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The rise of judgement over technical skill

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Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#121

Post by coldpie »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #118
coldpie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my experience so far, the people that aren’t getting value out of LLM code assistants, fundamentally like the process of writing code and using the tooling > All of my senior, staff, principals love it because we can make something faster than having to deal with a junior because it’s trivial to write the spec/requirement for Claude etc… Hm, interesting. As someone who has found zero joy and value in using LLMs,…

Software at scale is a business function You’re describing a hobby/artistry process You can still do all that, the same way that you can still build a table at your house. But the number of number of handmade table builders is going to drop to effectively zero for the majority of table building going forward

I'm not sure I agree that will happen, but if it does, then yeah like I said, it's probably my cue to exit the industry. If the fun goes out of the job, there's other things I'd rather do than sit inside alone and stare at a screen all day.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#122

Post by mlinhares »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #102
ben30 wrote: post #6

This echoes my experience with Claude Code. The bottleneck isn't the code generation itself—it's two critical judgment tasks: 1. Problem decomposition: Taking a vague idea and breaking it down into well-defined, context-bounded issues that I can effectively communicate to the AI 2. Code review: Carefully evaluating the generated code to ensure it meets quality standards and integrates properly Both of these require d…

This would be at least the third time in history we've tried to shunt writing code to low paid labor. We'll see if it's successful this time. The problem tends to be that small details affect large details which affect small details. If you aren't good at both you're usually shit at both.

The problem wasn't low paid labor, it was just incompetent labor. You can find competent developers in all these countries offering lower pay, India, Brazil, Romania, Poland, China, Pakistan, its just that they would already be hired by other higher paying companies and what is left for the ones that are looking for the lowest paid possible workers are the incompetent ones.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#123

Post by dgb23 »

thrwthsnw wrote: post #71
dgb23 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to add something to this which is rarely discussed. I personally value focus and flow extremely highly when I'm programming. Code assistance often breaks and prevents that in subtle ways. Which is why I've been turning it off much more frequently. In an ironic way, using assistance more regularly helped me realize little inefficiencies, distractions and bad habits and potential improvements while programming:…

Just move up an abstraction level and put that flow into planning the features and decomposing them into well defined tasks that can be assigned to agents. Could also write really polished example code to communicate the style and architectural patterns and add full test coverage for it. I do notice the same lack of flow when using an agent since you have to wait for it to finish but as others have suggested if you s…

There's something fundamentally different between writing the program directly that you visualize in your head versus staying one level away and reviewing someone else's code. I'm really talking about the former.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#124

Post by [deleted] »

ben30 wrote: post #6

This echoes my experience with Claude Code. The bottleneck isn't the code generation itself—it's two critical judgment tasks: 1. Problem decomposition: Taking a vague idea and breaking it down into well-defined, context-bounded issues that I can effectively communicate to the AI 2. Code review: Carefully evaluating the generated code to ensure it meets quality standards and integrates properly Both of these require d…

[deleted]

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#125

Post by dsjoerg »

physicsguy wrote: post #28

A similar debate has happened in education where people seem to think that having ability to critically analyse texts is more important than knowledge. and to some degree that’s true but personally I think that without building on some decent level of foundational level of knowledge and having a mental model of a subject, you can’t tackle thorny questions because you don’t have enough to draw upon as examples and cou…

> a relatively hostile setup without even local admin rights

Taking a diversion into this -- how about local admin rights to a virtual VM / sandboxed machine? I imagine that would allow developers to be productive, while protecting everything that IT wants to protect.

Once you do that, I imagine everyone will discover the issue isn't actually _local_ admin rights, but having admin rights to a machine that's on the internal network and can access internal company resources. Which might mean that IT has taken a strategy that once you're inside the local network, you have access to lots of valuable goodies. Which is a scary strategy.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#126

Post by bluefirebrand »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #113
gavmor wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot…

I like to do a good job on small stuff. It works nicely for me, but doesn't really bring accolades (but a hell of a lot of folks actually rely on stuff I authored; they just don't know it, or care -which is just fine).

We cannot build great things on poor foundations

If your small stuff contributes to a strong foundation for other people, then they should care

It's a shame people lose sight of the ground beneath their feet when reaching to the sky

I'm very guilty of this too, partly because any time I try to look down the people I work with rush in to discourage me from doing that - it's not part of the sprint, after all

Anyways, I am not sure what stuff you build, but thank you for being the sort of person that builds strong foundational stuff that helps other people. We need more people like you. I should try and be more like you

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#127

Post by whatarethembits »

prmph wrote: post #60
ben30 wrote: post #6

This echoes my experience with Claude Code. The bottleneck isn't the code generation itself—it's two critical judgment tasks: 1. Problem decomposition: Taking a vague idea and breaking it down into well-defined, context-bounded issues that I can effectively communicate to the AI 2. Code review: Carefully evaluating the generated code to ensure it meets quality standards and integrates properly Both of these require d…

What the heck, the code generation _is_ absolutely still a bottle-neck. I dare anyone who making these arguments that LLMs have removed the need for actual programming skill, for example, to share in a virtual pair programming session with me, and I will demonstrate their basic inability to do _any_ moderately complex coding in short order. Yes, I think that's the only way to resolve this controversy. If they have so…

Honestly, its mind boggling. Am I the worst prompter ever?

I have three python files (~4k LOC total) that I wanted to refactor with help from Claude 4 (Opus and Sonnet) and I followed Reed Harper's LLM workflow...the results are shockingly bad. It produces an okay plan, albeit full of errors, but usable with heavy editing. In the next step though, most of the code it produced was pretty much unusable. It would've been far quicker for me to just do it myself. I've been trying to get LLMs on various tasks to help me be faster but I'm just not seeing it! There is definitely value in it in helping to straighten out ideas in my head and using it as StackOverflow on roids but that's where the utility starts to hit a wall for me.

Who are these people who are "blown away" by the results and declaring an end to programming as we know it? What are they making? Surely there ought to be more detailed demos of a technology that's purported to be this revolutionary!?

I'm going to write a blog post with what I started with, every prompt I wrote to get a task done and responses from LLMs. Its been challenging to find a detailed writeup of implementing a realistic programming project; all I'm finding is small one off scripts (Simon Willison's blog) and CRUD scaffolding so far.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#128

Post by AndrewKemendo »

CodeMage wrote: post #117
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how to use it and exactly why it’s a huge deal In my experience so far, the people that aren’t getting value out of LLM code assistants, fundamentally like the process of writing code and using the tooling All of my senior, staff, principals love it because we can make something faster than having to deal with a junior because it’s trivial to write the spec/requirement for Claude etc…

> All of my senior, staff, principals love it because we can make something faster than having to deal with a junior because it’s trivial to write the spec/requirement for Claude etc… How will you make new senior, staff, and principal engineers without "having to deal with a junior"?

You don’t in the long term

It’s just like “calculator” used to be a manual human job in engineering

Los Alamos, NASA etc… literally had 100s of individual humans running long calculations that computers didn’t have the memory to handle

There are no more human computers

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#129

Post by schindlabua »

whatarethembits wrote: post #127
prmph wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the heck, the code generation _is_ absolutely still a bottle-neck. I dare anyone who making these arguments that LLMs have removed the need for actual programming skill, for example, to share in a virtual pair programming session with me, and I will demonstrate their basic inability to do _any_ moderately complex coding in short order. Yes, I think that's the only way to resolve this controversy. If they have so…

Honestly, its mind boggling. Am I the worst prompter ever? I have three python files (~4k LOC total) that I wanted to refactor with help from Claude 4 (Opus and Sonnet) and I followed Reed Harper's LLM workflow...the results are shockingly bad. It produces an okay plan, albeit full of errors, but usable with heavy editing. In the next step though, most of the code it produced was pretty much unusable. It would've bee…

I think you're supposed to let the AI write the bad python code and then do the refactoring yourself. No way I'm letting the AI make changes to 150 files with tons of cross-concerns when I don't even fully understand it all myself unless I dig into the code.

That being said copilot and chatgpt have been a 40% productivity boost at least. I just write types that are as tightly fitting as possible, and segregate code based on what side effects are going to happen, stub a few function heads and let the LLM fill in the gaps. I'm so much faster at coding than I was 2-3 years ago. It's like I'm designing the codebase more than writing it.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#130

Post by AndrewKemendo »

macNchz wrote: post #88
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Some learn, not all and decreasing numbers career to learn Also most juniors have no idea how to write tests, plan for data scale, know which IPC-RPC combo is best for prototyping vs production Etc… 90% of software is architecture and juniors don’t architect

> Disagree. Some learn, not all and decreasing numbers career to learn This is an organizational issue then—someone who is operating at a junior level who demonstrates that they don’t care to learn should be let go.

We’re saying the same thing

The business threshold (willingness to pay for something) for the worst automation will eventually beat the marginal expert.

So there becomes no business differentiation between a junior and a middle engineer

“Architecture” becomes the entry-level job

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