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Coding is when we're least productive

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Re: Coding is when we're least productive

#21

Post by torginus »

I feel one upshot of AI coding is that people finally recognize 5 layer enterprise architectures for what they are - useless slop whose purpose is to make solutions more 'professional' and complicated to make the people who write them feel smart, inflate costs and personnel needs and sell consulting on how to solve problems with 5x more code than necessary.

The extra code doesn't encode any requirement.

On the other hand, these couple-hundred line, crappy spitballed together solutions that actually still do what is needed (and are usually are hand-written, LLMs aren't known for brevity) are vindicated.

Re: Coding is when we're least productive

#22

Post by shalmanese »

At the end of the week, if you suffered a hard drive crash and all of your recent code got erased, how quickly could you recreate it? That's how much of your week was spent coding. The rest of the week was spent transforming you into the person who could code the thing you coded.

Contrast this with a chair maker. If at the end of the week, their chair got thrown in a woodchipper, some significant fraction of the next week would be in unavoidable labor making the exact same chair.

This is the fundamental difference between these two activities that gets abstracted away when we both think of them as "labor".

Re: Coding is when we're least productive

#23

Post by thefaux »

BrenBarn wrote: post #6

This is one reason I always roll my eyes when people talk about how vim keyboard bindings are so great because you don't have to move your fingers from the home row. The actual action of typing text is a small part of the process of coding.

Just because it is small doesn't mean that it isn't important.

Re: Coding is when we're least productive

#24

Post by michaelsalim »

shalmanese wrote: post #22

At the end of the week, if you suffered a hard drive crash and all of your recent code got erased, how quickly could you recreate it? That's how much of your week was spent coding . The rest of the week was spent transforming you into the person who could code the thing you coded. Contrast this with a chair maker. If at the end of the week, their chair got thrown in a woodchipper, some significant fraction of the nex…

I see where you're coming at. But don't underestimate the amount of design work that goes into making a good chair. It probably took more time than your think, which transforms them into the person who can craft the chair

Re: Coding is when we're least productive

#25

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

shinycode wrote: post #16
gethly wrote: post #3

Coding is the 5 minute result for an hour of thinking.

Many non-dev people think LLM does the thinking and the typing. That’s where the misconception comes from as regards to LLM replacing completely developers I guess

> That’s where the misconception comes from as regards to LLM replacing completely developers I guess

The misconception also arises because Ai companies use the word thinking and everything else too which is what the general population says and then this just gets caught on by Engineers too.

When we say reason/think/etc. all the hype created by AI definitely gets a boost imo.

Do we say these for a lack of a better term or was it intentional that we say reason/think?

Re: Coding is when we're least productive

#26

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

mr_mitm wrote: post #19
BrenBarn wrote: post #6

This is one reason I always roll my eyes when people talk about how vim keyboard bindings are so great because you don't have to move your fingers from the home row. The actual action of typing text is a small part of the process of coding.

Is anybody claiming it makes you more productive at writing code? I just find it more convenient and more comfortable.

Theoretically, isn't the fact that you are being more convenient and more comfortable likely to increase your productivity too?

Re: Coding is when we're least productive

#27

Post by aidos »

BrenBarn wrote: post #6

This is one reason I always roll my eyes when people talk about how vim keyboard bindings are so great because you don't have to move your fingers from the home row. The actual action of typing text is a small part of the process of coding.

Vim recognises that the typing text is a small part of coding by defaulting to a mode in which you can’t even type :)

For me, vim is a nice way to navigate code. It’s really fast to jump from place to place so I can explore quickly and build an understanding.

Re: Coding is when we're least productive

#28

Post by xg15 »

torginus wrote: post #21

I feel one upshot of AI coding is that people finally recognize 5 layer enterprise architectures for what they are - useless slop whose purpose is to make solutions more 'professional' and complicated to make the people who write them feel smart, inflate costs and personnel needs and sell consulting on how to solve problems with 5x more code than necessary. The extra code doesn't encode any requirement. On the other…

There are lot of useless, self-serving abstractions out there (looking at you, Spring and Angular)

There is also a lot of useful abstraction that ensures you can more easily understand the system - and that sneaks in orthogonal features such as monitoring and robust error handling, that managers aren't happy to allocate much time for but that prove their worth once the system is actually running.

It's possible, LLMs now offer a different way to solve the same problem, because the cost of adding those orthogonal features now approaches zero jueas quickly as working on the rest of the code. ("Add logging, please"). So it is possible that a lot of frameworks that did provide real value in the past will become obsolete with LLMs.

On the other hand, if you look at stuff like Gas Town, then it's clear people will still revel into inventing crazy architectures full of arcane terminology, independent of how much it's actually needed.

Re: Coding is when we're least productive

#29

Post by emil-lp »

BrenBarn wrote: post #6

This is one reason I always roll my eyes when people talk about how vim keyboard bindings are so great because you don't have to move your fingers from the home row. The actual action of typing text is a small part of the process of coding.

Roll your eyes if you want. A professional takes tools seriously, that includes key bindings and shortcuts.

Yes, it's not the time it takes to type that's the matter, but once you're in the zone you need to stay there without any resistance.

Re: Coding is when we're least productive

#30

Post by mathgeek »

michaelsalim wrote: post #24
shalmanese wrote: post #22

At the end of the week, if you suffered a hard drive crash and all of your recent code got erased, how quickly could you recreate it? That's how much of your week was spent coding . The rest of the week was spent transforming you into the person who could code the thing you coded. Contrast this with a chair maker. If at the end of the week, their chair got thrown in a woodchipper, some significant fraction of the nex…

I see where you're coming at. But don't underestimate the amount of design work that goes into making a good chair. It probably took more time than your think, which transforms them into the person who can craft the chair

Yes, but that is part of the point: a chair being built is mostly distinct from a chair being designed (there is of course a small amount of design that is done while building). Software is designed at a much higher percentage while being created (or if you prefer, there is a cycle between the two states).

You also don’t often learn why you don’t need a chair while building one.

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