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Comment by logicprog | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, because as you say, the flexibility of these tools and how you engage with them is so broad, and how much the nuances of thay engagement can often matter, the only way to teach someone how to do what you do with them is to sit down and pair a program with them. Barring that, any instructions you could give would massively under-determined what they actually try as a result of your instructions, and so it ends up being an infinite loop of them just coming back and saying "it doesn't work." So in the end, people really just have to discover how these things work for themselves.

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That's a completely reasonable take. I wouldn't have any issue with a nuanced comment like that. My issue with your above comment is that it's a lot more arrogant than nuanced.

That's fair, I think my point is there's a nuanced theory behind my choice to be rude, which is essentially "you need to experiment more, be more open minded, really work at it, and then you'll see what others are seeing, it isn't impossible." It's like Dark Souls, nobody can beat it for you, or teach you how to use dodge rolls, you've gotta build that skill yourself, and blaming the tools won't help.

I think your attitude is pretty lazy. It's a low-effort answer to say "skill issue" and then walk away feeling superior. Much harder to lean in to the other person, understand them, then help guide them onto the path. When you do this, you cause them to accelerate tremendously.

IMHO as you get more senior in software, after a while the only interesting metric becomes: are you raising the level of the people around you?

EDIT: looking at your Github seems like you are still in university. So I'll say "age and experience issue" on your end ;)

> IMHO as you get more senior in software, after a while the only interesting metric becomes: are you raising the level of the people around you?

Strongly agree, especially given how helping your teammates scales geometrically rather than linearly like improving your own output. If you work on a team team of five people with roughly equal output, and each becomes 20% more productive because of improvements you make, your team's output is increased the same as if you doubled your own productivity without helping anyone else on your team. (The math doesn't work out the same if your teammates aren't as productive as you already, but that's just an another argument for why it's better in the long run to be someone who can enable those around them rather than someone who only helps themself; helping everyone else has compounding returns if you keep doing it!)

I personally just also find it more fulfilling to be someone who makes everyone else around me better rather than just trying to be better than anyone else, but I recognize that not everyone will be motivated by that, so sometimes framing it in terms of raw output can help. The other potentially strong argument for those who are a bit more motivated by their own experiences only is that it's usually a lot more fun to have smart productive coworkers than ones who make you scoff and say "skill issue" to!

> That's fair, I think my point is there's a nuanced theory behind my choice to be rude, which is essentially "you need to experiment more, be more open minded, really work at it, and then you'll see what others are seeing, it isn't impossible."

Why not just say that then, instead of being rude? I pretty firmly disagree with the idea that being rude is ever a useful way to convey information rather than intent. Content and tone are separate axes that you can calibrate independently, so what you're saying is never an excuse for how you say it. Being rude conveys emotion, not information, and you didn't really convey information in your comment other than "look at how amazing the stuff I do is", and that's not a particularly effective mechanism for getting people to see your point of view.

I agree with you and I didn't think your comment was rude. Some people are against using LLMs and they will always find an excuse instead of experimenting with them so it doesn't matter how helpful you try to be they already made their mind.

> Some people are against using LLMs and they will always find an excuse instead of experimenting with them so it doesn't matter how helpful you try to be they already made their mind.

Do you think that I'm "against LLMs" and "finding an excuse instead of experimenting" because I disagree with you and the parent comment? If so, you should consider whether your perceptions are accurate, because I use them extensively.

More generally, if you aren't interested in engaging with the people who disagree with you, and you think that enough of them are arguing in bad faith and will never change their mind that their presence should determine the tone of your comments, why bother engaging in the discussion at all then?

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