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

141–150 of 400 posts

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#141

Post by Cthulhu_ »

oytis wrote: post #64
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…

I guess answering "you obviously didn't write it, please redo" is not an option, because then you are the dinosaur hindering company's march towards the AI future?

Honestly, I don't think it matters who wrote it; ultimately it's about the code and the product, not the individual author.

That said, a lazy contribution - substandard code or poorly LLM generated - just wastes your time if your feedback is just put into the LLM again. Setting boundaries then is perfectly acceptable, but this isn't unique to LLMs.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#142

Post by aleph_minus_one »

afiodorov wrote: post #11

Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code. Our tooling has become so powerful that the pure act of programming is secondary. It's a world away from when the industry began. There's a great story from Bill Gates about a time when his ability to simply write code was an incredibly scarce resource. A co…

> There's a great story from Bill Gates about a time when his ability to simply write code was an incredibly scarce resource.

The capability to write high-quality code and have a deep knowledge about it is still a scarce resource.

The difference from former days is rather that the industry began to care less about this.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#143

Post by rr808 »

thisoneisreal wrote: post #39
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…

I think this is going to look a lot like the same problem in education, where the answer is that we will have to spend less time consuming written artifacts as a form of evaluation. I think effective code reviews will become more continuous and require much more checking in, asking for explanations as the starting point instead of "I read all of your code and give feedback." That just won't be sustainable given the r…

>AI creates the same problem for hiring too

Leetcode Zoom calls always were marginal, now with chat AI they're virtually useless though still the norm.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#144

Post by pjmlp »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #131
dizhn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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…

This sounds like a tale of failed 'waterfall model' software development. Was it not possible to sees the quality issues before the project was finished?

As participant in many kinds of similar projects, lets put it this way, the crew already knows that the ship has a few holes while at the harbour, but captain decides for sailing anyway.

Eventually you will find yourself on deep waters, with the ship lower than it should be, routinely taking out buckets of water, whishing for the nearest island, only to repair ship with whatever is on that island, and keep sailing to the nearest one, with the buckets ready.

After a couple of enterprise projects, one learns it is either move into another business, or learn to cope with this approach.

Which might be specially trick given the job landscape on someone's region.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#145

Post by Cthulhu_ »

skydhash wrote: post #42
epolanski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I don't understand, if they don't test the code they write (even if manually) it's not an LLM issue, it's a process one. They have not been taught what does it mean to have a PR ready for being reviewed, LLMs are irrelevant here.

Sometimes, orgs don!t mandate testing or descriptive PRs, and then you requiring it makes you look like a PITA.

PITA or senior developer that's too senior for that company? Honestly I think an organization has no say in discussions about testing or descriptive PRs, and on the other side, a decent developer does not defer to someone higher-up to decide on the quality of their work.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#146

Post by aleph_minus_one »

afiodorov wrote: post #20
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code I think it's credible to say that it was just market demand. Marc Andreessen's main complaint before the AI boom was that "there is more capital available than there are good ideas to fund". Personally, I think that's out of touch with reality, but he's the…

I think the "more capital than ideas" problem is highly contextual and largely a Silicon Valley-centric view. There is immense, unmet demand for good software in developing countries—for example, robust applications that work well on underpowered phones and low-bandwidth networks across Africa or Southeast Asia. These are real problems waiting for well-executed ideas. The issue isn't a lack of good ideas, but a VC ec…

> while overlooking tangible, global needs because they don't fit a specific hyper-growth model.

I do believe that these also fit the hyper-growth model. It's rather that these investors have a very US-centric knowledge of markets and market demands, and thus can simply barely judge ideas that target very different markets.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#148

Post by Cthulhu_ »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #142
afiodorov wrote: post #11

Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code. Our tooling has become so powerful that the pure act of programming is secondary. It's a world away from when the industry began. There's a great story from Bill Gates about a time when his ability to simply write code was an incredibly scarce resource. A co…

> There's a great story from Bill Gates about a time when his ability to simply write code was an incredibly scarce resource. The capability to write high-quality code and have a deep knowledge about it is still a scarce resource. The difference from former days is rather that the industry began to care less about this.

This is in tandem with several generations of programming language, tooling, best practices, etc. LLMs haven't suddenly increased people's productivity, improved tooling did.

Back when these tools did not exist yet, a lot of this knowledge didn't exist yet. Software now is built on the shoulders of giants. You can write a line of code and get a window in your operating system, people like Bill Gates and his generation wrote the low level graphics code and had to come up with the concept of a window first, had to invent the fundamentals of graphics programming, had to wait and interact with hardware vendors to help make it performant.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#149

Post by Cthulhu_ »

threemux wrote: post #55

In a professional setting, I agree 100%, no notes. Where LLMs have helped me the most are actually side projects. There, writing the code is absolutely the bottleneck - I literally can't (or perhaps won't is more truthful) allocate enough time to write code for the little apps I've thought of to solve some small problem.

A fair point; at this point in my career, I can't just spend weeks on something, plus I know all of the non-functionals and longer-term things I should keep in mind. Even when skipping things like tests, things just cost more work.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#150

Post by b112 »

Sammi wrote: post #79
dizhn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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'm expecting to see so much more poor quality software being made. We're going to be swimming in an ocean of bad software. Good experienced devs will be able to make better software, but so many inexperienced devs will be regurgitating so much more lousy software at a pace never seen before, it's going to be overwhelming. Or as the original commenter described, they're already being overwhelmed.

I'm waiting for someone to use an LLM to handle all AWS deployment, without review, and eventual bankrupcy as the result.

Even better if the accountants are using LLMs.

Or even better, hardware prototyping using LLMs with EEs barely knowing what they are doing.

So far, most software dumbassery with LLMs can at least be fixed. Fixing board layouts, or chip designs, not as easy.

Post reply on HN