Some things just take time

vaylian

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.

Swizec

> 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.

titanomachy

> 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.

andyhedges

> 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.

dminor

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.

QuadrupleA

> 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?

lapcat

> 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.

tbrownaw

> 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.

cdevries

https://simplytrees.com/

sledgehammers

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.

NetMageSCW

“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

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.

thn-gap

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.

Chris_Newton

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.

jsisto

great article. reminds me of the saying “9 women can’t make a baby in a month”

felubra

"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

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".

jspaetzel

Was hoping this wasn't ai related, disappointed

gz5

>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

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.