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The bottleneck was never the code

thetypicalset.com

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#51

Post by anilakar »

lysium wrote: post #4

Can someone explain the title? I think the author illustrates that the code was the bottleneck and it has shifted to context. What am I missing?

The author argues that writing code cannot be a bottleneck because work always fills up the allotted time. Developer teams should instead focus on doing less and writing better specifications.

The error in the reasoning is that while you can increase your resourcing to tenfold and gain nothing in return, the inverse is not necessarily true.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#53

Post by frollogaston »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

I hate meetings when they're mismanaged, which is often. I like a good meeting. Probably what most swes would say.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#54

Post by knollimar »

dmm wrote: post #28
nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

Are you referring to the author specifically? Or a specific hypocritical person you know? If you're making a general statement about groups of online people you might be falling for the group attribution error[1], where the characteristics of an individual are assumed to be reflective of the whole group. In any case, two things can be simultaneously true: 1. Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop fe…

Or just goomba fallacy

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#55

Post by frollogaston »

kenforthewin wrote: post #31
nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

Looks like this comment is touching a nerve. This community is progressing from "AI can't write code", to "Well, AI can write code but it's not really about the code". I wonder where the goalposts will be moved next?

This community hasn't agreed on either of those things, just like it never agreed on good coding practices.

My opinion since college (8y ago) was that the best engineers are the ones who treat everything as halfway a people problem, even in low level code.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#56

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

Antibabelic wrote: post #33

What kind of projects are people working on, where understanding what features the management wants is the only difficult part and the rest can just be "typed out" (or, today, offloaded to an LLM)? If that's what you do, then I'm not surprised so many people on HN think LLMs can replace them.

This is like 80% of CRUD apps. Sometimes they have a few interesting problems but not like the upper 20%. Most of them are hot garbage in terms of code quality because of the offshoring and layoff cycles.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#57

Post by frollogaston »

jorisw wrote: post #10
rudyp_dev wrote: post #8

I think the argument here misses critical nuance; there is a difference between code used to implement a product and when code _is_ the product. It goes without saying that agents have little to no product sense in any discipline. If you're building a game or an app or a business, your creative input still matters heavily! And the same is true for code; if the software is your product, then absolutely the context mis…

> difference between code used to implement a product and when code _is_ the product Care to elaborate? I don't understand the difference unless you mean code that _is_ the product, being OSS code or code for license.

systems vs application code

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#60

Post by tlkan »

One of the bottlenecks has always been the code. That code has been stolen and is being laundered while companies rely on mediocre engineers who have never written anything of value to promote the burglary tools and call the process "writing software".

It is the same as putting an Einstein paper on a photocopier and call the process "writing a paper".

I agree with the point of the article though: code generation does not really work, the results are bloated and often wrong and people already had more features that they could absorb in 2020.

The solution to this mess is to have 18 year olds boycott studying computer science altogether, since the industry (and mediocre fellow "engineers") will treat them like human garbage.

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