Writing things down is handwriting. You perhaps mean “typing things out” as in using a keyboard. You get some benefits from typing things out but you don’t get many others, as handwriting requires you literally think about each letter and word as it is constructed and which actions you need to take to construct the letters and words. If I type, I type it and forget about it by design moving on to the next word not worrying at all about it. Handwriting essentially trains you to see, think, and understand longterm chains of thought; essentially deep focus on what you are doing while thinking about what is coming next. Typing only produces shortterm. Shortterm thought pairs well with brain dumping, such as on Twitter, which ends up being pretty valueless in the longterm.
I wonder how much bias there is in the science here. I certainly can think better with pen and paper versus computer but I’m 45 and my whole schooling through to postgrad was done with pen, paper and blackboard. It seems very plausible that digital natives from childhood will think just as well at a keyboard (maybe better since they’ll be less practiced with pen and paper).
You state this with such conviction, do you have some sources for this? As I wrote in my other comment, that 2014 study is often cited here, but it did not replicate well.
Long distance runner here, feels amazing from start to finish. Ok, amazing maybe only during runners high, but definitely good all the way through. Running sucks until it doesn't.
I don't get this thread. Just tell the agent to use conventional commit messages and to keep it nice and tight. Are you all just raw dogging agent output with no alignment/conventions?
> Just tell the agent to use conventional commit messages and to keep it nice and tight.
I have this in my claude.md along with guidance on (not) writing comments but it’s still dumps multi-paragraph comments of Claude speak everywhere.
I think a lot of us are talking past eachother, but what I and I think others are complaining about is doing things well, and being minimal. LLMs don’t really do that yet, they can’t look at and simplify a codebase well, even with guidance. They always seem to add rather than subtract. And eventually it becomes an issue. I think they were actually better in this regard with like Opus 4.8, and are now getting even worse (but score better, and are more autonomous).
At home I use Codex, and it’s better as far as language goes at least.
Anyway, it’s like the logic piece necessary to do good work is still missing, and hurt by recent reinforcement fine-tuning. And it leads to massive bloat since more comments = higher scores, but walls of text and the tokens (or cognition if you’re the sad human reading them) aren’t free.
The same. Think in systems, interfaces, integrations, the problem at hand. Zoom out, leave the grunt work and yak shaving to the machine, and keep your eyes on the price. If you only get satisfaction when you hand set functions in a particular way, then the only thing to say is that time is moving on.
Same here. Loved hacking on things from all angles, still do. The only thing lost to me now is the yak shaving, and good riddance. I want to think in systems, solutions, integration, and first and foremost the higher level problem, not nitty gritty implementation details.
Ever since Fable and Sol level LLMs/agents came online, I have ceased to look at the code. I recently launched a project for a client that integrated many many systems, has considerable traffic with low latency requirements and everything just.. works. I've never had to do this little firefighting when launching a project of that complexity and scale. It's been liberating and I was able to focus mostly on polish and QoL improvements of the stack and systems. What a time to be alive for a technical builder.
Well, this one folds, so you get a much larger screen surface that still fits in your pocket. And $200 won't get you that from any vendor. And while the low end phones have gotten amazingly good, a flag ship will still have a much better camera, better screen, better battery etc. If that's worth the price is a decision everyone has to make for themselves.
Sidenote, I've not had a single one of my smartphones crack a screen since 2008 when I got my first smartphone, take that for what it's worth.
reply