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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

I go to meetups and enjoy myself so much; 80% of people are showing how to install 800000000 MCPs on their 92gb macbook pros, new RAG memory, n8n agent flows, super special prompting techniques, secret sauces, killer .md files, special vscode setups and after that they still are not productive vs just vanilla claude code in a git repos. You get people saying 'look I only have to ask xyz... and it does it! magic' ; then you just type in vanilla CC 'do xyz' and it does exactly the same thing, often faster.

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This was always the case. People obsessing over keyboards, window managers, emacs setups... always optimizing around the edges of the problem, but this is all taking an incredible amount of their time versus working on real problems.

Yes, the thing they realize much later in life is that perhaps they enjoyed the act of gardening (curating your tools, workflows, etc) much more than farming (being downright focused and productive on the task at hand).

Sadly gardening doesn’t pay the bills!

If I only spend $1000 on hydroponics and 3 weeks tending to a vertical garden I can grow a $1 head of lettuce FOR FREE!

I tried growing lettuce in some cut up plastic bottles at university in soil from the nearby footpath, I think even with the cheap student approach I spent more on the (single pack of) seeds than a fully grown lettuce costs, and only managed about four individual leaves that were only about 1cm by 5cm.

What if I haven’t spent anything,

and I’m making money with lettuce I grew in the woods?

(or, in Anthropic/sama’s backyards)

yep, and I have the same thing, but then I am not going to tell everyone it is super productive for the actual task of farming. I say that I have a hobby farming (which I do) and talk about my tools and my meager yields (which won't make any money if sold). I am not going to say that my workflows are so productive while my neighbour who is a professional farmer just has old crap and just starts and works from 5 am to 9 pm making a living of his land.

I like farming but a lot of the tools are annoying to use so I find myself tinkering with them (gardening in your analogy I guess). It's not that I prefer tinkering in the shop to farming. More that I just have very little patience for tools that don't conform to the ways in which I think about the world.

Same thing happens in music production. If only I had this guitar, or that synth, or these plugins…

Gear Acquisition Syndrome is a very different problem. Even if you haven't cured the issue the new synth was meant to fix, at least you have a new synth.

It's the four hobbies all over again: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html

A better keyboard is a hill I will die on.

I have a fantastic keyboard, but I'm not taking pictures of it, changing the keycaps, posting about it. It's a tool, not a fetish; that's how I differentiate these things.

It's a keyboard attached to an article of clothing you put your head into so the keys drape over your shoulders. You then type, but also end up giving yourself a shoulder massage!

Yes, this happens quite often. So often that I wonder if it is among the symptoms of some psychiatric or neurological disorder.

It's just boredom probably. Obsessing over productivity tools is relatively more productive than say, something completely unrelated to your work.

That perfectly ties with my experience. Just direct prompts, with limited setup and limited context seem to work better or just as well as complex custom GPTs. There are not just diminishing, but inverting returns to complexity in GPTs

limited prompts work well for limited programs, or already well defined and cemented source bases.

once scope creeps up you need the guardrails of a carefully crafted prompt (and pre-prompts, tool hooks, AGENTS files, the whole gambit) -- otherwise it turns into cat wrangling rapidly.

Not in our (30+ year old software company) experience and we have large code bases with a lot of scope creep ; more than ever as we can deliver a lot more for a lot less (lot more revenue / profit too).

No, no, you misunderstand, that's still massive productivity improvement compared to them being on their own with their own incompetence and refusal to learn how to code properly

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