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I’m spending months coding the old way

miguelconner.substack.com

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Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#301

Post by beej71 »

bendmorris wrote: post #292
beej71 wrote: post #123

I'll bet we see more and more of this in the future. As developer skills atrophy due to over-reliance on LLMs, we'll have to keep our skills sharp somehow. What better way than a sabbatical?

To answer "what better way," clearly using the skills regularly is much better. Letting them atrophy for potentially multiple years and then trying to resurrect them repeatedly doesn't seem like a recipe for maintaining sharp skills to me.

That's definitely optimal, but I don't think a lot of people are going to have that opportunity. It's not really in the short-term interest of a company to have people spending time on that.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#302

Post by teaearlgraycold »

derwiki wrote: post #276
yodsanklai wrote: post #249

> so i'm spending 3 months coding the old way the old way which is about one year ago?

I mean ya, management at my company has made it clear that all of our code should be written by agents. So yea, things have changed a lot in a year.

How embarrassing for them.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#303

Post by jimbokun »

zrobotics wrote: post #145
apricot wrote: post #86

I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment. Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one. We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I…

I took a very similar class 9 years ago, and it was honestly one of the most helpful things I got out of my CS degree. The low level and limited tooling taught me to think before I start writing. I've had other people look askanse at me, but on greenfield work I tend to start with pen and graph paper. I'm not even writing pseudocode, but diagramming a loose graph with potential functions or classes and arrows interco…

This is why whiteboards used to be so popular in many/most tech company offices.

Doing this exact same process interactively with other people, and a not to NOT ERASE or later taking a picture of the whiteboard with your phone.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#304

Post by jimbokun »

shevy-java wrote: post #263
pipes wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say "why on earth are you making them use a line editor there is probably a vscode plugin for the assembler with syntax highlighting" then I got to your point about it being in their head instead. This reminds me of what zed Shaw said, for some reason code written without an ide is better and he's not sure why. As a sort of an adjacent point, I worked through a book that is used on a course often calle…

> This reminds me of what zed Shaw said, for some reason code written without an ide is better and he's not sure why. I am not sure whether the statement is correct; I am not sure whether the statement is incorrect either. But I tested many editors and IDEs over the years. IDEs can be useful, but they also hide abstractions. I noticed this with IntelliJ IDEA in particular; before I used it I was using my old, simple…

I really like this approach. A good reminder that Ruby started out as a shell scripting language, as evidenced by many of the built in primitives useful for shell programming.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#305

Post by andersmurphy »

elAhmo wrote: post #236

It is amazing to see such a change in the industry: this title is something nearly every single developer could've said ~two years ago, now anyone claiming to code by hand is almost like an endangered species.

The bigger change is those that do write by hand have stopped open sourcing their work. The age of sharing innovation for free is quickly coming to an end.

I also expect a bunch of open source/open core projects to go closed source in the next few months.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#306

Post by bccdee »

shevy-java wrote: post #263
pipes wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say "why on earth are you making them use a line editor there is probably a vscode plugin for the assembler with syntax highlighting" then I got to your point about it being in their head instead. This reminds me of what zed Shaw said, for some reason code written without an ide is better and he's not sure why. As a sort of an adjacent point, I worked through a book that is used on a course often calle…

> This reminds me of what zed Shaw said, for some reason code written without an ide is better and he's not sure why. I am not sure whether the statement is correct; I am not sure whether the statement is incorrect either. But I tested many editors and IDEs over the years. IDEs can be useful, but they also hide abstractions. I noticed this with IntelliJ IDEA in particular; before I used it I was using my old, simple…

Simpler tools are a forcing function for simplicity. If you don't have code search, you'll need to write code that is legible without searching. If you don't have auto-refactoring utils, you'll have to be stricter about information-hiding. And if you don't have AI, you might hesitate to commit to the first thing you think of. You might go back to the drawing board in search of a deeper, simpler abstraction and end up reducing the size of your codebase instead of increasing it.

Conveniences sometimes make things more complicated in the long run, and I worry that code agents (the ultimate convenience) will lead to a sort of ultimate carelessness that makes our jobs harder.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#307

Post by bsaul »

jimbokun wrote: post #303
zrobotics wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a very similar class 9 years ago, and it was honestly one of the most helpful things I got out of my CS degree. The low level and limited tooling taught me to think before I start writing. I've had other people look askanse at me, but on greenfield work I tend to start with pen and graph paper. I'm not even writing pseudocode, but diagramming a loose graph with potential functions or classes and arrows interco…

This is why whiteboards used to be so popular in many/most tech company offices. Doing this exact same process interactively with other people, and a not to NOT ERASE or later taking a picture of the whiteboard with your phone.

"used to be" ?? What are engineering team doing nowadays when discussing architecturing their systems ?

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#308

Post by SoftTalker »

shevy-java wrote: post #263
pipes wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say "why on earth are you making them use a line editor there is probably a vscode plugin for the assembler with syntax highlighting" then I got to your point about it being in their head instead. This reminds me of what zed Shaw said, for some reason code written without an ide is better and he's not sure why. As a sort of an adjacent point, I worked through a book that is used on a course often calle…

> This reminds me of what zed Shaw said, for some reason code written without an ide is better and he's not sure why. I am not sure whether the statement is correct; I am not sure whether the statement is incorrect either. But I tested many editors and IDEs over the years. IDEs can be useful, but they also hide abstractions. I noticed this with IntelliJ IDEA in particular; before I used it I was using my old, simple…

When .NET first came out I started learning it by writing C# code in Notepad and using csc.exe to compile it. I've never really used Visual Studio because it always made me feel that I didn't understand what was happening (that said, I changed jobs and never did any really big .NET project work).

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#309

Post by SoftTalker »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #149

I wonder if we could design a programming language specifically for teaching CS, and have a way to hard-exclude it from all LLM output. Kinda like anti virus software has special strings that are not viruses but trigger detections for testing. This would probably require cooperation during model training, but now that I think of it, is there adversarial research on LLM? Can you design text data specifically to mess w…

We had the first part: scheme.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#310

Post by SoftTalker »

thrance wrote: post #90
JuniperMesos wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't someone consult some kind of external resource for help, after struggling with a specific coding problem for 20 minutes? Why is 6 hours the right amount of time to timebox this to?

The struggle is the point, that's how you learn. If you offload your task to someone/something else after barely 20 minutes of head scratching, you've missed the plot entirely.

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