I think the engineering mindset comes from a place of curiosity. I don't agree that there is anything fundamentally different about the person who chooses to be an engineer versus not, I think everyone just has a different mix of characteristics and preferences.

For me, the act of creation is the compelling part. Sometimes that's writing code, other times it's seeing the fully-formed thing come into being. For the latter, LLMs can certainly help me do more, or at least take care of some of the menial stuff like writing test cases while I do more interesting things like think about strategy/architecture.

Just make sure you're reviewing your LLM's code as if you were a colleague's!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47489431

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

If you take your question and look into the future, you might consider the existence of an LLM specifically trained to take high-level language inputs and produce machine code. Well, we already have that technology: we call it a compiler. Compilers exist, are (frequently) deterministic, and are generally exceedingly good at their job. Leaving this behind in favor of a complete English -> binary blob black box doesn't make much sense to me, logically or economically.

I also think there is utility in humans being able to read the generated output. At the end of the day, we're the conscious ones here, we're the ones operating in meatspace, and we're driving the goals, outputs, etc. Reading and understanding the building blocks of what's driving our lives feels like a good thing to me. (I don't have many well-articulated thoughts about the concept of singularity, so I leave that to others to contemplate.)

On one hand I also lament the amount of hardware-potential wastage that occurs with deep stacks of abstractions. On the other hand, I've evolved my perspective into feeling that the medium doesn't really matter as much as the result... and most software is about achieving a result. I still take personal joy in writing what I think is well-crafted code, and I also accept that that may become more niche as time goes on.

To me this shift from software-as-craft to software-as-bulk-product has some similarities to the "pets vs cattle" mindset change when thinking about server / process orchestration and provisioning.

Then also on the dismay of JS becoming even more entrenched as the lingua franca. There's every possibility that in a software-as-bulk-product world, LLM-driven development could land on a safer language due to efficiency gains from e.g. static type checking. Economically I wonder if an adoption of a different lingua franca could manifest by way of increasing LLM development speed / throughput.

I know there are strongly held opinions about this, but I for one see no reason why the "application web" can't peacefully coexist, and interlink with, the document web. In my opinion it therefore makes sense to allow for different models for the application web, ones that do not revolve around a document.

On the other hand, if we're just bashing on javascript being the lingua franca of the web, that's a train I'll happily board!

The main issue IMHO with many of these boilerplate-reducing packages is that they feel like one-way trips. Most of them require a change to widget inheritance, and they all have slightly different syntax and semantics for wiring things up to state changes. This means if you get a few years into a project, migrating away from the package you chose at the beginning will probably be very difficult.

So while the quick example in the readme of this package looks simple and understandable, locking in to a third-party library makes me nervous, especially if the main benefit is just fewer keystrokes. Does anyone have experience or informed opinion here that would be willing to chime in?

Glad to hear dark mode was the other issue :-). I'll investigate further, it's probably just a matter of a flag not being propagated properly during the scene change.

For your note on different states for screens. Can you elaborate or give an example? I'm quite interested in this mode that you're describing.

The ellipse issue sounds like snapping getting in the way. It's on my list to come up with a better heuristic of when to apply snapping or not. One example of an idea I have here is to incorporate some hysteresis effect - essentially examining the local history of mouse movements when deciding to apply snapping or not. Right now each mouse movement is treated independently.

Also, were you in dark mode? It's definitely not intended that the whole screen should change color - a popup should dim the content behind. The whole screen changing color sounds like a bug and I'll investigate.

It's possible this tool may be more appropriate for e.g. presentation of info to a mixed audience. Technical people may have questions that can be answered with detail that non-technical people would find distracting, if it were visible on the main diagram. And "presentation" here could be a literal presentation in a conference room, or documenting something on a site that people visit on their own.

You could make the argument in that example that you should create two diagrams, one for each audience. I think that is a valid argument - but I can also imagine maintaining two separate diagrams that present similar information could be irritating.

TL;DR: easy creation of interactive diagrams, meaning diagrams that have mouse click/hover hooks that you can use to display pop-up content. The end result can be shared with a no-sign-in-required web link.

My thought is that this is useful for system docs, onboarding or user guides, presentations, etc. Anything where there is a high-level view that should remain uncluttered + important metadata or details that still need to be available somewhere.

You can try it out without signing up for anything, just launch the app here (https://app.vexlio.com/), create a shape, select it with the main pointer tool and then click "Add popup" on the context toolbar.

I'd be grateful for any and all feedback!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669906

Points: 47

# Comments: 6

In addition to the challenges listed here, IMO there are rapidly diminishing returns for the type of recall learning that spaced repetition enables. As you progress further in your career, there is much less emphasis on what you know, and more emphasis on how you apply it, how you communicate, and how your knowledge ends up helping others around you. I suspect most professionals decide at some point that they need to start "paging out" specific knowledge to make room for broader experience, retrieving it from the bookshelf (swap partition) when needed.

I'm also curious on the fixation with creating a startup in the VC-funded sense. Why choose able-to-find-VC-funding to be your metric of success?

I am not a mathematician though, so if you have other insight I'd be glad to hear it.