91–100 of 142 posts
A good dev can dive into a completely unknown codebase with or without tools like a debugger and figure it out. AI makes this far easier.
Some great devs/reverse-engineering experts can do the same without even the compiled source code. Again AI tools can now do this faster than any human.
Security researchers have figured out the intricacies of a system with no more than a single string as input and an error code as output.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Bus Factor was indeed an issue before LLMs, and in fact it's a jargon term that has been in use since forever. What TFA is arguing is that never before we had a trend towards Bus Factor zero . Before, the worst was often 1 (occasionally zero, of course, but now TFA argues we're aiming for zero whether we're aware or not).
True, but when the bus factor is 1, it might as well be zero -- soon you end up with employees (or contractors) who legitimately want more compensation realizing their critical nature. I totally sympathize from the employee's perspective, esp if the 1-factor means they cannot take holiday. Really, it is the company's job to control the bus factor (LLM or human) -- it is good for both the employee and company in the l…
If you're using llms to shit out large swathes of unreviewed code you're doing it wrong and your project is indeed doomed to become unmaintainable the minute it goes down a wrong path architecturally, or you get a bug with complex causes or whatever. Where llms excel is in situations like: * I have that I want to apply to - bam, half a days work done in 2 minutes. * I want to set up test data and the bones of unit te…
But yeah, LLM are not good at defining requirements, architectures, or writing a spec to the requirements. They are good a contained, bite sized asks that don't have much implications outside the code it writes.
If you're using llms to shit out large swathes of unreviewed code you're doing it wrong and your project is indeed doomed to become unmaintainable the minute it goes down a wrong path architecturally, or you get a bug with complex causes or whatever. Where llms excel is in situations like: * I have that I want to apply to - bam, half a days work done in 2 minutes. * I want to set up test data and the bones of unit te…
I like the spirit of these, but there are waaaay more. Like you only mentioned the ones for professional and skilled coders who have another option. What about all the sub-examples for people all the way from "technically unskilled" to "baby-step coders". There's a bunch of things they can now just do and get in front of ppl without us. Going from "thing in my head that I need to pay someone $100/h to try" to "thing…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Bus Factor was indeed an issue before LLMs, and in fact it's a jargon term that has been in use since forever. What TFA is arguing is that never before we had a trend towards Bus Factor zero . Before, the worst was often 1 (occasionally zero, of course, but now TFA argues we're aiming for zero whether we're aware or not).
Is there really a large difference between 0 and 1 when the average tenure of a software developer is 3 years or less at any given company?
A Bus Factor of 0, especially as an implicit goal, seems doubly worrisome! Now it's a goal rather than a warning sign.
just not even ten years ago the discussion here was all about "software engineering" trying to be more legitimized as a formal engineering practice, if there should be licensing, if there should be certifications, lots of threads about formal methods to prove algorithms work, and look where we are now. Arguing if humans should even care look at the code we are producing and shipping. crazy shit man
Pretty sure that was 25 years ago, not 10 years ago. And then, 20 years ago, we were coming to terms with the fact that all of that stuff was a spectacular failure. And then, 15 year ago, we had found much better ways to do things. I don't miss that phase of the evolution of software development practice at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there really a large difference between 0 and 1 when the average tenure of a software developer is 3 years or less at any given company?
> Is there really a large difference between 0 and 1 when the average tenure of a software developer is 3 years or less at any given company? Spot on. 1 might as well be zero. Totally unfair to the worker also, who now cannot take time off.
This is precisely why the term "Bus Factor" was invented: to point out when it's 1, because it's both high risk to the company and unfair to the dev that cannot go on vacation or extended time off.
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> If you're using llms to shit out large swathes of unreviewed code you're doing it wrong > bam, x days work done in 2 minutes This is a bit of a misrepresentation, since those two minutes don’t account for the reviewing time needed (nor prorperly, which vastly exceeds that time. Otherwise you end up in the situation of “doing it wrong” described in your first paragraph.
Most of these cases don't require "review". It either works or it doesn't. If you have an LLM transform a big pile of structs, you plug them into your program and it will either compile or it won't. All programmers write countless one-off throwaway scripts. I can't tell you how many times I've written scripts to generate boring boilerplate code. How many hours do you spend reviewing such tools and their output? I'll…
If you're using llms to shit out large swathes of unreviewed code you're doing it wrong and your project is indeed doomed to become unmaintainable the minute it goes down a wrong path architecturally, or you get a bug with complex causes or whatever. Where llms excel is in situations like: * I have that I want to apply to - bam, half a days work done in 2 minutes. * I want to set up test data and the bones of unit te…
I agree with your comment but I wanted to share something that gave me a good chuckle the other day. I had asked claude to write some unit tests that, after reviewing, were sound and actually uncovered a bug in the code-under-test that I had written. When I pointed this out, claude had decided that to make the unit test pass, it would not patch the bug but it would simply not exercise the failing unit test LOL! Good…