2 ms·
What do you mean by "firehose quality to this stuff"?
by ghostbrainalpha 14d ago
What do you mean by "firehose quality to this stuff"?
- mikestorrent 14d agoQuick to produce, emerges in vast quantities, and getting hit with it can consume all your attention immediately
- kragen 14d agoWell, for example, in one afternoon, I have a parsing engine to understand, which is 9 pages of code. I thought I knew OCaml, having written a few interpreters in it, but I didn't know the {foo| |foo} multiline string syntax, I didn't know about Printf.ksprintf, I didn't know about Buffer.create, I didn't know about String.escaped, I must have once known about List.exists and List.rev_append and forgotten, I'd never thought of pattern-matching Array.to_list Sys.argv as a way to parse a command line, I didn't know about Sys.file_exists, and now I also have to think about what the parse result should look like and how to use it. And Claude correctly pointed out that the way I had thought about handling things like heredocs (or {foo| |foo} strings) would violate the preconditions for using the Packrat parsing algorithm, and suggested that I use the alternative approach of parameterized productions as in OMeta, which I need to think over. I think that was the same day I prototyped an approach to using Service Workers from localhost as a platform for persistent mobile apps that don't show up in the app list but also don't rely on the TLS CA system for their security. Which involved learning a lot of stuff about the Service Worker lifecycle and localStorage and IndexedDB that I didn't know before. It's just a lot.
- simonw 14d agoI love how well this comment captures the experience of engaging with LLMs as a way to deliberately challenge and expand knowledge. When I see people worry about LLMs atrophying their mental abilities I assume they haven't thought very hard about ways to lean into using them to expand their mental capabilities.
- kragen 14d agoI'm guessing you've written a well-thought-out, clearly expressed blog post about this that I would absolutely love to read, if only I knew where it was.
- nlawalker 14d agoI assume that they don’t have time to do that, and are lamenting the fact that exercising those capabilities is no longer on the critical path to getting paid work done.
- kragen 14d agoAlthough I could be wrong about this, I suspect you still need them, for the reasons I've described in this thread.
- zero_shift 14d agoI have been prototyping some network proxies in a largely "vibe coded" fashion and it has been a mixed experience. It has definitely accelerated my learning: through the process of writing rigorous plans, I have learned so much about network programming... the intricacies of HTTP2, how to design a fast MITM proxy, performance pitfalls in SSL... These are things I studiously avoided learning for a decade, now demystified, mostly through Claude patiently rendering many figures and diagrams. And with Fable, I was able to ship a working Envoy Rust extension in a one-shot. On the other hand, my grasp on the details is tenuous. Every so often the agent can't progress and I am stuck for ideas, hitting different prompts like they were slot machines. I forget how to solve problems by myself. I can feel myself becoming supine and dependent on something I know is going to become more expensive, a dependency AI vendors will seek to exploit. It has happened quickly. I do not really consent; it is forced on me by my employer.