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Comment by memoriyato3 | Hacker News Reader

it was impossible to write code for 8 hours straight, you naturally had to stop

but you can prompt for 8 hours more or less

like running versus cycling - you can cover more distance by cycling and it's less intensive (I'm talking casual running/cycling, not racing)

agents are a bicycle for the mind

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Why is prompting for 8 hours easier than coding for 8 hours?

Is it because the prompts matter less?

I find the opposite to be true. I'm much less in control when prompting than programming. So I can be much more in the flow during programming and 8h (well stopping to lunch) can be no issue. I feel bad prompting 2h straight.

I don’t know how any engineer can claim this. Is this guy even reviewing his “output”?

You have to take a lot of these comments on this site with a grain of salt. These guys are not pushing out stuff they are professionally liable for.

The point was they trained to be a runner, not a cyclist.

But the metaphorical goal is to cover distance not get fit or to make the best use of what you trained for. A trained runner on a bike is faster than a trained runner.

At least if the metaphor is about coding as a means to creating usefully functional code as efficiently as possible. Careful coding by hand may eventually be a hobby activity.

Personally, while I do get some satisfaction in coding by hand it was always the production of something useful that I found most rewarding. I was never someone who wrote code for a hobby. With LLM's I'm more productive. And I find that very satisfying.

> A trained runner on a bike is faster than a trained runner.

Not true if they kept going the wrong direction.

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