Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

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ChrisMarshallNY

For myself, I’m very much a “results” guy. Have been, for all my career. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to “writing”) software for most of my adult life. People seem to like to stuff I make.

I’m currently working on my first major project that incorporates heavy LLM contributions. It’s coming along great.

I started with Machine Code and individual gate ICs, so my knowledge goes way down past the roots.

I don’t miss it, at all. Occasionally, my understanding of stuff has been helped by that depth of experience, but, for the most part, it’s been irrelevant. It’s a first-stage booster, dropping back into the atmosphere.

I will say that my original training as a bench tech has been very useful, as I’m good at finding and fixing bugs, but a lot of my experience is in the rear-view mirror.

I have been routinely googling even the most basic stuff, for many years. It hasn’t corroded my intellect (yet), and I’m doing the same kind of thing with an LLM.

Not being sneered at by some insecure kid is nice.

I'm somewhere in between. I'm excited about building more things faster and extending my capabilities. But I also love thinking about the underlying language, runtime, algorithms, the wider system. I want LLMs to enhance this for me, I want my understanding to go up as I write less code. It's also key to my job as a lead that I maintain understanding of the system for debugging, security etc.

So if I can do both with these tools, then great. I want to cognitively offload in a way that allows me to focus on the important bits. And I'm writing instructions to the LLM to help me do that eg 'help teach me this bit'. A builder and tutor at once.

Great approach.

I usually use ChatGPT, as a chat (as opposed to an agent).

It explains everything quite well (if sometimes a bit verbose).

Today, I am going to do an experiment: I’ll be asking it to rewrite the headerdocs in one of my files (I tend to have about a 50% comment/code ratio), so it generates effective docc documentation. I suspect the result will be good.

> Not being sneered at by some insecure kid is nice.

How very adult of you.

I have found that having a humble, generous, and non-caustic approach to other people, has been very good for my personal mental health (and career).

I have spent my entire career, being the dumbest guy in the room, and I’m not exactly a dunce. It can sometimes be quite humbling, but I’ve had great opportunities to learn.

People will often be willing to go out of their way to help you understand, if you treat them with respect; even if they are being jerks.

Life’s too short, to be spending in constant battle.

Would you be aware of it if that was the case? I don’t mean this to be hostile or anything but the senario in which one does not notice himself and it goes unnoticed or silently accepted externally does not seem too far fetched to me.

Probably, yes. If we don’t have a clear understanding of the fundamentals, it can make life difficult. Having that understanding, often helps us to verify new information. My personal experience has been “layers,” with the new layer building upon, and often subsuming, the substrate.

But it does mean that there’s limits. A lot of folks start at points higher than mine, and can go much further than me.

That’s fine; as long as I understand and accept my limitations, as well as my strengths.

It’s a long story, but I spent the majority of my career at some pretty demanding and high-functioning places. I had to learn to be self-critical, without being self-abusive.

Also, I have terrible memory. I suspect it comes from … experimentation … in my youth. Doesn’t make me stupid, but has given me a talent for leveraging reference materials.

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