Comment by the_duke
20 days ago
That's because many developers are used to working like this.
With AI, the correct approach is to think more like a software architect.
Learning to plan things out in your head upfront without to figure things out while coding requires a mindset shift, but is important to work effectively with the new tools.
To some this comes naturally, for others it is very hard.
I think what GP is referring too are technical semantics and accidental complexity. You can’t plan for those.
The same kind of planning you’re describing can and do happen sans LLM, usually on the sofa, or in front of a whiteboard. Or by reading some research materials. No good programmer rushes to coding without a clear objective.
But the map is not the territory. A lot of questions surface during coding. LLMs will guess and the result may be correct according to the plan, but technically poor, unreliable, or downright insecure.
> Learning to plan things out in your head
I dont think any complex plan should be planned in your head. But drawing diagrams, sketching components, listing pros and cons, 100%. Not jumping directly into coding might look more like jumping into spec writing a poc
Maintaining a 'mental RAM Cache' is a powerful tool to understanding the system as a whole on a deep and intuitive level, even if you can only 'render' sections at a time. The bigger it is the more you can keep track of to be able to foresee interactions between distant pieces.
It shouldn't be your only source of a plan as you'd likely wind up dropping something, but figuring out how to jiggle things around before getting it 'on paper' is something I've found helpful.
Following the RAM analogy, this sounds like saving files only in RAM, instead of creating the files in the file system, persisted on disk, and then caching it in RAM.
Personally, for me without writing or sketching I cannot think complex things: as in complex logic, constraints, etc.
I guess this is topic too abstract, so we can read into it different things.