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One big difference I see in how minds work is their ability to model. A few people I know focus on end-to-end model thinking — trying to maximize against some functions.
The rest of them seem to avoid thinking outside a small info bubble/closed system, not sure why, but it looks like it creates anxiety when they start feeding too much info. Instead of trying to extract abstractions that make it possible to model the complexity and fuzz the non-important parts.
The same people, when they come up with a product implementation idea, avoid thinking about all the things required to be in place for the product to actually satisfy some real need/want. The product ends up detached from user need. The tech doesn't work.
And it doesn't matter if they can code or if Claude can work, because the directions required to define what needs to be there are not present.
I realized I need to take the thinking of these people as their ideas and advice — as inputs that need to be sanitized. The easy way I found is to remodel why they think the way they think — it's like having a safe VM running their code (thinking) through my computer (my brain).
These same people, usually years later, realize you were telling them things they were not able to comprehend at the time, but they realized those things were so important and would have saved them from suffering so much. They start to treat your voice with reverence instead of thinking through with their own minds and stress-testing against reality.
I would love to read some research about this and how to take advantage of it, or at least avoid the toxic influence such minds can have against one's own well-being and success.
Unfortunately you're indexed on and promoted based on how much code you write, not how little. There's a very real reason the meme of "promotion driven development" exists. You'll never get favorable review making sound choices that minimize the amount of new code that is needed. Believe me, I tried.
I prefer an alternate measure - great developers write code with a long half life relative to the rest of the product. (An idea I learned from a hiring reference check ... of all places.)
Many people try to design a perfect system on the first attempt.
And for the original requirements, it often works beautifully.
But as new requirements appear, the clean design slowly turns into layers of patches and exceptions.
you discover a deeper pattern that absorbs the complexity back into the core, and you do a rewrite.
Then the cycle repeats.
I don't worry about writing a perfect system anymore, i realize there is more to a system i do not currently know about, many things will surface once the foundation is laid.
There's also the sunk cost fallacy. Instead of removing code/features that it's becoming more and more obvious were a bad idea to begin with they get kept in the code base causing even more problems and delays because of "we cannot just remove it after spending so much time and money creating it".
The issues with bad code/architecture/complexity often gets "solved" by creating even more of it.
"We are living in an age of mass denial. Some very smart people are telling us that we no longer need to write good software because LLMs can generate code now. But terrible software is still terrible software, whether it was written by Claude Code or by a human who did not know what they were doing."
I actually think we have it pretty backwards in terms of what we need now. We as humans no longer need complex front-ends. We need data. I would rather have data access to all my spending and say things like, did I go over my restaurant budget last month? And the LLM can figure out how to do it.
It makes no sense for me to use the limited UIs that companies present anymore. Let alone signup processes - it should all be LLM friendly. Simple APIs that are called by your agent.
My company uses Teams and it's ecosystem. And for email I get a lot of crappy system updates, etc.... And around the UI there are little "AI" buttons or "Ask a question" boxes. No. This. Is. Wrong. Instead I need to be able to ask my OWN agent to check my email and archive anything dumb and inform me of anything important. In fact, don't even make it a one-off prompt- make it a permanently running long-haul agent that interacts with my "personal assistant" agent that is in charge of getting my attention if it's absolutely necessary, which knows if I'm watching a movie.
Very rarely you're bottlenecked by typing speed. If you truly are, and you are already typing at like 200 wpm, then you are probably doing something at the wrong abstraction level. E.g. for a very simple example when making a CRUD admin, but implementing everything from the first principles for each entity, not making helper functions to render generic forms, handle add/update/remove operations uniformly, etc. Of course LLMs can help you generate such code faster, but if you then need to change something systematically in the future it'll take longer and will definitely be less consistent / more buggy.
Not my experience at all (30+ years of getting paid to deliver software).
Thinking hard (and discussing with experienced colleagues) before writing any code can dramatically speed up your overall delivery time and completely remove whole classes of potential errors.
If you skip the "thinking hard" bit to "go fast" you will probably end up being 10x slower overall.
Agreed, and the "thinking hard" phase scales better with team size too. We used to just start coding and then spend weeks untangling conflicting assumptions. Once we started doing even 30-minute design chats first, the cleanup work almost disappeared. The code itself got smaller almost as a side effect.
The "typing speed" framing is probably anachronistic shorthand for implementation cost generally — in the punch card era, expressing code was genuinely expensive. Whether that counts as typing-bottlenecked is debatable. The comprehension side has more empirical backing though; maintenance cost estimates in the literature cluster around 60-80% of total software effort, which would make paul_knox's second claim the more defensible one.
I highly doubt it was ever really bottlenecked by typing speed. If _that_ is your bottleneck then you either don’t care about what you write or you have a perfect plan laid out and just need to type it in.
That's not really true. Plenty of programming is rote - writing boilerplate, transcribing a design you've already worked through mentally, converting one data format to another. In those moments typing speed does matter. Not every line requires deep thought first.
Has anyone actually separated "deleted code that shouldn't have existed" from "never wrote code that should have"? They look identical from the outside. The second failure mode seems common too — systems that are elegantly minimal until someone needs a feature that the shortcuts made impossible.
The rest of them seem to avoid thinking outside a small info bubble/closed system, not sure why, but it looks like it creates anxiety when they start feeding too much info. Instead of trying to extract abstractions that make it possible to model the complexity and fuzz the non-important parts.
The same people, when they come up with a product implementation idea, avoid thinking about all the things required to be in place for the product to actually satisfy some real need/want. The product ends up detached from user need. The tech doesn't work.
And it doesn't matter if they can code or if Claude can work, because the directions required to define what needs to be there are not present.
I realized I need to take the thinking of these people as their ideas and advice — as inputs that need to be sanitized. The easy way I found is to remodel why they think the way they think — it's like having a safe VM running their code (thinking) through my computer (my brain).
These same people, usually years later, realize you were telling them things they were not able to comprehend at the time, but they realized those things were so important and would have saved them from suffering so much. They start to treat your voice with reverence instead of thinking through with their own minds and stress-testing against reality.
I would love to read some research about this and how to take advantage of it, or at least avoid the toxic influence such minds can have against one's own well-being and success.