111–120 of 231 posts
You could write more code, but you also could abstract code more if you know what/how/why.
This same idea abstracts to business, you can perform more service or you can try to provide more value with same amount of work.
factorio ... it's also the most useful engineering homework that's technically a game
> The bottleneck is understanding the problem. No amount of faster typing fixes that. Why not? Why can't faster typing help us understand the problem faster? > When you speed up code output in this environment, you are speeding up the rate at which you build the wrong thing. Why can't we figure out the right thing faster by building the wrong thing faster? Presumably we were gonna build the wrong thing either way in…
> Why can't we figure out the right thing faster by building the wrong thing faster? Because usually the customer can only tolerate so many failed attempts per unit of time. Running your fitness function is often very expensive in terms of other people's time. This is easily the biggest bottleneck in B2B/SaaS stuff for banking. You can iterate maybe once a week if you have a really, really good client.
I just set up Claude Code tonight. I still read and understand every line, but I don't need to Google things, move things around and write tests myself. I state my low-level intent and it does the grunt work.
I'm not going to 10x my productivity, but it'll free up some time. It's just a labour-saving technology, not a panacea. Just like a dishwasher.
As human developers, I think we're struggling with "letting go" of the code. The code we write (or agents write) is really just an intermediate representation (IR) of the solution. For instance, GCC will inline functions, unroll loops, and myriad other optimizations that we don't care about. But when we review the ASM that GCC generates (we don't) we are not concerned with the "spaghetti" and the "high coupling" and…
>Source code in a higher-level language is not really different anymore Source code is a formal language, in a way that natural language isn't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why can't we figure out the right thing faster by building the wrong thing faster? Because usually the customer can only tolerate so many failed attempts per unit of time. Running your fitness function is often very expensive in terms of other people's time. This is easily the biggest bottleneck in B2B/SaaS stuff for banking. You can iterate maybe once a week if you have a really, really good client.
The customer doesn't need to be shown every "wrong thing".
> The bottleneck is understanding the problem. No amount of faster typing fixes that. Why not? Why can't faster typing help us understand the problem faster? > When you speed up code output in this environment, you are speeding up the rate at which you build the wrong thing. Why can't we figure out the right thing faster by building the wrong thing faster? Presumably we were gonna build the wrong thing either way in…
AI is really good when: 1. you want something that's literally been done tons of times before, and it can literally just find it inside its compressed dataset 2. you want something and as long as it roughly is what you wanted, it's fine It turns out, this is not the majority of software people are paying engineers to write. And it turns out that actually writing the code is only part of what you're paying for - much…
As human developers, I think we're struggling with "letting go" of the code. The code we write (or agents write) is really just an intermediate representation (IR) of the solution. For instance, GCC will inline functions, unroll loops, and myriad other optimizations that we don't care about. But when we review the ASM that GCC generates (we don't) we are not concerned with the "spaghetti" and the "high coupling" and…
At least today the coding agents will cheat, choose the wrong pattern, brute force a solution where an abstraction or extra system was needed, etc. A few PR's won't make this a problem, but after not very long at all in a repo that a dev team is constantly contributing to (via their herds of agents) it can get pretty gnarly, and suddenly it looks like the agents are struggling with tech debt.
Maybe one day we can stop writing programming languages. It's a thought-provoking idea, but in practice I don't think we're there yet.
> The bottleneck is understanding the problem. No amount of faster typing fixes that. Why not? Why can't faster typing help us understand the problem faster? > When you speed up code output in this environment, you are speeding up the rate at which you build the wrong thing. Why can't we figure out the right thing faster by building the wrong thing faster? Presumably we were gonna build the wrong thing either way in…
Sometimes you need to think slow to understand something. Offloading your thinking to a black box of numbers and accepting what it emits is not thinking slow (i.e. ponder) and processing the problem at hand.
On the contrary, it's entering tunnel vision and brute forcing. i.e. shotgun coding.