The "doing it badly" principle changed everything for me. I spent weeks planning the perfect architecture for some automation tools I was building. Then I just... stopped planning and built the ugly version that solved my own pain point.
What surprised me was how much the ugly first version taught me that planning never could. You learn what users actually care about (often not what you expected), which edge cases matter in practice, and what "good enough" looks like in context.
The hardest part is giving yourself permission to ship something you know is flawed. But the feedback loop from real usage is worth more than weeks of hypothetical architecture debates.
While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts that flood some productivity subreddits recently. Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that.
Commenter's history is full of 'red flags':
- "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding"
- "This resonates."
- "What actually worked"
- "This hits close to home"
- "Where it really shines is the tedious stuff - writing tests for edge cases, refactoring patterns across multiple files, generating boilerplate that follows existing conventions."
> While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts
> Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This resonates."
Wow it's obvious in the full comment history. What is the purpose for this stuff? Do social marketing services maintain armies of bot accounts that just build up credibility by doing normal-ish comments, so they can called on later like sleeper cells for marketing? On Twitter I already have scroll down to find the one human reply on many posts.
And when the bots get a bit better (or people get less lazy prompting them, I'm pretty sure I could prompt to avoid this classic prose style) we'll have no chance of knowing what's a bot. How long until the majority of the Internet be essentially a really convincing version of r/SubredditSimulator? When I stop being able to recognize the bots, I wonder how I'll feel. They would probably be writing genuinely helpful/funny posts, or telling a touching personal story I upvote, but it's pure bot creative writing.
> Do social marketing services maintain armies of bot accounts that just build up credibility by doing normal-ish comments, so they can called on later like sleeper cells for marketing?
Russia and Israel are known to run full time operations doing this for well over a decade. Twitter by their own account, 25% of users are/were bots back in 2015 (their peak user year). Even here on HN if you go look at the most trafficked Israel/Palestine threads, there are lots of people complaining about getting modded into oblivion, turning the conversation into neutral/pro israel, and silencing negative comments via a ghost army of modders.
Relatedly, LLMs clearly picked the "LinkedIn influencer" style up.
My guess is some cross-over between those who write this way on LinkedIn and those who engage with chatbot A/B testing or sign up for the human reinforcement learning / fine tuning / tagging jobs, training in a preference for it.
> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that.
I understand that it's not the main point in your comment (you're trying to determine if the parent comment was written using an LLM), but yes, we do exist: I've spent years planning personal projects that remain unimplemented. Don't underestimate the power of procrastination and perfectionism. Oliver Burkeman ("Four Thousand Weeks", etc.) could probably explain that dynamic better than me.
My struggle is having enough patience to do any planning before I start building. As soon as there's even the remote hint of a half-baked idea in my head, it's incredibly tempting to just start building and figure out stuff as I go along.
I totally get that. I have a super corpo buddy who tells me every project is 80% planning and he uses that philosophy for his personal projects. That makes sense for a huge company.
I resist working like that because I am mega ignorant and I know I will encounter problems that I won't recognize until I get to them.
But, I also HATE having to rework my projects because of something I overlooked.
My (attempted) solution is to slog through a chat with an AI to build a Project Requirements Document and to answer every question it asks about my blindspots. It mostly helps build stuff. And sometimes the friction prevents me from overloading myself with more unfinished projects!
I didn't catch it immediately, but after you pointed it out I totally agree. That comment is for sure LLM written. If that involved a human in the loop or was fully automated I cannot say.
We currently live in the very thin sliver of time where the internet is already full of LLM writing, but where it's not quite invisible yet. It's just a matter of time before those Dead Internet Theory guys score another point and these comments are indistinguishable from novel human thought.
> … the internet is already full of LLM writing, but where it's not quite invisible yet. It's just a matter of time …
I don't think it will become significantly less visible⁰ in the near future. The models are going to hit the problem of being trained on LLM generated content which will cause the growth in their effectiveness quite a bit. It is already a concern that people are trying to develop mitigations for, and I expect it to hit hard soon unless some new revolutionary technique pops up¹².
> those Dead Internet Theory guys score another point
I'm betting that us Habsburg Internet predictors will have our little we-told-you-so moment first!
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[0] Though it is already hard to tell when you don't have your thinking head properly on sometimes. I bet it is much harder for non-native speakers, even relatively fluent ones, of the target language. I'm attempting to learn Spanish and there is no way I'd see the difference at my level in the language (A1, low A2 on a good day) given it often isn't immediately obvious in my native language. It might be interesting to study how LLM generated content affects people at different levels (primary language, fluent second, fluent but in a localised creole, etc.).
[1] and that revolution will likely be in detecting generated content, which will make generated content easier to flag for other purposes too, starting an arms race rather than solving the problem overall
[2] such a revolution will pop up, it is inevitable, but I think (hope?) the chance of it happening soon is low
To me it seems like it'd only get more visible as it gets more normal, or at least more predictable.
Remember back in the early 2000's when people would photoshop one animals head onto another and trick people into thinking "science has created a new animal". That obviously doesn't work anymore because we know thats possible, even relatively trivial, with photoshop. I imagine the same will happen here, as AI writing gets more common we'll begin a subconscious process of determining if the writer is human. That's probably a bit unfairly taxing on our brains, but we survived photoshop I suppose
The obviously fake ones were easy to detect, and the less obvious ones took some some sleuthing to detect. But the good fakes totally fly under the radar. You literally have no idea how much of the images you see are doctored well because you can't tell.
Same for LLMs in the near future (or perhaps already). What will we do when we'll realize we have no way of distinguishing man from bot on the internet?
I'd say the fact that you know theres some photoshop jobs you can't detect is proof enough that we're surviving it. It's not necessarily that we can identify it with 100% accuracy, but that we consider it a possibility with every image we see online
> What will we do when we'll realize we have no way of distinguishing man from bot on the internet?
The idea is this is a completely different scenario if we're aware of this being a potential problem versus not being at all aware of it. Maybe we won't be able to tell 100% of the time, but its something which we'll consider.
This reminds me of how bad browsing the internet will likely get this year. There are a ton of 'Cursor for marketing' style startups going online now that basically spam every acquisition channel possible.
Not sure about this user specifically, but interesting that a lot of their comments follow a pattern of '<x> nailed it'
> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves?
Ironically, I see this very often with AI/vibe coding, and whilst it does happen with traditional coding too, it happens with AI to an extreme degree. Spend 5 minutes on twitter and you'll see a load of people talking about their insane new vibe coding setup and next to nothing of what they're actually building
> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves?
Probably. I've been known to spend weeks planning something that I then forget and leave completely unstarted because other things took my attention!
> Commenter's history is full of 'red flags'
I wonder how much these red flags are starting to change how people write without LLMs, to avoid being accused of being a bot. A number of text checking tools suggested replacing ASCII hyphens with m-dashes in the pre-LLM-boom days¹ and I started listening to them, though I no longer do. That doesn't affect the overall sentence structure, but a lot of people jump on m-/n- dashes anywhere in text as a sign, not just in “it isn't <x> - it is <y>” like patterns.
It is certainly changing what people write about, with many threads like this one being diverted into discussing LLM output and how to spot it!
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[1] This is probably why there are many of them in the training data, so they are seen as significant by tokenisation steps, so they come out of the resulting models often.
The best marketing is indistinguishable from non–marketing, like the label on the side of my Contoso® Widget-like Electrical Machine™ — it feels like a list of ingredients and system requirements but every brand name there was sponsored.
I'm not so sure. There's a fair amount of voice and first person in their writing. I wonder if they just use LLMs so much that the language and style of LLMs have rubbed off on them.
Yeah; this is such a hard intuition to teach beginners. And something I think will be lost as we move more and more toward vibe coding.
There is so much to be learned about a problem - and programming in general - by implementing stuff and then refactoring it into the ground. Most of the time the abstractions I think up at first are totally wrong. Like, I imagine my program will model categories A, B and C. But when I program it up, the code for B and C is kinda similar. So I combine them, and realise C is just a subset of B. And sometimes then I realise A is a distinct subset of B as well, and I rewrite everything. Or sometimes I realise B and C differ in one dimension, and A and B in another. And that implies there's a fourth kind of thing with both properties.
Do this enough and your code ends up in an entirely unrecognisable place from where you started. But very, very beautiful.
> What surprised me was how much the ugly first version taught me that planning never could.
Fred Brooks, author of “The Mythical Man Month” wrote an essay called “Plan to Throw One Away” in 1975.
He argues much what you’ve described.
Of course, in reality we seldom do actually throw away the first version. We’ve got the tools and skills and processes now to iterate, iterate, iterate.
+1, if you can get positive feelings from doing something bad, i think that gives real improvement to one’s life. “The first step to getting good is being bad”.
Of course you’ll also maintain the satisfaction of doing something well.
> The hardest part is giving yourself permission to ship something you know is flawed. But the feedback loop from real usage is worth more than weeks of hypothetical architecture debates.
Nice statement.
I think there is another equally pervasive problem: balancing between shipping something and strategizing a complete "operating system" but in the eyes of OTHER stakeholders.
I'm in this muck now. Working with an insurance co that's building internal tools. On one had we have a COO that wants an operating model for everything and what feels like strategy/process diagrams as proof of work.
Meanwhile I am encouraging not overplanning and instead building stuff, shipping, seeing what works, iterating, etc.
But that latter version causes anxiety as people "don't know what you're doing" when, in fact, you're doing plenty but it's just not the slide-deck-material things and instead the tangible work.
There is a communication component too, of course. Almost an entirely separate discipline.
I've never arrived at acceptable comfort on either side of this debate but lean towards "perfect is the enemy of good enough"
The most important aspect of software design, at least with respect to software that you intend not to completely throw away and will be used by at least one other person, is that it is easy to change, and remains easy to change.
Whether it works properly or not, whether it's ugly and hacky or not, or whether it's slow... none of that matters. If it's easy to change you can fix it later.
Put a well thought out but minimal API around your code. Make it a magic black box. Maintain that API forever. Test only the APIs you ship.
I guess the important (and hard) part is to not make a categorical error and mix up design of high level functionality and UI with the plumbing underneath it.
The plumbing also needs iteration and prototyping, but sound, forward looking decisions at the right time pay dividends later on. That includes putting extra effort and thinking into data structures, error handling, logging, naming etc. rather earlier than later. All of that stuff makes iterating on the higher levels much easier very quickly.
I completely agree and went by the proverb "everything worth doing is worth doing poorly" about a year ago now, it took some time for it to sink in but now I'm actually productive. My main blocker was waiting for other's approval, now I feel a lot more free.
I've forgotten where I've seen this now, but one of the best developers I've seen wrote code by writing it, deleting everything, then writing it again, sometimes many times in order to get their final code. I found it fascinating.
There is a difference between shipping something that works but is not perfect, and shipping something knowingly flawed. I’m appalled at this viewpoint. Let’s hope no life, reputation or livelihood depends on your software.
This is the right point to mention "How Big Things Get Done" by Bent Flyvbjerg. You can iterate your design without putting lives into danger.
"I spent weeks planning" -- using the terminology from that book: No, you didn't spend weeks planning, you spent weeks building something that you _thought_ was a plan. An actual plan would give you the information you got from actually shipping the thing, and in software in particular "a model" and "the thing" look very similar, but for buildings and bridges they are very different.
For my personal projects, which are under zero time constraints, I usually build an ugly version, to figure out the kinks. Then delete it and write a proper one using the lessons I learned the first time.
Yes, but the experience you're describing is just getting stuck due to insufficient experience architecting a solution.
Not saying this is you, but it's so easy for people to give up and sour into hyper-pragmatists competing to become the world's worst management. Their insecurities take over and they actively suppress anyone trying to do their job by insisting everything be rewritten by AI, or push hard for no-code solutions.
This nails my issue with systems design insanity. There are so many things you learn through living with systems that are correct, though counterintuitive.
Do a thing. Write rubbish code. Build broken systems. Now scale scale. Then learn how to deal with the pattern changing as domains specific patterns emerge.
I watched this at play with a friend's startup. He couldn't get response times within the time period needed for his third party integration. After some hacking, we opted to cripple his webserver. Turns out that you can slice out mass amounts of the http protocol (and in that time server overhead) and still meett all of your needs. Sure it needs a recompile - but it worked and scaled, far more then anything else they did. Their exit proved that point.
This one works for me, and I've learned it from a post on HN. Whenever I feel stuck or overthink how to do something, just do it first - even with all the flaws that I'm already aware of, and if it feels almost painful to do it so badly. Then improve it a bit, then a bit, then before I know it a clear picture start to emerge... Feels like magic.
>You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you're an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team "I will one day write something good" to team "I have no choice but to write a piece of shit" and then take off your "bad writer" hat and replace it with a "petty critic" hat and go to town on that poor hack's draft and that's your second draft.
>Your taste is why your work disappoints you... it is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.*
'“One day, I’m gonna write that novel.” Pal? You better start tomorrow morning because the right time never happens. It’s when you boldly determine it. It’s like running on a rainy day. You’re fine once you get out there. The only difficulty is getting off the couch when you lace your shoes up.'
Except you do this in a corporate setting and they will stop you the second it works. And then you are stuck maintaining a barely working version forever.
I learned this the bad way, but now I just lie and say it doesn't work until it's good enough for me
This is what it looks like when trust has broken down at a company. Management don't trust engineers when they say "this needs more time". And engineers don't trust management with the truth (it kinda works - we really could ship it now if we wanted to).
Remarkably common, but not inevitable. Thankfully there's plenty of workplaces which don't look like this.
And yeah, lying is certainly one way to get work done in a bad organisation. I'd much rather - if at all possible - to find and fix the actual problem.
I think the problem is that in the current system, the blame is always on the engineer. If you ship something early and it didn't work, then it's your fault because you didn't QA it enough.
If you don't ship it in time it's also your fault
This is bound to happen with any company that needs to deliver to clients. Sales are incentivized to sell at all cost, even if the product is not there yet.
“The current system” isn’t a thing across our whole industry. You’re speaking about some specific places you've worked.
Personally I’ve never felt blamed for bugs that made it into production. I’ve felt responsible for sure, but I’ve never been blamed by others in the business. And I have seen sales people utterly chewed out for selling features we haven’t implemented without asking engineering. It all really depends on where you work, and what the culture is like.
If you hate it there, you don’t have to stay. Not every job will be like that.
Another fun one is when sales has already sold the thing to the customer without there being a product to sell. At that point it stops being about trust it's just "get it out there".
I hate this, but seems to be fairly normal practice.
I always try and keep in mind that we typically think of software as having three versions -- alpha, beta, and release -- but for it's considered even kind of "finished."
In my own work, this often looks like writing the quick and dirty version (alpha), then polishing it (beta), then rewrite it from scratch with all the knowledge you gained along the way.
The trick is to not get caught up on the beta. It's all too tempting to chase perfection too early.
> Whenever I feel stuck or overthink how to do something, just do it first - even with all the flaws that I'm already aware of, and if it feels almost painful to do it so badly. Then improve it a bit, then a bit, then before I know it a clear picture start to emerge... Feels like magic.
Funny how these things when done by a human is a positive and when done by an LLM is a negative. According to all the anti-llm experts... Humans generate perfect code on the first pass every time and it's only LLMs that introduce bad implementations. And this isn't a callout on this user in specific. It's a generalization to the anti-ai sentiment on HN. If incremental improvement works, incremental improvement works.
> Funny how these things when done by a human is a positive and when done by an LLM is a negative.
> Humans generate perfect code on the first pass every time and it's only LLMs that introduce bad implementations.
That's not what the "anti-llm experts" are saying at all. If you think of LLMs as "bad first draft" machines, then you'll likely be successful in finding ways to use LLMs.
But that's not what is being sold. Atman and Amodei are not selling "this tool will make bad implementations that you can improve on". They are selling "this tool will replace your IT department". Calling out that the tool isn't capable of doing that is not pretending that humans are perfect by comparison.
Honestly, it feels like straight up plagiarism. When I saw the title, I thought I knew which website was posted because I had seen it before. When I clicked, I saw an unfamiliar website and was surprised that it was posted 3 days ago rather than a couple months ago.
The contents are so similar, that it cannot be coincidence. It really seems like the author of this blog simply plagiarized the strangestloop post without referring to it at all...
Same thoughts here.
I gave it the benefit of the doubt, thought it might be an adoption for a specific field, or an extension of thought, or maybe a fun twist or something.
At a previous company we used to joke that most of management was a "problem admiration society":
They'd love to talk about problems, investigate them from all angles, make plans on how to plan to solve the problem, identify who caused it or how to blame for it, quantify how much it costs us or how much money we could make from solving it, everything and anything except actually doing something about it.
That definitely happens, but I wish had the displeasure of working at companies that were enamored with the solution they have, and couldn't be convinced to look again at the problem and see how it's changed since they originally solved it. As with most anything, the best approach is to somewhere in the middle, combining a love for the problem with a drive to repeatedly solve it. And one of the best tools for that seems to be dog-fooding, when the people in the company really want to use it for themselves.
Somewhat related, I've learned that when you're the one who ends up doing the thing, it's important to take advantage of that. Make decisions that benefit you where you have the flexibility.
I used to think this. Then I noticed how often "preparation" became its own infinite loop.
At work we built something from a 2-page spec in 4 months. The competing team spent 8 months on architecture docs before writing code. We shipped. They pivoted three times and eventually disbanded.
Planning has diminishing returns. The first 20% of planning catches 80% of the problems. Everything after that is usually anxiety dressed up as rigor.
The article's right about one thing: doing it badly still counts. Most of what I know came from shipping something embarrassing, then fixing it.
Getting everyone to fall in love with the thing is not doing the thing... learned this as a data scientist brought in to work on a project which ended soon thereafter. A team of 20 people spent 1.5 years getting people to love an idea which never materialized. Time was wasted because the technical limitations and issues came too late... it died as a 40 page postmortem that will never see daylight.
I learned that lesson as a solo dev on a project that lasted a year, then learned it again as a team of 4 on a 2-year project. I've not had to learn the lesson again but I've certainly trod the same path... 20 people (including some VERY expensive contractors), 3.5 years, AU$80m to deliver what amounts to a timesheeting system that needs a team of 10 people manually massaging the data every month to make it work.
How do you not be "toxic" after that? How do you retain a chipper attitude when you know for a rock-solid certainty that even if the project is successful it's likely by accident?
Is it always like that? I worked in teams where we had some planning beforehand (months, like in your example). We shipped just fine and the product started to bring money. I guess it depends, as usual.
I agree that planning has diminishing returns, yet simultaneously nearly every software project I’ve been part of has been under-planned and ended up worse off for it.
I think the original agile people had the right idea. Do some planning, not too much. Then write some code - but not too much. Then take what you've learned from implementing and replan.
Or if you want another way of thinking about it, code isn't only useful for deployment. Its also a tool you can use during the planning process to learn more about the problem you're trying to solve. When planning, the #1 killer is unknown unknowns. You can often discover a lot of them by building a super simple prototype.
Analysis paralysis is a thing. And as the article makes very clear, there are a lot of ways to get stuck doing anything else then the one thing you are supposed to be doing.
The way to break through that is indeed to start doing. Forget about the edge cases. Handle the happy path first. Build something that does enough to deliver most of the value. Then refine it; or rebuild it.
Seriously. The cost of prototyping is very low these days. So try stuff out and learn something. Don't be afraid to fail.
One reason LLMs are so shockingly effective for this is that they don't do analysis paralysis; they start doing right away. The end results aren't always optimal or even good but often still good enough. You can optimize and refine later. If that is actually needed. Worst case you'll fail to get a useful thing but you'll have a lot better understanding of the requirements for the next attempt. With AI the sunk cost is measured in tokens. It's not free. But also not very expensive. You can afford to burn some tokens to learn something.
A good rule is to not build a framework or platform for anything until you've built at least three versions of the type of thing that you would use it for. Anything you build before that is likely to be under and overengineered in exactly the wrong places. These places make themselves clear when you build a real system.
Just don't mistake prototyping for doing the thing.
Good enough is a self limiting fallacy.
A prototype failing to attract fans doesn't prove a lack of a market for the job the prototype attempts to perform. It only proves the prototype, as it stands, lacks something.
On the other hand: sometimes doing the thing is itself a bad idea. One reason I continue to insist on design docs and code review is that I'd rather find this out ahead of time rather than deal with the damage afterwards.
In the GenAI era, "doing the thing badly without planning" has become so easy that some counterweight is needed.
The happy path is trivial now but I've found the gap between prototype and production is actually wider. You end up spending all your time handling non-determinism and latency issues that simply didn't exist with deterministic code. It seems like the real engineering challenge is just getting the unit economics to work.
In "Remains of The Day" they call just talking about "the thing" an indulgence. Which is really what it is, it feels good, isn't hard, and doesn't achieve anything.
The characters in the book are quick to cut non-productive discussions short, but it feels like the feel good discussions around "the thing" are about as far as many people want to go these days.
A lot of tech-savvy people (like me) love solving meta-problems.
Doing the thing that would take 10 minutes? Na man, let me build an unnecessary complicated technical solution that in theory enables hundreds of people to do the thing much more efficiently in just 2 minutes. That takes a month and the thing has not been done, ha.
My nitpick is that thinking and dreaming about solving the problem is part of doing. Its the planning phase. Skipping This planning phase in Software engineering is the root cause of most Day 2 operations issues. However I agree that thinking or announcing about outcome is not doing.
There's probably some fuzziness here. I have notes upon notes going back ugh, 20 years (idk how old I am anymore?) that I could count as planning. At some point I need a kick in the ass to do it. Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Sometimes getting to prod feels like that.
I guess you understand this and are making a joke, but that "attack" would appear to be intentional (and motivating).
I find that I don't have major issues doing a thing once I get started on it. The main problem is choosing from among many things that I could reasonably consider "the thing", and then feeling confident enough in that choice to start.
This sounds not too dissimilar to the release the POC to prod mentality.
There are times where you obviously need to do the thing to understand the thing to see the process of doing the thing. This allows for breaking the process down into better steps. Just writing code to do things you think is doing thing but prove not to do the thing when actually doing the thing is common.
I have bad ADHD and printed the strangestloop.io blog post out and put it on the wall by my work desk in Oct 2023 according to the printout timestamp. I still haven't done the thing in some meaningful areas, and the print has honestly kind of been dispiriting. I'm going to take this post as the prompt to take it down.
I'm going to consider this with the same weight I would if my future grey-bearded self popped out of a portal to say it, thank you. I've had a sticky note on my monitor for a few years that just says "SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP"; it might be time for that to go before it becomes much more depressing.
There are things that humans have to unfortunately do when working as a group of people. That's why we became the alpha predator. Not because we were the strongest ape. That includes:
- Filling in timesheets, quarterly, half yearly cycles, company meetings, team meetings is not doing the thing — as a solopreneur. But not as a member of a group.
- Writing tickets, reviewing PRs is not doing the thing — as a solopreneur.
- Commuting to work and back is not doing the thing — If I'm a solopreneur this doesn't even matter.
- Answering technical questions, analyzing data, attending to bugs is not doing the thing — If I'm a solopreneur especially on a greenfield stuff, I have zero baggage.
- Writing test cases and putting up alerts is not doing the thing — if it's only me judging me, I have nothing to judge.
I take it to mean: if you can just do the thing now (you are in the right place, healthy, with tools and prerequisites) and you choose not to because of (procrastination reasons) then you could be doing the task but you choose not to.
I kinda agree, but I also gain pleasure from doing all those things that are not supposed to be "the thing". The thinking, the dreaming, the visualizing... I just like that. I do it a lot when working on personal projects (which some of them I never ship). I think it's fine, and I wouldn't go as far as saying that those things are "not doing the thing"; in many ways those things are "the thing", at least for me.
That's OK. It's totally fine to not doing the thing. Find joy however you want.
But it's not good to lie to yourself about doing the thing while not doing the thing. If your joy comes from the result of doing the thing, but you're putting time into other things that aren't doing the thing, that joy is not getting any closer.
This is something I ran into, ego satisfaction, where you tell people/show things like concepts, talk about it, get the "that sounds cool" but yeah it's not real. I now try to build something real like a hardware project before showing it.
I split activities at work into "Engineering" and "Talking about Engineering". We're a consultancy so there's a certain amount of "Talking about Engineering" that is required and good, but I try not to lose sight of what is actually engineering and what isn't.
What I am still on the fence about is when "design" or "architecture" type work counts as Engineering. There's a certain amount of design work that is valuable to do before coding and is part of the thinking process. But sometimes you get into a lot of abstract talking that is "not doing the thing".
I wholeheartedly agree. In an age of talking heads. you will not hear from the people actually doing the thing. because they too busy doing the thing versus talking about it. now excuse me ima go back to doing the thing.
Writing a litany about doing the thing is not doing the thing.
Posting on HN about doing the thing is not doing the thing.
Commenting about doing the thing is not doing the thing.
Sometimes that's because they're making it worthwhile, by connecting the thing with those who will benefit from it and explaining how to use it, which is as valuable as doing the thing.
I.e. by making sure that they're doing the right thing.
Will this continue to be true? I do agree with the principle. But I've sometimes had the feeling that poor design upfront can have compounding consequences, especially when AI is filling in ambiguities.
I get the sentiment, but thinking and planning are important steps to doing things. Obviously you can’t stop there, and you shouldn’t spend too much time on that part, but it is still important.
A bit of a meta lesson for me here: Writing a short, pointed, opinionated blog post is blogging. If I care about blogging my thoughts, I need to just do it, not worry about rigor or depth ahead of time
If some task has a known step-by-step pattern, then doing it step by step makes perfect sense. That is doing the thing. Taking the known shortest/best path.
Doing the thing is going to involve both direct steps, and indirect steps necessary to do the direct steps.
Not doing the thing involves doing things other than the shortest/safest/effective path to getting the thing done.
This is a useful methodology and article nudges the reader towards doing things and "taking action". I am sure it will appeal to a huge number of people and indeed, rightly it has climbed to the top of HN, else I would have completely missed it.
I have found these articles on the exact same topic to be creating more actionable mindset.
1. The cult of done by No Boilderplate: https://youtu.be/bJQj1uKtnus?si=efV5OTF35LcDjuN3. Through the years, I have come back to this video many a times and even have the Cult of Done manifesto (snipped from this video) stuck on to my wall.
2. High agency by George Mack: https://www.highagency.com/. This is a long form article and sitting and just reading it has helped me unblock myself. I have a bookmark of this on my favourites bar at all times.
When saying 'doing the thing', we often mean getting some progress or a result. I'd say you did the thing if you consider the result created by the AI acceptable.
And running the marathon is just running the marathon? I disagree. Big part of running the marathon is in the preparation. Weeks after weeks of training and not skipping a single session. The marathon itself is the tip of the iceberg; important but not the whole "thing".
There are some things that you just can't do without preparation. But never mistake the preparation for doing the thing. You can be "getting in shape for a marathon" forever without ever running a marathon.
But as a metaphor for other creative pursuits, my experience is that most of the time when people are "planning" or working on other things that they like to believe will help them do the thing... they are really just avoiding doing the thing.
People spend years doing "world-building" and writing character backgrounds and never write the damn book. Aspiring musicians spend thousands collecting instruments and never make a song.
As you say, if it's just for fun, that's all fine. But if the satisfaction you want comes from the result of the thing, you have to do the thing.
This version has the general form of the original, So why does it seem there is something odd about it?
Whoever the guy from ‘Strangest Loop’ is it’s my impression that it’s meant to resonate with self-starters; as if he’s speaking from that vantage of and for hustle culture. The grinders. The movers. The seniors. The managers. The founders. [1]
I don’t get that vibe from this derivative and in fact I think it carries a slight affect of a neurotic employee while the original airs determination. Reading this brings one into the mind of an observer, the founder of a VC firm, watching OP wring over a Palo Alto brewed latte.
[1] Am I the only one who was unable to find out his actual name on this website?
I don’t get it? Are they sharing a quote they liked or taking credit for it? Maybe they just saw the YouTube video and decided to turn it into the page?
Edit:
Seems like a way to show they’re looking for roles, I guess.
So the typical nonsensical argument is that an architect should be a builder.
Alright.
You can very much do the thing when it's not too costly to fuck up. For many important things, thinking about doing the thing is even more important than doing the thing.
I like that this place still primarily focuses on the message (even just the headline) rather than the messenger. Feels like an antifeature of the big social media platforms that who’s saying it is often more important than what’s being said.
as a counter point, in another current thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46789913, there's a discussion of the "hostile codebase" of openssl. maybe they neglected preparation and "just did it"?
No it's not. Sometimes (or maybe most of the time) doing it badly means maybe it's not your thing.
I used to have a neighbour who liked to play the piano and sing. He was doing it consistently badly and he didn't have anyone to tell him that he should probably stop trying.
I have two problems with that. One is, you can do what you like quietly and without disturbing anyone around you. Second is the Dunning Kruger effect: witnessing it first hand is never fun.
Who are you, to define what "the thing" is, for someone else?
Doing the thing isn't about judging other people. That doesn't contribute to your thing.
If someone is bothering you, making it hard to do your thing, then your thing involves talking to them about your problem. Without judging what they are doing.
Oh.. So you start doing something new and you're top 10% without practicing or being bad at it first? I'd love to test that to see if it's the case... Your logic is "You're not the best ever to do something so you are not doing it" means you have probably never done a single thing your entire life. Maybe you should just stop.
The "doing it badly" principle changed everything for me. I spent weeks planning the perfect architecture for some automation tools I was building. Then I just... stopped planning and built the ugly version that solved my own pain point.
What surprised me was how much the ugly first version taught me that planning never could. You learn what users actually care about (often not what you expected), which edge cases matter in practice, and what "good enough" looks like in context.
The hardest part is giving yourself permission to ship something you know is flawed. But the feedback loop from real usage is worth more than weeks of hypothetical architecture debates.
While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts that flood some productivity subreddits recently. Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that.
Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This resonates." - "What actually worked" - "This hits close to home" - "Where it really shines is the tedious stuff - writing tests for edge cases, refactoring patterns across multiple files, generating boilerplate that follows existing conventions."
> While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts
> Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This resonates."
Wow it's obvious in the full comment history. What is the purpose for this stuff? Do social marketing services maintain armies of bot accounts that just build up credibility by doing normal-ish comments, so they can called on later like sleeper cells for marketing? On Twitter I already have scroll down to find the one human reply on many posts.
And when the bots get a bit better (or people get less lazy prompting them, I'm pretty sure I could prompt to avoid this classic prose style) we'll have no chance of knowing what's a bot. How long until the majority of the Internet be essentially a really convincing version of r/SubredditSimulator? When I stop being able to recognize the bots, I wonder how I'll feel. They would probably be writing genuinely helpful/funny posts, or telling a touching personal story I upvote, but it's pure bot creative writing.
Building up karma, for its own sake or to gain the right to flag politically disagreeable content
> Do social marketing services maintain armies of bot accounts that just build up credibility by doing normal-ish comments, so they can called on later like sleeper cells for marketing?
Russia and Israel are known to run full time operations doing this for well over a decade. Twitter by their own account, 25% of users are/were bots back in 2015 (their peak user year). Even here on HN if you go look at the most trafficked Israel/Palestine threads, there are lots of people complaining about getting modded into oblivion, turning the conversation into neutral/pro israel, and silencing negative comments via a ghost army of modders.
Dark forest, y'all. We live in the grey goo scenario of content.
> The tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM.
This particular piece is LinkedIn “copy pasta” with many verbatim or mildly variant copies.
Example: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chriswillx_preparing-to-do-th...
And in turn, see: https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...
Relatedly, LLMs clearly picked the "LinkedIn influencer" style up.
My guess is some cross-over between those who write this way on LinkedIn and those who engage with chatbot A/B testing or sign up for the human reinforcement learning / fine tuning / tagging jobs, training in a preference for it.
I suppose we missed the change to make that the "Linkedinfluencer" style ?
> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that.
I understand that it's not the main point in your comment (you're trying to determine if the parent comment was written using an LLM), but yes, we do exist: I've spent years planning personal projects that remain unimplemented. Don't underestimate the power of procrastination and perfectionism. Oliver Burkeman ("Four Thousand Weeks", etc.) could probably explain that dynamic better than me.
Fascinating how differently people can work.
My struggle is having enough patience to do any planning before I start building. As soon as there's even the remote hint of a half-baked idea in my head, it's incredibly tempting to just start building and figure out stuff as I go along.
I totally get that. I have a super corpo buddy who tells me every project is 80% planning and he uses that philosophy for his personal projects. That makes sense for a huge company.
I resist working like that because I am mega ignorant and I know I will encounter problems that I won't recognize until I get to them.
But, I also HATE having to rework my projects because of something I overlooked.
My (attempted) solution is to slog through a chat with an AI to build a Project Requirements Document and to answer every question it asks about my blindspots. It mostly helps build stuff. And sometimes the friction prevents me from overloading myself with more unfinished projects!
I didn't catch it immediately, but after you pointed it out I totally agree. That comment is for sure LLM written. If that involved a human in the loop or was fully automated I cannot say.
We currently live in the very thin sliver of time where the internet is already full of LLM writing, but where it's not quite invisible yet. It's just a matter of time before those Dead Internet Theory guys score another point and these comments are indistinguishable from novel human thought.
> … the internet is already full of LLM writing, but where it's not quite invisible yet. It's just a matter of time …
I don't think it will become significantly less visible⁰ in the near future. The models are going to hit the problem of being trained on LLM generated content which will cause the growth in their effectiveness quite a bit. It is already a concern that people are trying to develop mitigations for, and I expect it to hit hard soon unless some new revolutionary technique pops up¹².
> those Dead Internet Theory guys score another point
I'm betting that us Habsburg Internet predictors will have our little we-told-you-so moment first!
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[0] Though it is already hard to tell when you don't have your thinking head properly on sometimes. I bet it is much harder for non-native speakers, even relatively fluent ones, of the target language. I'm attempting to learn Spanish and there is no way I'd see the difference at my level in the language (A1, low A2 on a good day) given it often isn't immediately obvious in my native language. It might be interesting to study how LLM generated content affects people at different levels (primary language, fluent second, fluent but in a localised creole, etc.).
[1] and that revolution will likely be in detecting generated content, which will make generated content easier to flag for other purposes too, starting an arms race rather than solving the problem overall
[2] such a revolution will pop up, it is inevitable, but I think (hope?) the chance of it happening soon is low
To me it seems like it'd only get more visible as it gets more normal, or at least more predictable.
Remember back in the early 2000's when people would photoshop one animals head onto another and trick people into thinking "science has created a new animal". That obviously doesn't work anymore because we know thats possible, even relatively trivial, with photoshop. I imagine the same will happen here, as AI writing gets more common we'll begin a subconscious process of determining if the writer is human. That's probably a bit unfairly taxing on our brains, but we survived photoshop I suppose
we didn't really survive photoshop.
The obviously fake ones were easy to detect, and the less obvious ones took some some sleuthing to detect. But the good fakes totally fly under the radar. You literally have no idea how much of the images you see are doctored well because you can't tell.
Same for LLMs in the near future (or perhaps already). What will we do when we'll realize we have no way of distinguishing man from bot on the internet?
I'd say the fact that you know theres some photoshop jobs you can't detect is proof enough that we're surviving it. It's not necessarily that we can identify it with 100% accuracy, but that we consider it a possibility with every image we see online
> What will we do when we'll realize we have no way of distinguishing man from bot on the internet?
The idea is this is a completely different scenario if we're aware of this being a potential problem versus not being at all aware of it. Maybe we won't be able to tell 100% of the time, but its something which we'll consider.
This reminds me of how bad browsing the internet will likely get this year. There are a ton of 'Cursor for marketing' style startups going online now that basically spam every acquisition channel possible.
Not sure about this user specifically, but interesting that a lot of their comments follow a pattern of '<x> nailed it'
This is true, but the need to read critically especially on the internet has become an indispensable skill anyway.
Psy-ops, astroturfing, now LLM slop.
> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves?
Ironically, I see this very often with AI/vibe coding, and whilst it does happen with traditional coding too, it happens with AI to an extreme degree. Spend 5 minutes on twitter and you'll see a load of people talking about their insane new vibe coding setup and next to nothing of what they're actually building
Still would love to see somebody with a fresh install of windows set up their vibe coding suite and then build something worthwhile.
> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves?
Probably. I've been known to spend weeks planning something that I then forget and leave completely unstarted because other things took my attention!
> Commenter's history is full of 'red flags'
I wonder how much these red flags are starting to change how people write without LLMs, to avoid being accused of being a bot. A number of text checking tools suggested replacing ASCII hyphens with m-dashes in the pre-LLM-boom days¹ and I started listening to them, though I no longer do. That doesn't affect the overall sentence structure, but a lot of people jump on m-/n- dashes anywhere in text as a sign, not just in “it isn't <x> - it is <y>” like patterns.
It is certainly changing what people write about, with many threads like this one being diverted into discussing LLM output and how to spot it!
--------
[1] This is probably why there are many of them in the training data, so they are seen as significant by tokenisation steps, so they come out of the resulting models often.
It’s already happening. This came up in a webinar attended by someone from our sales team:
> "A typo or two also helps to show it’s not AI (one of the biggest issues right now)."
When it comes to forum posts, I think getting to the point quickly makes something worth reading whether or not it’s AI generated.
The best marketing is usually brief.
The best marketing is indistinguishable from non–marketing, like the label on the side of my Contoso® Widget-like Electrical Machine™ — it feels like a list of ingredients and system requirements but every brand name there was sponsored.
I'm not so sure. There's a fair amount of voice and first person in their writing. I wonder if they just use LLMs so much that the language and style of LLMs have rubbed off on them.
Yeah; this is such a hard intuition to teach beginners. And something I think will be lost as we move more and more toward vibe coding.
There is so much to be learned about a problem - and programming in general - by implementing stuff and then refactoring it into the ground. Most of the time the abstractions I think up at first are totally wrong. Like, I imagine my program will model categories A, B and C. But when I program it up, the code for B and C is kinda similar. So I combine them, and realise C is just a subset of B. And sometimes then I realise A is a distinct subset of B as well, and I rewrite everything. Or sometimes I realise B and C differ in one dimension, and A and B in another. And that implies there's a fourth kind of thing with both properties.
Do this enough and your code ends up in an entirely unrecognisable place from where you started. But very, very beautiful.
> What surprised me was how much the ugly first version taught me that planning never could.
Fred Brooks, author of “The Mythical Man Month” wrote an essay called “Plan to Throw One Away” in 1975.
He argues much what you’ve described.
Of course, in reality we seldom do actually throw away the first version. We’ve got the tools and skills and processes now to iterate, iterate, iterate.
>The hardest part is giving yourself permission to ship something you know is flawed.
https://wiki.c2.com/?PlanToThrowOneAway
+1, if you can get positive feelings from doing something bad, i think that gives real improvement to one’s life. “The first step to getting good is being bad”.
Of course you’ll also maintain the satisfaction of doing something well.
> The hardest part is giving yourself permission to ship something you know is flawed. But the feedback loop from real usage is worth more than weeks of hypothetical architecture debates.
Nice statement.
I think there is another equally pervasive problem: balancing between shipping something and strategizing a complete "operating system" but in the eyes of OTHER stakeholders.
I'm in this muck now. Working with an insurance co that's building internal tools. On one had we have a COO that wants an operating model for everything and what feels like strategy/process diagrams as proof of work.
Meanwhile I am encouraging not overplanning and instead building stuff, shipping, seeing what works, iterating, etc.
But that latter version causes anxiety as people "don't know what you're doing" when, in fact, you're doing plenty but it's just not the slide-deck-material things and instead the tangible work.
There is a communication component too, of course. Almost an entirely separate discipline.
I've never arrived at acceptable comfort on either side of this debate but lean towards "perfect is the enemy of good enough"
Depends what "doing it badly" means.
The most important aspect of software design, at least with respect to software that you intend not to completely throw away and will be used by at least one other person, is that it is easy to change, and remains easy to change.
Whether it works properly or not, whether it's ugly and hacky or not, or whether it's slow... none of that matters. If it's easy to change you can fix it later.
Put a well thought out but minimal API around your code. Make it a magic black box. Maintain that API forever. Test only the APIs you ship.
I guess the important (and hard) part is to not make a categorical error and mix up design of high level functionality and UI with the plumbing underneath it.
The plumbing also needs iteration and prototyping, but sound, forward looking decisions at the right time pay dividends later on. That includes putting extra effort and thinking into data structures, error handling, logging, naming etc. rather earlier than later. All of that stuff makes iterating on the higher levels much easier very quickly.
I completely agree and went by the proverb "everything worth doing is worth doing poorly" about a year ago now, it took some time for it to sink in but now I'm actually productive. My main blocker was waiting for other's approval, now I feel a lot more free.
I've forgotten where I've seen this now, but one of the best developers I've seen wrote code by writing it, deleting everything, then writing it again, sometimes many times in order to get their final code. I found it fascinating.
To me, that is the only way to write code.
One of my friends calls it "development-driven development".
> ship something you know is flawed
There is a difference between shipping something that works but is not perfect, and shipping something knowingly flawed. I’m appalled at this viewpoint. Let’s hope no life, reputation or livelihood depends on your software.
This is the right point to mention "How Big Things Get Done" by Bent Flyvbjerg. You can iterate your design without putting lives into danger.
"I spent weeks planning" -- using the terminology from that book: No, you didn't spend weeks planning, you spent weeks building something that you _thought_ was a plan. An actual plan would give you the information you got from actually shipping the thing, and in software in particular "a model" and "the thing" look very similar, but for buildings and bridges they are very different.
For my personal projects, which are under zero time constraints, I usually build an ugly version, to figure out the kinks. Then delete it and write a proper one using the lessons I learned the first time.
I want to do this with a multiplayer online game I'm working on but you just can't do it wrong and have it actually work though :/
Yes, but the experience you're describing is just getting stuck due to insufficient experience architecting a solution.
Not saying this is you, but it's so easy for people to give up and sour into hyper-pragmatists competing to become the world's worst management. Their insecurities take over and they actively suppress anyone trying to do their job by insisting everything be rewritten by AI, or push hard for no-code solutions.
Planning feels safe because it lets you postpone judgment
This nails my issue with systems design insanity. There are so many things you learn through living with systems that are correct, though counterintuitive.
Do a thing. Write rubbish code. Build broken systems. Now scale scale. Then learn how to deal with the pattern changing as domains specific patterns emerge.
I watched this at play with a friend's startup. He couldn't get response times within the time period needed for his third party integration. After some hacking, we opted to cripple his webserver. Turns out that you can slice out mass amounts of the http protocol (and in that time server overhead) and still meett all of your needs. Sure it needs a recompile - but it worked and scaled, far more then anything else they did. Their exit proved that point.
"Doing it badly is doing the thing."
This one works for me, and I've learned it from a post on HN. Whenever I feel stuck or overthink how to do something, just do it first - even with all the flaws that I'm already aware of, and if it feels almost painful to do it so badly. Then improve it a bit, then a bit, then before I know it a clear picture start to emerge... Feels like magic.
"Everything worth doing is worth doing badly."
Got me through many a rough spot.
it fits well enough into another frame - make it work, then make it pretty, then make it fast
if youre worried about doing it well, youre a step or two ahead of where you need to be
This has been my motto for decades, dunno where I picked it up frst.
I think I've reached the "make it fast" bit in my career twice. Most projects are considered as ready after "make it work" =)
My two favorite bits of wisdom in this vein:
Dan Harmon's advice on writer's block: https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/5b2w4c/dan_h...
>You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you're an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team "I will one day write something good" to team "I have no choice but to write a piece of shit" and then take off your "bad writer" hat and replace it with a "petty critic" hat and go to town on that poor hack's draft and that's your second draft.
"The Gap" by Ira Glass: https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/c98jpd/the_g...
>Your taste is why your work disappoints you... it is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.*
Henry Rollins too.
'“One day, I’m gonna write that novel.” Pal? You better start tomorrow morning because the right time never happens. It’s when you boldly determine it. It’s like running on a rainy day. You’re fine once you get out there. The only difficulty is getting off the couch when you lace your shoes up.'
I miss Harmontown dearly. He was always dropping solid-gold wisdom like this in the middle of otherwise borderline-incoherent rants.
Except you do this in a corporate setting and they will stop you the second it works. And then you are stuck maintaining a barely working version forever.
I learned this the bad way, but now I just lie and say it doesn't work until it's good enough for me
^^^ THIS ... If what you're building is useful, showing someone a prototype too early can cause the whole company to rush you to deploy.
Everyone's threshold is different. I aspire to "move fast and break things", but more often than not, I obsess over the rough edges.
This is what it looks like when trust has broken down at a company. Management don't trust engineers when they say "this needs more time". And engineers don't trust management with the truth (it kinda works - we really could ship it now if we wanted to).
Remarkably common, but not inevitable. Thankfully there's plenty of workplaces which don't look like this.
And yeah, lying is certainly one way to get work done in a bad organisation. I'd much rather - if at all possible - to find and fix the actual problem.
I think the problem is that in the current system, the blame is always on the engineer. If you ship something early and it didn't work, then it's your fault because you didn't QA it enough.
If you don't ship it in time it's also your fault
This is bound to happen with any company that needs to deliver to clients. Sales are incentivized to sell at all cost, even if the product is not there yet.
“The current system” isn’t a thing across our whole industry. You’re speaking about some specific places you've worked.
Personally I’ve never felt blamed for bugs that made it into production. I’ve felt responsible for sure, but I’ve never been blamed by others in the business. And I have seen sales people utterly chewed out for selling features we haven’t implemented without asking engineering. It all really depends on where you work, and what the culture is like.
If you hate it there, you don’t have to stay. Not every job will be like that.
Another fun one is when sales has already sold the thing to the customer without there being a product to sell. At that point it stops being about trust it's just "get it out there".
I hate this, but seems to be fairly normal practice.
I always try and keep in mind that we typically think of software as having three versions -- alpha, beta, and release -- but for it's considered even kind of "finished."
In my own work, this often looks like writing the quick and dirty version (alpha), then polishing it (beta), then rewrite it from scratch with all the knowledge you gained along the way.
The trick is to not get caught up on the beta. It's all too tempting to chase perfection too early.
And overthinking starts to feel less like diligence and more like avoidance
"When in doubt, use brute force."
> Whenever I feel stuck or overthink how to do something, just do it first - even with all the flaws that I'm already aware of, and if it feels almost painful to do it so badly. Then improve it a bit, then a bit, then before I know it a clear picture start to emerge... Feels like magic.
Funny how these things when done by a human is a positive and when done by an LLM is a negative. According to all the anti-llm experts... Humans generate perfect code on the first pass every time and it's only LLMs that introduce bad implementations. And this isn't a callout on this user in specific. It's a generalization to the anti-ai sentiment on HN. If incremental improvement works, incremental improvement works.
> Funny how these things when done by a human is a positive and when done by an LLM is a negative.
> Humans generate perfect code on the first pass every time and it's only LLMs that introduce bad implementations.
That's not what the "anti-llm experts" are saying at all. If you think of LLMs as "bad first draft" machines, then you'll likely be successful in finding ways to use LLMs.
But that's not what is being sold. Atman and Amodei are not selling "this tool will make bad implementations that you can improve on". They are selling "this tool will replace your IT department". Calling out that the tool isn't capable of doing that is not pretending that humans are perfect by comparison.
The essay is quite similar to this one from strangestloop.io[0]
[0]: https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...
Honestly, it feels like straight up plagiarism. When I saw the title, I thought I knew which website was posted because I had seen it before. When I clicked, I saw an unfamiliar website and was surprised that it was posted 3 days ago rather than a couple months ago.
The contents are so similar, that it cannot be coincidence. It really seems like the author of this blog simply plagiarized the strangestloop post without referring to it at all...
Same thoughts here. I gave it the benefit of the doubt, thought it might be an adoption for a specific field, or an extension of thought, or maybe a fun twist or something.
This is a tasteless copy.
I’m glad someone mentioned this. Couldn’t remember where I’d read this but knew there was something really similar.
At a previous company we used to joke that most of management was a "problem admiration society":
They'd love to talk about problems, investigate them from all angles, make plans on how to plan to solve the problem, identify who caused it or how to blame for it, quantify how much it costs us or how much money we could make from solving it, everything and anything except actually doing something about it.
It was never about doing the thing.
That definitely happens, but I wish had the displeasure of working at companies that were enamored with the solution they have, and couldn't be convinced to look again at the problem and see how it's changed since they originally solved it. As with most anything, the best approach is to somewhere in the middle, combining a love for the problem with a drive to repeatedly solve it. And one of the best tools for that seems to be dog-fooding, when the people in the company really want to use it for themselves.
What's ironic is that all that analysis is often framed as being responsible or strategic, when in reality it's risk avoidance dressed up as rigor
This is an excellent piece about how doing something is better than just talking about it: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
Oh man, I feel this.
Somewhat related, I've learned that when you're the one who ends up doing the thing, it's important to take advantage of that. Make decisions that benefit you where you have the flexibility.
you remove "managers" then simply rate of output goes up.
specially the middle managers i.e engineering managers, senior engineering manager, director of engineering duh duh
there's less coordination to do - to keep managers up to date.
the most functional software orgs out there - don't have managers
Output goes up until everything fails catastrophically
Which orgs did you have in mind?
That is OK if that fed into a decision to do another thing now because of <good reasons>.
I used to think this. Then I noticed how often "preparation" became its own infinite loop.
At work we built something from a 2-page spec in 4 months. The competing team spent 8 months on architecture docs before writing code. We shipped. They pivoted three times and eventually disbanded.
Planning has diminishing returns. The first 20% of planning catches 80% of the problems. Everything after that is usually anxiety dressed up as rigor.
The article's right about one thing: doing it badly still counts. Most of what I know came from shipping something embarrassing, then fixing it.
I think you may have slightly misunderstood the article.
"Preparation" isn't mentioned explicitly, but by my reading it would come firmly under "is not doing the thing".
Getting everyone to fall in love with the thing is not doing the thing... learned this as a data scientist brought in to work on a project which ended soon thereafter. A team of 20 people spent 1.5 years getting people to love an idea which never materialized. Time was wasted because the technical limitations and issues came too late... it died as a 40 page postmortem that will never see daylight.
I learned that lesson as a solo dev on a project that lasted a year, then learned it again as a team of 4 on a 2-year project. I've not had to learn the lesson again but I've certainly trod the same path... 20 people (including some VERY expensive contractors), 3.5 years, AU$80m to deliver what amounts to a timesheeting system that needs a team of 10 people manually massaging the data every month to make it work.
How do you not be "toxic" after that? How do you retain a chipper attitude when you know for a rock-solid certainty that even if the project is successful it's likely by accident?
Is it always like that? I worked in teams where we had some planning beforehand (months, like in your example). We shipped just fine and the product started to bring money. I guess it depends, as usual.
Rimmer planning for his astro-navigation exam sums up the "infinite loop" of preparation.
From the Red Dwarf book and quoted previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28033747
I agree that planning has diminishing returns, yet simultaneously nearly every software project I’ve been part of has been under-planned and ended up worse off for it.
I think the original agile people had the right idea. Do some planning, not too much. Then write some code - but not too much. Then take what you've learned from implementing and replan.
Or if you want another way of thinking about it, code isn't only useful for deployment. Its also a tool you can use during the planning process to learn more about the problem you're trying to solve. When planning, the #1 killer is unknown unknowns. You can often discover a lot of them by building a super simple prototype.
Once something exists, decisions collapse around reality instead of possibility
That’s not a zero-sum game.
Pivoting to zero-planning, would also have a basket of flaws.
Analysis paralysis is a thing. And as the article makes very clear, there are a lot of ways to get stuck doing anything else then the one thing you are supposed to be doing.
The way to break through that is indeed to start doing. Forget about the edge cases. Handle the happy path first. Build something that does enough to deliver most of the value. Then refine it; or rebuild it.
Seriously. The cost of prototyping is very low these days. So try stuff out and learn something. Don't be afraid to fail.
One reason LLMs are so shockingly effective for this is that they don't do analysis paralysis; they start doing right away. The end results aren't always optimal or even good but often still good enough. You can optimize and refine later. If that is actually needed. Worst case you'll fail to get a useful thing but you'll have a lot better understanding of the requirements for the next attempt. With AI the sunk cost is measured in tokens. It's not free. But also not very expensive. You can afford to burn some tokens to learn something.
A good rule is to not build a framework or platform for anything until you've built at least three versions of the type of thing that you would use it for. Anything you build before that is likely to be under and overengineered in exactly the wrong places. These places make themselves clear when you build a real system.
Just don't mistake prototyping for doing the thing.
Good enough is a self limiting fallacy.
A prototype failing to attract fans doesn't prove a lack of a market for the job the prototype attempts to perform. It only proves the prototype, as it stands, lacks something.
Beware quitting early. All good builders do.
This is very similar to [1] (as discussed here [2]). It is a good message though, which is why I remember the earlier post at all.
1. https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45939431
The discussion is going to be so similar, this really ought to be marked as a [dupe].
It’s eye-brow-raisingly similar to StrangestLoop’s original article
On the other hand: sometimes doing the thing is itself a bad idea. One reason I continue to insist on design docs and code review is that I'd rather find this out ahead of time rather than deal with the damage afterwards.
In the GenAI era, "doing the thing badly without planning" has become so easy that some counterweight is needed.
The happy path is trivial now but I've found the gap between prototype and production is actually wider. You end up spending all your time handling non-determinism and latency issues that simply didn't exist with deterministic code. It seems like the real engineering challenge is just getting the unit economics to work.
In "Remains of The Day" they call just talking about "the thing" an indulgence. Which is really what it is, it feels good, isn't hard, and doesn't achieve anything.
The characters in the book are quick to cut non-productive discussions short, but it feels like the feel good discussions around "the thing" are about as far as many people want to go these days.
A lot of tech-savvy people (like me) love solving meta-problems. Doing the thing that would take 10 minutes? Na man, let me build an unnecessary complicated technical solution that in theory enables hundreds of people to do the thing much more efficiently in just 2 minutes. That takes a month and the thing has not been done, ha.
On the other hand.. planning, preparation and mise-en-place can help with doing the thing.
But only if you end up doing the thing (and avoid analysis paralysis)
I think the point is people mistaking planning, preparation, talking about the thing... for doing the thing.
My nitpick is that thinking and dreaming about solving the problem is part of doing. Its the planning phase. Skipping This planning phase in Software engineering is the root cause of most Day 2 operations issues. However I agree that thinking or announcing about outcome is not doing.
There's probably some fuzziness here. I have notes upon notes going back ugh, 20 years (idk how old I am anymore?) that I could count as planning. At some point I need a kick in the ass to do it. Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Sometimes getting to prod feels like that.
"Failing while doing the thing is doing the thing."
I needed this today. Currently questioning my career choices, as I hit my first wall where people are involved. Gave me quite the headache.
As a person with ADHD, I feel personally attacked.
I guess you understand this and are making a joke, but that "attack" would appear to be intentional (and motivating).
I find that I don't have major issues doing a thing once I get started on it. The main problem is choosing from among many things that I could reasonably consider "the thing", and then feeling confident enough in that choice to start.
What about doing the thing intently for a week and then realizing later you haven't touched the project in 6 months?
This sounds not too dissimilar to the release the POC to prod mentality.
There are times where you obviously need to do the thing to understand the thing to see the process of doing the thing. This allows for breaking the process down into better steps. Just writing code to do things you think is doing thing but prove not to do the thing when actually doing the thing is common.
I'm talking about having completely different, unstarted, overall projects in mind.
that sounds like paralysis by analysis. just pick a project and go.
Same. I'm tempted to print this post out and hang it for inspiration. But I guess that would also not be doing the thing.
I have bad ADHD and printed the strangestloop.io blog post out and put it on the wall by my work desk in Oct 2023 according to the printout timestamp. I still haven't done the thing in some meaningful areas, and the print has honestly kind of been dispiriting. I'm going to take this post as the prompt to take it down.
I'm going to consider this with the same weight I would if my future grey-bearded self popped out of a portal to say it, thank you. I've had a sticky note on my monitor for a few years that just says "SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP"; it might be time for that to go before it becomes much more depressing.
sometimes i find that being okay with not doing the thing is exactly the thing i need to do to be okay with getting around to doing the thing
Coming up with excuses is not doing the thing.
Who claimed it was?
The article was great — for solopreneurs.
There are things that humans have to unfortunately do when working as a group of people. That's why we became the alpha predator. Not because we were the strongest ape. That includes:
- Filling in timesheets, quarterly, half yearly cycles, company meetings, team meetings is not doing the thing — as a solopreneur. But not as a member of a group.
- Writing tickets, reviewing PRs is not doing the thing — as a solopreneur.
- Commuting to work and back is not doing the thing — If I'm a solopreneur this doesn't even matter.
- Answering technical questions, analyzing data, attending to bugs is not doing the thing — If I'm a solopreneur especially on a greenfield stuff, I have zero baggage.
- Writing test cases and putting up alerts is not doing the thing — if it's only me judging me, I have nothing to judge.
I dont take the post too literally.
I take it to mean: if you can just do the thing now (you are in the right place, healthy, with tools and prerequisites) and you choose not to because of (procrastination reasons) then you could be doing the task but you choose not to.
For corps: timesheets is one of the things.
"Filling in timesheets" sucks until you want to qualify for R&D credits.
> "Buying tools for the thing is not doing the thing."
This one hit me right in the feels, I have been buying more woodworking/DIY tools than the projects I've worked on with them.
I kinda agree, but I also gain pleasure from doing all those things that are not supposed to be "the thing". The thinking, the dreaming, the visualizing... I just like that. I do it a lot when working on personal projects (which some of them I never ship). I think it's fine, and I wouldn't go as far as saying that those things are "not doing the thing"; in many ways those things are "the thing", at least for me.
That's OK. It's totally fine to not doing the thing. Find joy however you want.
But it's not good to lie to yourself about doing the thing while not doing the thing. If your joy comes from the result of doing the thing, but you're putting time into other things that aren't doing the thing, that joy is not getting any closer.
This is something I ran into, ego satisfaction, where you tell people/show things like concepts, talk about it, get the "that sounds cool" but yeah it's not real. I now try to build something real like a hardware project before showing it.
I split activities at work into "Engineering" and "Talking about Engineering". We're a consultancy so there's a certain amount of "Talking about Engineering" that is required and good, but I try not to lose sight of what is actually engineering and what isn't.
What I am still on the fence about is when "design" or "architecture" type work counts as Engineering. There's a certain amount of design work that is valuable to do before coding and is part of the thinking process. But sometimes you get into a lot of abstract talking that is "not doing the thing".
I wholeheartedly agree. In an age of talking heads. you will not hear from the people actually doing the thing. because they too busy doing the thing versus talking about it. now excuse me ima go back to doing the thing.
Failure, bad execution, and tiny progress all count. That's the part people conveniently forget while optimizing their toolchains and workflows
Writing a litany about doing the thing is not doing the thing. Posting on HN about doing the thing is not doing the thing. Commenting about doing the thing is not doing the thing.
Guilty as charged, going back to work.
Am I crazy or have I read this or a very similar post before?
I thought the same thing. From a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45939431
So this is kind of a rip off! Thanks for digging it up.
https://www.anquotes.com/charles-bukowski-quotes/ has some similar themes.
“Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.”
Ironically people who fall in not doing the thing category of this article are valued more than those who do the thing.
Sometimes that's because they're making it worthwhile, by connecting the thing with those who will benefit from it and explaining how to use it, which is as valuable as doing the thing.
I.e. by making sure that they're doing the right thing.
Are they "not doing the thing", or are they "doing the different thing"?
Selling the thing isn't doing the thing, but it pays more!
Life is tough like that
Let's all switch to finance.
> Writing a blog about doing the thing is not doing the thing.
I like that this was included.
Could’ve ended with “I should get back to doing the thing”
Will this continue to be true? I do agree with the principle. But I've sometimes had the feeling that poor design upfront can have compounding consequences, especially when AI is filling in ambiguities.
1,000,000% agree.
Corollary: whoever has done something, even "wrong", is 1,000x more valuable as somebody else who is "planning to do it someday".
I get the sentiment, but thinking and planning are important steps to doing things. Obviously you can’t stop there, and you shouldn’t spend too much time on that part, but it is still important.
Planning to do the thing is a new thing, thing2
Doing the thing2 is doing the thing2
Ok, but thing2 is a dependency of thing, so you have to do thing2 before you can do thing.
What do you gain by saying it isn't thing? You have to do it first either way.
A bit of a meta lesson for me here: Writing a short, pointed, opinionated blog post is blogging. If I care about blogging my thoughts, I need to just do it, not worry about rigor or depth ahead of time
"If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four sharpening the axe."
I still believe there's a mise en place step before doing the thing, when quality counts.
If some task has a known step-by-step pattern, then doing it step by step makes perfect sense. That is doing the thing. Taking the known shortest/best path.
Doing the thing is going to involve both direct steps, and indirect steps necessary to do the direct steps.
Not doing the thing involves doing things other than the shortest/safest/effective path to getting the thing done.
Sure, but a lot of the things on the list marked as “not doing the thing” are actually important early steps to doing the thing.
This is a useful methodology and article nudges the reader towards doing things and "taking action". I am sure it will appeal to a huge number of people and indeed, rightly it has climbed to the top of HN, else I would have completely missed it.
I have found these articles on the exact same topic to be creating more actionable mindset.
1. The cult of done by No Boilderplate: https://youtu.be/bJQj1uKtnus?si=efV5OTF35LcDjuN3. Through the years, I have come back to this video many a times and even have the Cult of Done manifesto (snipped from this video) stuck on to my wall.
2. High agency by George Mack: https://www.highagency.com/. This is a long form article and sitting and just reading it has helped me unblock myself. I have a bookmark of this on my favourites bar at all times.
Reading or adding comments is not doing the thing.
Is telling AI to do thing, doing the thing?
The more I use AI to do the thing, the more it feels like I didn't do the thing.
Yet the thing got done. Perhaps in the age of AI, it’s about making things get done.
When saying 'doing the thing', we often mean getting some progress or a result. I'd say you did the thing if you consider the result created by the AI acceptable.
Idk, depends. Is going to office-hours in order to pass an exam "doing the thing?" Help seems fine.
Similarly, is ordering Zhu Li to "Do the thing!" doing the thing?
Is planning, like deciding how to position your troops in battle, doing the thing?
Planning is doing the planning thing, but it is not doing the battle thing.
And running the marathon is just running the marathon? I disagree. Big part of running the marathon is in the preparation. Weeks after weeks of training and not skipping a single session. The marathon itself is the tip of the iceberg; important but not the whole "thing".
There are some things that you just can't do without preparation. But never mistake the preparation for doing the thing. You can be "getting in shape for a marathon" forever without ever running a marathon.
It depends on your thing. If the marathon was just the motivation, your thing is running... if the marathon was the bucketlist item, it is the thing.
No matter how much preparation and training one does, if they haven’t run the marathon, they haven’t run the marathon.
Right, but conversely you can’t run the marathon unless you train. You can’t skip straight to doing the thing.
But both are doing the winning thing, which is more valuable than just the battle thing. Unless you do it just for fun and don't mind the result.
I don't know anything about planning and battle.
But as a metaphor for other creative pursuits, my experience is that most of the time when people are "planning" or working on other things that they like to believe will help them do the thing... they are really just avoiding doing the thing.
People spend years doing "world-building" and writing character backgrounds and never write the damn book. Aspiring musicians spend thousands collecting instruments and never make a song.
As you say, if it's just for fun, that's all fine. But if the satisfaction you want comes from the result of the thing, you have to do the thing.
"Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder but nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weights!"
"Ain't nuttin but a peanut"
This version has the general form of the original, So why does it seem there is something odd about it?
Whoever the guy from ‘Strangest Loop’ is it’s my impression that it’s meant to resonate with self-starters; as if he’s speaking from that vantage of and for hustle culture. The grinders. The movers. The seniors. The managers. The founders. [1]
I don’t get that vibe from this derivative and in fact I think it carries a slight affect of a neurotic employee while the original airs determination. Reading this brings one into the mind of an observer, the founder of a VC firm, watching OP wring over a Palo Alto brewed latte.
[1] Am I the only one who was unable to find out his actual name on this website?
I don’t get it? Are they sharing a quote they liked or taking credit for it? Maybe they just saw the YouTube video and decided to turn it into the page?
Edit: Seems like a way to show they’re looking for roles, I guess.
Brother please add proper exception handling :/D
Thank you for shaking me once more .....
Thanks for this. It is timely.
> Buying tools for the thing is not doing the thing.
Why not? If i need a saw to build a deck, buying a saw must be the first step?
So the typical nonsensical argument is that an architect should be a builder. Alright.
You can very much do the thing when it's not too costly to fuck up. For many important things, thinking about doing the thing is even more important than doing the thing.
Oh, now HN is discussing a meaningless copy-pasted self promotion blog post. I guess this says something about the current state of the HN community.
I like that this place still primarily focuses on the message (even just the headline) rather than the messenger. Feels like an antifeature of the big social media platforms that who’s saying it is often more important than what’s being said.
Your point is quite good. I like it!
most of the time the article doesn't matter that much and you can still have interesting discussions of the topic at hand
in short learn by doing.
as a counter point, in another current thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46789913, there's a discussion of the "hostile codebase" of openssl. maybe they neglected preparation and "just did it"?
TLDR: "Just do it." ~ Nike
[flagged]
> Doing it badly is doing the thing.
No it's not. Sometimes (or maybe most of the time) doing it badly means maybe it's not your thing.
I used to have a neighbour who liked to play the piano and sing. He was doing it consistently badly and he didn't have anyone to tell him that he should probably stop trying.
People sometimes do things because they enjoy doing them, even if they aren’t particularly good at them.
I have two problems with that. One is, you can do what you like quietly and without disturbing anyone around you. Second is the Dunning Kruger effect: witnessing it first hand is never fun.
And both of those problems are yours, not your neighbor’s.
To your neighbor, doing it badly is still doing the thing.
Who are you, to define what "the thing" is, for someone else?
Doing the thing isn't about judging other people. That doesn't contribute to your thing.
If someone is bothering you, making it hard to do your thing, then your thing involves talking to them about your problem. Without judging what they are doing.
Well you are pretty bad at comments. Hang up the keyboard bud
Oh.. So you start doing something new and you're top 10% without practicing or being bad at it first? I'd love to test that to see if it's the case... Your logic is "You're not the best ever to do something so you are not doing it" means you have probably never done a single thing your entire life. Maybe you should just stop.
Yeah the dude should have stopped doing what he liked
All because this dude is the ultimate judge for all that is good and worth doing somehow..
no, theres a different thing here, which is that practice needs yo be deliberate.
the answer isnt to stop practicing, its to practice the right thing and not practice doing it wrong.
theyre probably still better off playing badly and enjoying it, vs just staring at an unplayed piano though
Maybe people did tell him he sucked, but he was having fun
Just let people be.