If the code uses other code you've written, how do you ensure all dependencies fit within the context window? Or does this only work for essentially dependencyless code?
But then why is it outputting those kinds of outputs, as opposed to anything else?
Strongly agree, made the same case here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rTveDBBavah4GHKxk/the-case-for-corporal-punishment
Out of interest, why not test this by generating one paragraph of the scratchpad, paraphrasing it, and then continuing thinking using the paraphrased scratchpad, doing this after each additional paragraph?
I agree there's better ways to do this, but:
a) the point is even the brute force stupid ways are doable and would likely work. Obviously try to the cleverer ways first.
b) the drop in fertility rate is so bad and so destructive that if we can't get this done the good way, even the dysgenic way is very much worth it.
The goal is writing good software to solve a particular problem. Using haskell to write an SPA is not going to work well whether your doing it for someone else or for yourself (assuming you care about the product and it's not just a learning/fun exercise). It is a perfectly valid decision to say that you'll only work on products where Haskell is a good fit, but I would strongly recommend against using Haskell where it's not a good fit in a production setting, and would consider it low key fraud to do so where somebody else is paying you for your time.
but terrible for job satisfaction, making you depressed or angry every time you have to use that silly language/tool.
My experience is that once you get over yourself, and put in the effort to properly understand the language, best practices, etc. you might not love the language, but you'll find it's actually fine. It's a popular language, people use it, and they've found ways to sand down the rough edges and make the good bits shine. Sure it's got problems but it's not as soul destroying as it looked at first sight, and you'll likely learn a lot anyway.
(I'm not talking about a case where a company forces you to use a deprecated language like COBOL or ColdFusion . I'm talking about a case where you pick the language because it's the best tool for the job).
This is in general good career advice. You'll lose out on a lot of opportunities if you refuse to put yourself in uncomfortable situations.
Claude already has an external memory, as do most AI agents.
In my experience truly powerful developers are able to do this, but even many Google L5s will just look up this code every time.
Indeed I am a Google L5, and I usually do look this stuff up (or ChatGPT it). I think it's more important to remember roughly what libraries do at a high level (what problems they solve, how they differ from other solutions, what can't they do) than trivia about how exactly you use them.
You are right that writing code glue code is a large part of software engineering, and that knowing what the libraries do is an important part of that. But once you know (or think you know) what the libraries do, how quickly do you bash out the code that does that? Do you struggle, or does it just come naturally?
And as faul_sname pointed out, often the quickest way to understand what the library does is to look at it. Is that something you're capable of doing, or are you forced to hope the documentation addresses it?
Other times you want to write a quick test that the library does what you expect. Is that going to take you half an hour, or 2 minutes?
I think it's convincing that the effect, if it exists, is much smaller than the one for weight. The graph for weight is so obvious you don't even need to do statistics.