Some things just take time

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be.

I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of both the good and the bad that I hear about LLM-based coding tools. Using AI for research or to spin up a quick demo or prototype is using it to help plot a course. A lot of the multi-stage agentic workflows also come down to creating guard rails before doing the main implementation so the AI can’t get too far off track. Most of the success stories I hear seem to be in these areas so far. Meanwhile, probably the most common criticism I see is that an AI that is simply given a prompt to implement some new feature or bug fix for an existing system often misunderstands or makes bad assumptions and ends up repeatedly running into dead ends. It moves fast but without knowing which direction to move in.

Awesome article, I feel a lot of people have also forgotten that good projects take iteration not 100 new features. To get few features to an excelent state it requires multilpe iterations at multiple stages. 1) The developer who does a task validates that their thinking was the correct one, they see how they changes impact the system, is it scalable? Does it need to be scalable? While you are working and thinking on it you get more and more context which simply wasn't there at the begining. 2) A feature done once (even after my perfect ClaudeCode plan) is not done forever, people will want to make it better/faster/smoother/etc. But instead of taking the time to analyze and perfect it we go onto the next feature, and if we have to iterate on the current one, we don't iterate we redo...

Really like the article I think it is awesome, and I strongly believe AI for coding will stay, but I also beleive that we need to still have a strong understanding of why we are building things and what they look like.

One of my favorite ideas from Nietzsche [1] is that civilizations take millennia to “digest” or integrate concepts. It seems a little obvious, maybe, until you look at the modern world and realize the baseline assumption is something like, “every problem is just a question of resources.”

An example being the common attitude that [advanced tech] is just a math problem to be solved, and not a process that needs to play itself out in the real world, interacting with it and learning, then integrating those lessons over time.

Another way to put this is: experience is undervalued, and knowledge is overvalued. Probably because experience isn’t fungible and therefore cannot be quantified as easily by market systems.

1. Probably not his original idea, and now that I think about it this is kind of more Hegelian. I’m not familiar enough with Hegel to reference him though.

I've been working on a clone of Sid Meier's Pirates but with a princess theme (for my daughters).

I've been using AI to help me write it and I've come to a couple conclusions:

- AI can make working PoCs incredibly quickly

- It can even help me think of story lines, decision paths etc

- Given that, there is still a TON of decisions to be made e.g. what artwork to use, what makes sense from a story perspective

- Playtesting alone + iterating still occurs at human speed b/c if humans are the intended audience, getting their opinions takes human time, not computer time

I've started using this example more and more as it highlights that, yes, AI can save huge amounts of time. However, as we learned from the Theory of Constraints, there is always another bottleneck somewhere that will slow things down.

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things

You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks.

But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills that void.

Make sure you fit the rocks first.

> We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them

Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to zero.

I've been hearing similar things from a lot of different directions. The underlying issue about "you cannot replace time" is one that is good to internalize early. A number of people I know who "missed" their kids growing up because they were working hard to make lots of money. You can't go buy "time with my kids when they were growing up."

Agentic coding very much feels like a "video game" in the sense of you pull the lever and open the loot box and sometimes it's an epic +10 agility sword and sometimes its just grey vendor trash. Whether or not it generates "good" or even "usable" code fades to the background as the thrill of "I just asked for a UI to orchestrate micro services and BLAMMO there it was!" moves to the fore.

Sounds familiar, for most of my life I have tried to remove all "friction" from life – applying that engineering mindset to make everything as efficient as possible. Only then I realized that life somehow is about that "friction".

We value human ingenuity and effort. If there was a button "create an Oscar-worty movie" anyone could press it would make a paradox. The trick is that this won't render film industry useless, since we watch movies only when we believe they're worth our time, which is not true for zero-effort content.

Some of the items listed in the "takes time" list say the beginning are not great examples. They are better emblems of artificial scarcity, especially Hermes bags.

Speed is useful, when you have a good idea or a hypothesis you want to test. But if you are running in the wrong direction, speed is of very little value. With LLMs it might be even harder to stop and realize that you are creating the wrong thing, because you are not spending effort to create the wrong thing.

As for the tree analogy and open source.

Yes, you cannot build years of community and trust in a weekend. But sometimes it's totally sufficient to plant a seed, give it some small amounts of water and leave it on its own to grow. Go ask my father having to deal with a huge maple tree, that I’ve planted 30 years ago and never cared for it.

Open Source projects sometimes work like this. I've created a .NET library for Firebase Messaging in a weekend a few years ago… and it grew on its own with PRs flowing in. So if your weekend project generates enough interest and continues to grow a community without you, what’s the bad thing here? I don’t get it.

Sometimes a tree dies and an Open Source project wasn’t able to make it.

That said, I’ve just finished rewriting four libraries to fix long standing issues, that I haven’t been able to fix for the past 10 years.

It's been great to use Gemini as a sparring partner to fix the API surface of these libraries, that had been problematic for the past 10 years. I was so quick to validate and invalidate ideas.

Once being one of the biggest LLM haters I have to say, that I immensely enjoy it right now.

I work at FAANG, and leadership is successfully pushing the urge for speed by stablishing the new productivity expectations, and everyone is rushing as much as they can, as the productivity gain doesn't really match the expectations, and people overwork to make up for this difference. This works very well with internal competition and a quota system for performance ratings, with some extra fear due to the bad job market.

I feel this new world sucks. We have new technology that boosts the productivity of the individual engineer, and we could be doing MUCH better work, instead of just rushed slop to meet quotas.

I feel I'm just building my replacement, to bring the next level of profits to the c-suite. I just wish I wasn't burning out while doing so.

What's faster now are the time-dependent factors of production - product development, go-to market, etc.

What's slower now are threats to production - even minor regulations take years or decades, and often appear only when workarounds have surfaced.

So what changed in the last 40+ years are the many tools for businesses to shape the conditions of their business -the downstream market, upstream suppliers, and regulatory support/constraints. This is extremely patient work over generations of players, sometimes by individuals, but usually by coalitions of mutual corporate self-interest, where even the largest players couldn't refuse to participate.

It's evolution.

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things

I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?

>Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak. And nobody is going to conjure trust, or quality, or community out of a weekend sprint.

absolutely although i wonder how different 'trust' is in the culture of tomorrow? will it 'matter' as much, be as cherished, as earned over the fullness of time?

i suspect it is a pendulum - and we are back to oak trees at some point - but which way is the pendulum swinging right now?

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I think the signals that we use to determine whether we're doing the right things are different with the new AI enhanced toolsets.

Refactoring decent sized components are an order of magnitude easier than it was, but the more important signal is still, why are you refactoring? What changed in your world or your world-view that caused this?

Good things still take time, and you can't slop-AI code your way to a great system. You still need domain expertise (as the EXCELLENT short story from the other day explained, Warranty Void if Regenerated (https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated) ). The decrease in friction does definitely allow for more slop, but it also allows for more excellence. It just doesn't guarantee excellence.

I love this, and it applies to a lot more than software and trees :)

I think it's hard to argue with the idea that we should slow down and think more, and that AI is pushing us to do the opposite. But time is limited, it's very limited. And at least in a professional setting, to spend time on the correct things is key.

What AI allow us is to do those things we would not have been able to prioritize before. To "write" those extra tests, add that minor feature or to solve that decade old bug. Things that we would never been able to prioritize are we noe able to do. It's not perfect, it's sometimes sloppy, but at least its getting shit done. It does not matter if you solve 10% of your problem perfect if you never have time for the remaining 90.

I do miss the coding, _a lot_, but productivity is a drug and I will take it.

lots of things take days, not hours. And idt AI changes that much. It does let you (or - let's be real - your middle management) try to make it happen with hours tho :P

On the contrary, you can solve the tree problem with money. There are nurseries that sell mature trees -- most people though will not choose to spend $20k on a tree.

> I’m also increasingly skeptical of anyone who sells me something that supposedly saves my time.

Imagine a world in which the promise of AI was that workers could keep their jobs, at the same compensation as before, but work fewer hours and days per week due to increased productivity.

What could you do with those extra hours and days? Sleep better. Exercise more. Prepare healthy meals. Spend more time with family and friends. The benefits to physical and mental well-being are priceless. Even if you happened to earn extra money for the same amount of work, your time can be infinitely more valuable than money.

Unfortunately, that's not this world. Which is why the "increased productivity" promise doesn't seem to benefit workers at all.

If you look at the technological utopias that people imagined 50, 60+ years ago, they involved lives of leisure. If you would have told them that advances in technology would not reduce our working hours at all, maybe they would have started smashing the machines back then. Now we're supposed to be happy with more "stuff", even if there's no more time to enjoy stuff.

Also you know, for programmers, say a 3 day work week is right there up for grabs. Even still employers would see big productivity increases.

> We know this intuitively. We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them. Either because of the time it took to build them or because of their age.

Oh, I thought it was because they're a way to show off about being rich.

> We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience.

Even if she could reach the pedals, my 4yo doesn't have the attention span to drive. This isn't a "lived experience" thing, it's a physical brain development thing. IIRC the are effects with learning math, where starting earlier had limited impact on being able to move to certain more advanced topics earlier; ie there's more going on than just hours of experience.

The standard age for voting is also the age for being a legal adult. There are sound logical reasons that these ages should match.

The standard drinking age is due to pressure by activists, and AIUI is lower in other countries.

I feel for the larger companies and the people who started 10 years ago, though.

They have spent the last decade building processes and guardrails for getting consistent average performance from people. But now, some talented people who worked at those companies are building their own new companies without the overhead and moving much, much more quickly.

I think what we assume is "vibe slop at inference speed" is not as simple as people make it out to be. From a perspective, I think generally it might be people trying to save jobs.

I'm seeing more slop come out of larger, older companies than the new ones (with experienced operators).

And the speed is somewhat scary. For smaller team it doesn't take as much effort to build deep, beautiful product anymore.

The bottleneck was never the ability for a engineer to code. It was the 16 layers between the customer and the programmer which has vanished in smaller companies and is forcing larger ones to produce slop.

great article. reminds me of the saying “9 women can’t make a baby in a month”

We're gonna have to learn some lessons from other engineering fields in this regard. Electrical, civil, mechanical, aerospace... They've all had to put processes in place to intentionally slow things down for a long time. I could throw a circuit board layout together 1000x faster then a team of engineers could have 50 years ago, but that industry has developed a culture of rigorous review processes to ensure quality, which means I couldn't actually move nearly as fast as possible.

Undoubtedly a lot of that comes down to production cost and safety. A plane is far more likely to kill people and it costs a shitload more to produce then an app (though plenty of software is mission critical). But now in software we can move quick enough up front that if we don't start applying some discipline it's going to bite us in the ass in the long run.

"So welcome to the machine"

I'm reading Against The Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, and now reading this blog piece is hard not to make connections with the points of the book: the usage of the tree as a counter-argument for the machine's automation credo exposed in the blog post very much aligns with I've read so far.

I don't see the problem - everything the author describes has, and will always be, true. You can't vibe code anything of value in a weekend exactly because anyone _else_ with the same level of experience can do the exact same thing in the same weekend! This has always been true across all trades and technologies. Once again, the domain expertise, wisdom, and simply _time_ of doing something always win. LLMs literally don't change that at all.

“The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.”

Was hoping this wasn't ai related, disappointed

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> We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience.

Not true, we do this because the 99% of the time it's true, however there are people who would be perfectly competent and responsible to drive without living to the age of 16-18. Same with voting, there are humans who have a deep understanding and intelligence about politics at a younger age than suffrage. Equally there are people who will be reckless drivers at 40 and vote on whim at 60.

We have these rules not because sophistication only comes through lived experience, we have them because it's strongly correlated and covers of most error cases.

To take this to AI, run the model enough times with a higher enough temperature, then perhaps it can solve your challenges with a high enough quality - just a thought.