Yet another Hacker News

49 points sunils34 2 hours ago 13 comments

elendilm 31 minutes ago | parent

This is one of those things where one can throw around the term "first principles thinking" with relative ease.

To actually do it is different and usually comes from having to wrestle with a problem.

Sadly people from the academia and the public at large has a hard time understanding what this even means.

They equate it with exam based memorization or delegation to authority. Funnily they even think first principles reasoning is an improved version of doing the same.

But this is a blessing in disguise as it gives those who wrestle with real problems a unique skillset that can be advantageous.

woliveirajr 20 minutes ago | parent

And it's a skill that you'll use in other contexts. Over too learn and practice it in IT/physics, and you find out that you can use it to psychology, humans around you are dealt with another depth and different outcomes become possible

pxc 5 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

trwhite 28 minutes ago | parent

I'm really struggling to see how to make architectural decisions with an agent. It's great when you're at a total loss for ideas, but when you already have some of the pieces it ultimately wants to drive all of the thinking and takes over. Then it just feels like you're deferring your experienced judgement. I've seen colleagues lose the ability to reason any more without asking the agent to do it for them, because they inherently don't see the point if the agent is going to end up doing the whole piece (and probably auditing/overruling anything they came up with on their own).

elendilm 27 minutes ago | parent

I have found autonomous agents to be pathetic at architectural decisions.

Architecture has remained so far to be one of those domains where skillset dwarfs everything by comparison.

royal__ 24 minutes ago | parent

How much scope do you give it? I find it's easier to stay in control when you give it scope down the chunks of work you give it.

NotGMan 14 minutes ago | parent

Why would you care about architecture? It was an issue when humans were writing code so architecture mattered in the sense that you needed a sweet spot between current requirements and future extensions.

The agent can rewrite half your codebase in one day, so architecture stops mattering for the most part.

bluGill 6 minutes ago | parent

An agent can rewrite a small codebase in half a day, I have millions of lines of code - it can't rewrite that in half a day.

delillos 2 minutes ago | parent

Why try to make things that are good? Why care about anything? Why not just turn our minds over to the machines, and let them rock us to sleep like babies?

pxc 11 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

bheadmaster 7 minutes ago | parent

This is one thing I actually do with a chatbot, instead of an agent. Voice mode even.

I start talking to it while doing menial tasks like cleaning or doing the laundry, and I discuss the architectual decisions and options until I come to some resemblance of a plan.

Good side of this approach is that I can't just "skim over" or "copy paste" things - either I understood them and can repeat them myself, or I can't. It takes more time than /grill-me and similar approaches, but it's the only approach that doesn't make me want to claw my brain out.

pkaler 2 minutes ago | parent

> I'm really struggling to see how to make architectural decisions with an agent.

I walk to work and home with ChatGPT Voice and AirPods. I ask it to be Socratic and I just start rambling the top of thing on my mind. After 20 mins of back-and-forth it's usually teased an answer out of me or I've teased an answer out of it.

cyclopeanutopia 5 minutes ago | parent

Lots of words, not a lot of meaning. What is this post about?