alt Hacker NewsThis is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems:
> There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand!
Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling.
I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he was doing this for education, not for work. He should have spent more like 6 hours before desperately reaching for the LLM. I imagine after 1 hour he would have figured it out on his own.
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Yep and after 6 hours don't reach for LLM, instead:
* Ask someone to come over and look
* Come back the next day, work on something else
* Add comment # KNOWN-ISSUE: ...., and move on and forget about it.
But year spent days on a bug at work before ha ha!
I’ve worked in financial modelling before where you need to make sure results are correct, not approximate. One time there was a nasty bug in pandas multiindexes (admittedly we banned pandas for all new code because it just can’t do semver). Spent 9 days to debug three lines of code. Endurance and patience are learned skills and sometimes they’re the only way you can get a correct verifiable solution.
Often times the fastest way to debug is to write it wrong, write it wrong again, find an example where somebody wrote it right, write that wrong in your own file, then figure out what you changed to adapt it that made it go wrong.
If anyone remembers middleschool mathematics this is the coding example of the teacher making you write out the equations in their longest form instead of shortcutting. It's done this way because it shows you your exact train of thought and where you went wrong. That sticks in your head. You understand the problem by understanding yourself. Giving up after twenty minutes instead of stopping, clearing your active cognitive load, and then coming back erases your ability to understand that train of thought.
For a comparison it's like being in first person view in a videogame, and the only thing you have is the ability to look behind you, versus being able to bring up a map that has an overhead view. In first person you're likely to lose where exactly you went to get where you are, while with the overhead view map you can orient your traveled route according to landmarks and distance.
Now imagine someone else reading this and genuinely considering 20 minutes a long time to wait :-)
Why shouldn't someone consult some kind of external resource for help, after struggling with a specific coding problem for 20 minutes? Why is 6 hours the right amount of time to timebox this to?
I just grabbed an Android remaster of "Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars", a 90's point-and-click adventure that has been added a hints system which pops up automatically after a timeout of the player not progressing.
This can be set as far as 1h of being stuck. Can also be 5 minutes. But by default it is 30 seconds.
My inner kid was screaming "that's cheating!" :-D but on second thought it is a very cool feature for us busy adults, however it's sad the extremes that gamedevs have to go in order to appease the short-term mindless consumers of today's tik-toks.
But more seriously, where's the joy of generating long-standing memories of being stuck for a while on a puzzle that will make you remember that scene for 30 years? An iconic experience that separates this genre from just being an animated movie with more steps.
I couldn't imagine "Monkey Island II but every 30 seconds we push you forward". Gimme that monkey wrench.
TFA and this comment just made me have this thought about today's pace of consumption, work, and even gaming.
I'm sure the author will encounter problems where the only way to solve them will be the marginal effort provided by a human. At that point he won't be just be solving problems to work his brain, but also to accomplish a goal.
YES. I don't know how many multi WEEK sessions of debugging I've been through in my career. Frustrating, but so many valuable lessons learned in the process. LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important.
Why? I’m as old timer as old timer can get - started programming as a hobby in 1986 in assembly on an Apple //e in 65C02 assembly language.
But just today a bug was reported by a customer (we are still in testing not a production bug). I implemented this project myself from an empty git repo and an empty AWS account including 3 weeks of pre implementation discovery.
I reproduced the issue and through the problem at Claude with nothing but two pieces of information - the ID of the event showing the bug and the description.
It worked backwards looking at the event stream in the database, looking at the code that stored the event stream, looking at the code that generated the event stream (separate Lambda), looking at the actual config table and found the root cause in 3 minutes.
After looking at the code locally, it even looked at the cached artifacts of my build and verified that what was deployed was the same thing that I had locally (same lambda deployment version in AWS as my artifacts). I had it document the debug steps it took in an md file.
Why make life harder on myself? Even if it were something I was doing as a hobby, I have a wife who I want to spend time with, I’m a gym rat and I’m learning Spanish. Why would I waste 6 hours doing something that a computer could do for me in 5 minutes?
Assuming he has a day job and gets off at 6, he would be spending all of his off time chasing down a bug that he could be using doing something else.
Often when LLMs give me some command option or advice I haven’t seen before I try to independently verify it. And I’ve often been frustrated just how hard it is to find this info from the source documents.
Though a lot of the time this is more an inefficiency of the documentation and Google rather than something only LLMs could do.