuse to participate. It's evolution.
  • johnnyanmac 7mo ago
    evolution towards a dystopia, perhaps. No regulations means no worker protections, which means society goes into its next depression.
• ChuckMcM 7mo ago
  I've been hearing similar things from a lot of different directions. The underlying issue about "you cannot replace time" is one that is good to internalize early. A number of people I know who "missed" their kids growing up because they were working hard to make lots of money. You can't go buy "time with my kids when they were growing up." Agentic coding very much feels like a "video game" in the sense of you pull the lever and open the loot box and sometimes it's an epic +10 agility sword and sometimes its just grey vendor trash. Whether or not it generates "good" or even "usable" code fades to the background as the thrill of "I just asked for a UI to orchestrate micro services and BLAMMO there it was!" moves to the fore.
• MPSimmons 7mo ago
  I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I think the signals that we use to determine whether we're doing the right things are different with the new AI enhanced toolsets. Refactoring decent sized components are an order of magnitude easier than it was, but the more important signal is still, why are you refactoring? What changed in your world or your world-view that caused this? Good things still take time, and you can't slop-AI code your way to a great system. You still need domain expertise (as the EXCELLENT short story from the other day explained, Warranty Void if Regenerated (https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated) ). The decrease in friction does definitely allow for more slop, but it also allows for more excellence. It just doesn't guarantee excellence.
• le5051 7mo ago
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• whateveracct 7mo ago
  lots of things take days, not hours. And idt AI changes that much. It does let you (or - let's be real - your middle management) try to make it happen with hours tho :P
• bytefish 7mo ago
  As for the tree analogy and open source. Yes, you cannot build years of community and trust in a weekend. But sometimes it's totally sufficient to plant a seed, give it some small amounts of water and leave it on its own to grow. Go ask my father having to deal with a huge maple tree, that I’ve planted 30 years ago and never cared for it. Open Source projects sometimes work like this. I've created a .NET library for Firebase Messaging in a weekend a few years ago… and it grew on its own with PRs flowing in. So if your weekend project generates enough interest and continues to grow a community without you, what’s the bad thing here? I don’t get it. Sometimes a tree dies and an Open Source project wasn’t able to make it. That said, I’ve just finished rewriting four libraries to fix long standing issues, that I haven’t been able to fix for the past 10 years. It's been great to use Gemini as a sparring partner to fix the API surface of these libraries, that had been problematic for the past 10 years. I was so quick to validate and invalidate ideas. Once being one of the biggest LLM haters I have to say, that I immensely enjoy it right now.
  • johnnyanmac 7mo ago
    You didn't so much "leave it on its own" as much as outsource the duty to nature. Turns out nature spent eras optimizing for tending to trees. Can't really say the same for vibecoding. You still need to do a lot of work that's ultiamtely putting lipstick on a pig. Maybe someone talented can make it pretty, but it has a quality ceiling, and most won't get anywhere close to that; people will just see a pig with lipstick on it.
• imilev 7mo ago
  Awesome article, I feel a lot of people have also forgotten that good projects take iteration not 100 new features. To get few features to an excelent state it requires multilpe iterations at multiple stages. 1) The developer who does a task validates that their thinking was the correct one, they see how they changes impact the system, is it scalable? Does it need to be scalable? While you are working and thinking on it you get more and more context which simply wasn't there at the begining. 2) A feature done once (even after my perfect ClaudeCode plan) is not done forever, people will want to make it better/faster/smoother/etc. But instead of taking the time to analyze and perfect it we go onto the next feature, and if we have to iterate on the current one, we don't iterate we redo... Really like the article I think it is awesome, and I strongly believe AI for coding will stay, but I also beleive that we need to still have a strong understanding of why we are building things and what they look like.
• scuff3d 7mo ago
  We're gonna have to learn some lessons from other engineering fields in this regard. Electrical, civil, mechanical, aerospace... They've all had to put processes in place to intentionally slow things down for a long time. I could throw a circuit board layout together 1000x faster then a team of engineers could have 50 years ago, but that industry has developed a culture of rigorous review processes to ensure quality, which means I couldn't actually move nearly as fast as possible. Undoubtedly a lot of that comes down to production cost and safety. A plane is far more likely to kill people and it costs a shitload more to produce then an app (though plenty of software is mission critical). But now in software we can move quick enough up front that if we don't start applying some discipline it's going to bite us in the ass in the long run.
• keiferski 7mo ago
  One of my favorite ideas from Nietzsche [1] is that civilizations take millennia to “digest” or integrate concepts. It seems a little obvious, maybe, until you look at the modern world and realize the baseline assumption is something like, “every problem is just a question of resources.” An example being the common attitude that [advanced tech] is just a math problem to be solved, and not a process that needs to play itself out in the real world, interacting with it and learning, then integrating those lessons over time. Another way to put this is: experience is undervalued, and knowledge is overvalued. Probably because experience isn’t fungible and therefore cannot be quantified as easily by market systems. 1. Probably not his original idea, and now that I think about it this is kind of more Hegelian. I’m not familiar enough with Hegel to reference him though.
  • DrewADesign 7mo ago
    I have no problem with people treating advanced tech like a math problem. I have a big goddamned problem with the tech world seeing things like creativity, expression, exploration, imagination, experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun, beauty, inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a goddamned math problem to be solved. It’s just so sad and most people resent it being shoved down their throats by tech companies abusing their societal leverage.
    • lll-o-lll 7mo ago
      > I have a big goddamned problem with the tech world seeing things like creativity, expression, exploration, imagination, experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun, beauty, inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a goddamned math problem to be solved. Resource to be exploited. That’s worse of course.
      • DrewADesign 7mo ago
        Two sides of the same tech industry coin: engineering and commerce. The commerce side always sets the agenda, and developing new avenues for resource (or “resource”) exploitation is often the goal. Anyone working on LLM or diffusion model products or projects pretending they’re solving technical problems in a vacuum without contributing to that are, frankly, lying to themselves.
• ivanjermakov 7mo ago
  We value human ingenuity and effort. If there was a button "create an Oscar-worty movie" anyone could press it would make a paradox. The trick is that this won't render film industry useless, since we watch movies only when we believe they're worth our time, which is not true for zero-effort content.
  • Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
    Isn't it only of late that the Oscars panel have to watch the films?
• fuzzy_biscuit 7mo ago
  Some of the items listed in the "takes time" list say the beginning are not great examples. They are better emblems of artificial scarcity, especially Hermes bags.
• bambax 7mo ago
  > Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that. This is a bad start. Louis XIV at Versailles and Marly famously made while forests appear or disappear overnight, to the utter dismay of Saint-Simon, the memorialist, who thought this was an unacceptable waste of money and energy. And this was before the industrial revolution. Today I'm sure many more miracles happen every day.
• aantix 7mo ago
  Everyone is obsessed with speed. But no one wants to go out of their house. Social connections. Trust. Facetime. All matter more than ever. Want a moatable software business? Know your customers on a personal level. Have a personal relationship. Know the people that sign the contracts, know their kids names, where they vacationed last winter, their favorite local restaurant. Get out of the house.
• ICodeSometimes 7mo ago
  It's worth noting that just because something takes time doesn't mean it's automatically worth doing. Vibe slop-ing at supersonic speeds and waiting years to grow aren't the only options, there's something in between where you have enough signal to keep going and enough speed to not waste years on the wrong thing. I feel that today's VCs have completely disregarded the middle and are focused on getting as big as possible as fast as possible without regard to the effect it's having on the ecosystem.
• mocamoca 7mo ago
  Can someone ELI5 what Earandil purpose is?
• mayukh 7mo ago
  Go slow to go fast.
• Lerc 7mo ago
  Is this not an observation bias? Consider the idea of trying to determine how quickly an unknown number of timers will go ping, It could be 10,000 timers that go ping when finished or 1,000,000 timers that go ping when finished. I don't know when they are going to go ping, just that they all the timers are running at different speeds spread over some distribution. After one time period, 5,000 pings have been detected. Should you conclude that timers are pinging fairly quickly? You cannot tell the overall duration of timers if you don't know the number of timers there are out there. Your only data that the timer exists is the ping, consequently you cannot tell if a small population is at high speed or a large population is at a moderate speed. In both cases the data you receive are the fastest of the population. In other words we haven't yet seen what the 10 year project made using these tools is like (or even if it exists/will exist), because they haven't been around for 10 years.
• erelong 7mo ago
  yes, we want to avoid counterproductive things that are done too quickly no we don't want to miss genuine ways to speed things up to improve our productivity so we can do other or more things
• ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
  I find myself sympathetic to the author's PoV, but I am incorporating LLMs into my workflow, with a resultant jaw-dropping (to me) increase in velocity. But I am not just dispatching to agents. I work interactively with a chat interface, and sometimes, I will just bin a whole hour's worth of back-and-forth, because we're not getting anywhere (in fact, I did exactly that, about 30 minutes ago). But that hour is peanuts, compared to the ten hours that I would have spent, trying to figure it out on my own. With an LLM (and git), I can "run something up the flagpole, and see who salutes." I can afford to experiment with very large code bases, and toss out a whole bunch of stuff, if need be. That said, I know damn well, that quite a few folks here, would sneer at my methodology, as "awkward, stodgy, and slow." Nevertheless, I am pretty chuffed with the results. Yeah, it's slower than some folks would do it, but the Quality is really high, and I'm happy with the results. My favorite thing to do, is (for example) toss all 5 of my SDK files into the LLM, paste in the JSON server interaction, describe the bug, and ask it to help me figure it out. Nine times out of ten, it finds the bug quickly. The real bug. I am not always happy with the proposed solutions, but finding the root cause is always the time-consuming part.
  • FrankRay78 7mo ago
    A perfectly good methodology with the right guardrails in place imho.
  • ramshanker 7mo ago
    Same approach as mine. :) One more thing I try is give same prompt once in a while to ChatGPT/Gemini/Grok. Than take the 2 out of 3 ideas forward. All leading AI seems to have some blind spot. Like some kind of intricsic character. 1 will completely overlook some particular bug while finding other excellent bugs and edge cases. Getting the code through all 3 before commiting has shown excellent results to me.
    • johnnyanmac 7mo ago
      Hope you'll be able to afford that workflow once the money dries up and costs skyrocket.
  • 7mo ago
• lifeisstillgood 7mo ago
  Some things take time And time takes money Enough money to pay one’s bills while one tends the growing tree And if we have a society that ensures everyone is given the dignity of time We also get a society that reaps what some create with that time But if we have a society that only rewards pushing money back up the hierarchy Then we all lose our time and our nest eggs to those who have the most.
• Animats 7mo ago
  "Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak." Mass production of engineered structural lumber.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCYn3xQ0yS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCYn3xQ0yS8
  • thearrow 7mo ago
    A 50-year-old oak is not just lumber. The fact that you think these are equivalent is a hilarious, classic HN take.
• nchmy 7mo ago
  I've been slowly working on something for a decade, and I'm always comforted by this poem by Mary Oliver Things take the time they take. Don't worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?
• triwats 7mo ago
  Sometimes to move fast - we have to go slow. That's a mantra I learned when getting into technology. Asking questions about how things work, why it is a certain way, or why a shortcut was made often give you far better insights than anything else. Slowing down and understandng is great. With AI this is even easier. But choose wisely, brains get full.
• tusuegra 7mo ago
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• socketcluster 7mo ago
  My current project is the culmination 15 years of software development. I started out building a full stack framework like Meteor framework (though I started before Meteor framework was created in 2012 and long before Next.js). Then I ported it to to Node.js because I saw an advantage to having the same language on the frontend and backend. Then I noticed that developers like to mix and match different libraries/modules and this was a necessity. The whole idea of a cohesive full stack framework didn't make sense for most software. So I extracted the most essential part of it that people liked and this became SocketCluster. It got a fair amount of traction in the early days. At the time, some people might have thought SocketCluster was trying to be a more scalable copycat of Socket.io but actually I had been working on it for several years by that point. I just made the API similar when I extracted it for better compatibility with Socket.io but it had some additional features. A few years ago, I ended up building a serverless low-code/no-code CRUD platform which removes the need for a custom backend and it can be used with LLMs directly (you can give them the API key to access the control panel). It can define the whole data schema for you. I've built some complex apps with it to fully prove the concept with advanced search functionality (including indexing with a million records). I've made some technical decisions which will look insane to most developers but are crucial and based on 15 years of experience, carefully evaluating tradeoffs and actual testing with complex applications. For example my platform only has 3 data types. String, Number and Boolean. The string type supports some additional constraints to allow it to be used to store any kind of data like lists, binary files (as base64)... Having just 3 types greatly simplifies spam prevention and schema validation. Makes it much easier for the user (or LLM) to reason about and produce a working, stable, bug-free solution. That said I've been struggling to sell it because there are some popular well funded solutions on the market which look superficially similar or better. Of course they can't handle all the scenarios, they're more complex, less secure, don't scale, require far more LLM tokens, lead to constant regressions when used with AI. It's just impossible to communicate those benefits to people because they will value a one-shotted pretty UI over all these other aspects. You can check out https://saasufy.com/ https://saasufy.com/ if interested.
  • TurdF3rguson 7mo ago
    You've been working on this for 15 years and you only have 4 stars on github?
• vincentabolarin 7mo ago
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• mememememememo 7mo ago
  I love this piece and read to the end. Currently working on an idea. Started with Claude and it made a mess. Now enjoying doing it by hand. It just feels easier! AI is assisting on blockers now noy writing code. Anyway 2 areas I slightly disagree on. Open source abandonware is fine. Sometimes people give up because they realize it is not a good idea. Or they get busy or sick. And 10 years at a startup is great but that relies on it being a good startup. Entropy at companies means I have never made it to 10yrs even though I wanted to.
• devnotes77 7mo ago
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• arcadianalpaca 7mo ago
  The part about open source projects needing years of sustained work rings true for sure, but it kind of skips over why a lot (most?) projects die. Sometimes the author gets bored, sure, but maintaining something used by strangers is a completely different job than building something for yourself, and nobody warns you about that transition.
• sltr 7mo ago
  "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned." -- Fred Brooks on project management
• rednafi 7mo ago
  Mandatory read by Peter Norvig - even more relevant now https://norvig.com/21-days.html https://norvig.com/21-days.html
• xivzgrev 7mo ago
  Reminds me of old wood - companies will dive into water to recover for various uses such as musical instruments It's valued because it's more dense. It grew slowly. Now wood grows fast and it's less dense. Like this article, that's fine for many things - you just need wood - but not always.
• deleted 7mo ago
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• analog8374 7mo ago
  It takes ten years to track down a really strange good idea, from first whiff to laying your hands on it. There's no getting around that. And it is neither profitable nor efficient.
• XCSme 7mo ago
  I've been building my project[0] for 14+ years, but I'm still looking forward to the day I won't have to worry about next month's rent. Customers are happy though. Last week I got messages from two customers that purchased more than 7 years ago, because they wanted to install/use the product again. It was fun to revisit our email conversations and to see how much the product has evolved since. What's funny is that the feeling is the same after 1, 5 or 15 years. There's always stuff to optimize and improve. Unless it's a standalone experience (e.g. game or a movie), most software and tools do need constant updates and improvents to keep up-to-date with the current world. What's funny, is that I had many other projects attempted over the years, but many rise and die quickly, yet the one that lasted the longest is also the one that is likely to last longest from now. [0]: https://uxwizz.com https://uxwizz.com
• waynerisner 7mo ago
  It’s a tool, and now part of the culture—so people are naturally using it. What it seems to reveal is less about the tool and more about us. The fragmentation was already there. Maybe the response is to slow down a bit—revisit what matters, and use it with some sense of proportion and coherence.
• andai 7mo ago
  >Friction is good This has been on my mind for a long time. I used to be all about frictionlessness. Speed! Convenience! Make it smoother! Then I found... actually, paper based systems work way better for me. Digital systems just turn into big piles of bloat. It's too easy to add stuff. So they grow until they collapse under their own weight. (Take a look at your contacts list. How many should still be in there? How many did you add for a one time thing and then keep forever? Should there be a temporary folder? Shouldn't it be the default? That's how it works in nature!) Ended up using paper as a temporary improvisation, then realized it solved all the problems I had with digital systems. Friction is good. With communication, it used to cost money to communicate. Now it's free, and we now have a sea of noise where most messages are "adding negative value", because they steal your time and energy. Same with the app stores. Do any search and you find an ocean of slop! The gems drown in the sea of slop. Friction is good.
• andai 7mo ago
  > we seemingly have this desire to ship faster than ever The desire to make life faster instead of better was identified as a neurosis of civilization in the 19th century.
• skybrian 7mo ago
  If you could grow an oak tree in a week, that would transform the timber industry. It would seem pretty silly to wait two decades for it.
• LeeannaOns384 7mo ago
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• lzhgusapp 7mo ago
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• snthpy 7mo ago
  The point about all the extra efficiency just making us more stressed and busy resonates deeply with me. It also stood out to me in the recent episode of the No Priors podcast with Andrej Karpathy. It's that feeling of falling behind is you're not using all available compute. Btw the earendil.com website is gorgeous.
  • Chaosvex 7mo ago
    > Btw the earendil.com website is gorgeous. It really is but it's come at the cost of actually being useful. It has a vague 'about' modal and that's your lot, which is confusing since they're encouraging people to join. I'm just not sure anybody's going to know what.
    • the_mitsuhiko 7mo ago
      > It has a vague 'about' modal and that's your lot, which is confusing since they're encouraging people to join. It's a surprisingly good filter and gets curious people to send mail in :)
  • bitwize 7mo ago
    I'm more concerned about the "falling behind" we're doing chewing up compute generating, and then running, LLM slop. That is a lot of energy used and heat generated for a less-than-optimal payoff.
• rando77 7mo ago
  It's important to have good feedback at each stage of iteration
• steveharing1 7mo ago
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• machuz 7mo ago
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• ngburke 7mo ago
  Went indie after a long run at a big company and this hits. The hardest thing wasn't the work, it was getting comfortable with the silence between shipping and seeing any signal. Still working on it tbh.
• algolint 7mo ago
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• contingencies 7mo ago
  So who else is gardening? Hands up! Join hngardeners email list. https://gaggle.email/join/hn-gardeners@gaggle.email https://gaggle.email/join/hn-gardeners@gaggle.email
• samiv 7mo ago
  Now that everyones running faster than ever and trying to outrun the competition by slapping more code on than they do you can only brace for the results. I expect these tools will quickly let people to ramp up several orders of magnitude of more complexity and lines of code to any software project. The your 100kloc JS electron app will become a 10m loc JS electron app running on a 500m loc browser runtime. Repeat this across the stack for every software component and application and library. If you think things are bloated now just wait a few years and your notepad will be a 1m line behemoth with runtime performance of a glacier.
  • deadbabe 7mo ago
    But how do you make the case for thoughtful less bloated software to people who just value writing less code themselves, even if the output produces more lines of code? Seems to me like people don’t care about LOC, they care about how much effort they have to spend writing the lines.
  • Barbing 7mo ago
    "Introducing picopad" "introducing nanopad"
• zelphirkalt 7mo ago
  The website of earendil definitely still takes time, as it is right now only a gray area with white on gray labels in the corners, not displaying anything in the content area. The labels don't work like links either. The background image doesn't load, until one clicks some subitem of the "about" label and then "closes" the content that is shown. The theme toggle (?) at the bottom right does nothing, website stays gray, no content shown. This website does not resonate with the message I got earlier from the article. It does not give the impression of someone taking appropriate time to make it.
• presentation 7mo ago
  I for one am not shedding tears about being able to waste less time with SOC 2 drudgery that doesn’t even make organizations secure.
• alexsdev 7mo ago
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• DeathArrow 7mo ago
  I see that at play in economics and geopolitics. While the West wants results in weeks, months or, anyway, in less than one term, China being inspired by Confucius and Sun Tzu is calmly waiting and slowly building.
• pmavrodiev 7mo ago
  What a beautifully expressed thought: "I keep coming back to the trees. I’ve been maintaining Open Source projects for close to two decades now. The last startup I worked on, I spent 10 years at. That’s not because I’m particularly disciplined or virtuous. It’s because I or someone else, planted something, and then I kept showing up, and eventually the thing had roots that went deeper than my enthusiasm on any given day. That’s what time does! It turns some idea or plan into a commitment and a commitment into something that can shelter and grow other people." Good luck _creating_ this by trying to predict the next best word in the sentence.
• pugchat 7mo ago
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• jFriedensreich 7mo ago
  users also dont have time to find and report bugs until the next release and also get even more desensitized to things being broken so will report less likely, or just clone and fix something only for themselves because issues and prs are more work. contributions are also harder because main is already dramatically different by the time your features are ready. ai also does not care for mergeabilty of changes. as a user i start to git clone everything not just because i can fix bugs myself but also because i dont get projects update schedule forced on.
• deleted 7mo ago
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• atrealadam 7mo ago
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• seboapps 7mo ago
  Love it!
• andrewrozumy 7mo ago
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• dmvjs 7mo ago
  OP, you can transplant trees
• hudtaylor 7mo ago
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• rolisz 7mo ago
  Sent this I a friend. Their reply: Is it a bad sign that I am only skimming diagonally the AI summary of an article called "some things just take time" because it feels like I already know the idea?
• Roooster 7mo ago
  I was reading an article about 5 days ago about time enthusiasts and i can't find it again.. can i anybody point me in the right direction? I believe i was reading this article around the same time. thank you in advance.