Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

ordep.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 400 posts

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#121

Post by bluefirebrand »

Xss3 wrote: post #24
gwervc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few weeks ago people were discussing here how their typing speed was making them code faster. On the other hand I haven't been limited by writing code, the linked article match my professional experience.

You have to be fluent on the keyboard, to type without thought or 'hunting and pecking' if you want your ideas to flow from brain to pc smoothly and uninterrupted. Speed is part of fluency and almost a shortcut to explaining the goal in real terms. Nobody is hunting and pecking at 80wpm.

Maybe nobody is hunting and pecking at 80wpm but I am not exaggerating when I say one of the best devs I've worked with was a hunt+peck typist

The fact is that programming is not about typing lines of code into an editor

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#123

Post by AshleysBrain »

This reminds me of the quote by Robert C. Martin[1]: "the ratio of time spent reading [code] versus writing is well over 10 to 1".

If programmers spend 90%+ of their time reading code rather than writing it, then LLM-generated code is optimizing only a small amount of the total work of programming. That seems to be similar to the point this blog is making.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/835238-indeed-the-ratio-of-...

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#124

Post by bluefirebrand »

dmezzetti wrote: post #97

There has long been ways to reduce writing boilerplate code with IDEs. AI code generation is just another tool and it will help enable competent people.

Not unless it is deterministic

If I have to manually review the boilerplate after it generates then I may as well just write it myself. AI is not improving this unless you just blindly trust it without review, AND YOU SHOULDN'T

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#125

Post by stoneyhrm1 »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #22

My most recent example of this is mentoring young, ambitious, but inexperienced interns. Not only did they produce about the same amount of code in a day that they used to produce in a week (or two), several other things made my work harder than before: - During review, they hadn't thought as deeply about their code so my comments seemed to often go over their heads. Instead of a discussion I'd get something like "go…

> "good catch, I'll fix that"

I see this a lot and even done so myself, I think a lot of people in the industry are a bit too socially-aware and think if they start a discussion they look like they're trying too hard.

It's stupid yes, but plenty of times I've started discussions only to be brushed off or not even replied to, and I believed it was because my responses were too long and nobody actually cared.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#126

Post by aleph_minus_one »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #22

My most recent example of this is mentoring young, ambitious, but inexperienced interns. Not only did they produce about the same amount of code in a day that they used to produce in a week (or two), several other things made my work harder than before: - During review, they hadn't thought as deeply about their code so my comments seemed to often go over their heads. Instead of a discussion I'd get something like "go…

Simply require from the junior developers that each pull request has to satisfy a very high standard. If they are not sure about something, they may ask, but if they send you some pull request of bad quality to review, and you find something, they deserve a (small) tantrum.

It is likely not possible to completely forbid junior developers from using AI tools, but any pull request that they create that contains (AI-generated) code that they don't fully comprehend (they can google) will be rejected (to test this, simply ask them some non-trivial questions about the code). If they do so, again, these junior developers deserve a (small) tantrum.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#127

Post by steveBK123 »

dizhn wrote: post #53
andrelaszlo wrote: post #22

My most recent example of this is mentoring young, ambitious, but inexperienced interns. Not only did they produce about the same amount of code in a day that they used to produce in a week (or two), several other things made my work harder than before: - During review, they hadn't thought as deeply about their code so my comments seemed to often go over their heads. Instead of a discussion I'd get something like "go…

> - Many bugs were of a new kind (to me), the code would look like it does the right thing but actually not work at all, or just be much more broken than code with that level of "polish" would normally be. This reminded me of a quarter million dollar software project one of my employers had contracted to a team in a different country. On the face of it - especially if you go and check by the spec sheet - everything w…

I dealt with a 4x as expensive statement-of-work fixed price contract that was nearshored and then subbed out to a revolving cast of characters.

The SOW was so poorly specified that it was easy to maliciously comply with it, and it had no real acceptance tests. As a result legal didn't think IT would have a leg to stand on arguing with the vendor on the contract, and we ended up constantly re-negotiating on cost for them to make fixes just to get a codebase that never went live.

An example of how bad it was - imagine you have a database of metadata to generate downloader tasks in a tool like airflow, but instead of doing any sane groupings of say the 100 sources with 1000 files each every day into a 100ish tasks, it generated a 700,000 task graph because its gone task-per-file-per-day.

We were using some sort of SaaS dag/scheduler tool at the time and if we deployed we'd have been using 5x more tasks than the entire decades-old, 200 person person were using to date, and paid for it.

Or they implemented the file arrival SLA checker such that it only alerted when a late file arrived. So if a file never arrives it never alerts. Or when a daily file arrives a week late, you get the alert on arrival, not a week ago when it was late.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#128

Post by jameshart »

stoneyhrm1 wrote: post #125
andrelaszlo wrote: post #22

My most recent example of this is mentoring young, ambitious, but inexperienced interns. Not only did they produce about the same amount of code in a day that they used to produce in a week (or two), several other things made my work harder than before: - During review, they hadn't thought as deeply about their code so my comments seemed to often go over their heads. Instead of a discussion I'd get something like "go…

> "good catch, I'll fix that" I see this a lot and even done so myself, I think a lot of people in the industry are a bit too socially-aware and think if they start a discussion they look like they're trying too hard. It's stupid yes, but plenty of times I've started discussions only to be brushed off or not even replied to, and I believed it was because my responses were too long and nobody actually cared.

That doesn’t sound like ‘social awareness’, it sounds like paranoia

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#129

Post by kgwgk »

AshleysBrain wrote: post #123

This reminds me of the quote by Robert C. Martin[1]: "the ratio of time spent reading [code] versus writing is well over 10 to 1". If programmers spend 90%+ of their time reading code rather than writing it, then LLM-generated code is optimizing only a small amount of the total work of programming. That seems to be similar to the point this blog is making. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/835238-indeed-the-ratio-…

Even worse, in some cases it may be decreasing the writing time and increasing the reading time without reducing the total work.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#130

Post by hn_throw2025 »

brokegrammer wrote: post #91

For me, writing CSS and coming up with professional looking designs were huge bottlenecks. Now I delegate those tasks to LLMs. I recently started working on a client's project where we were planning on hiring a designer to build the front-end UI. Turns out, Gemini can generate really good UIs. Now we're saving a lot of time because I don't have to wait on the designer to provide designs before I can start building. T…

This is something that’s been in my mind too.

I don’t think there’s enough distinction between using LLMs for frontend and backend in discussions similar to these.

Using it for things like CSS/Tailwind/UI widget layout seems like a low risk timesaver.

Post reply on HN