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The bottleneck was never the code

thetypicalset.com

61–70 of 446 posts

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#61
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#62

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.

Uno reverse. What kind of limited project experience would lead anyone to think that there isn't an enormous continuum between code difficulty and organizational problems in the space of software development?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#63

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…

You’re describing a multitude of different people with a variety of viewpoints. It’s also smart to change your mind when the environment changes; code being easy to write is a decisive shift.

Code may be easy to write once you know what the code needs to do.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#64

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?

The community portion that unironically think AI is good enough now, are mostly managers and non/semi-technical people, and engineers who do not engage in critical or complex problems. HN has always been too much of the velocity-alignment-synergy class of professional talkers; it's just so much more obvious now that they feel emboldened in false confidence.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#65
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nakedly hypocritical How is it hypocritical? If in the old world, the very important process that used up a lot of time and benefited greatly from no distractions was the actual writing of code then interruptions for various ceremonies with limited value other than generating progress reports for some higher ups would feel like a waste of time. That same person in the 'new' world where writing code is very fast but…

Well it is hypocritical. Hypocrisy is an action or statement that is contrary to a stated value or principle. Just because your values or principles changed doesn’t make you a suddenly no longer a hypocrite, it just admits that your former opinions are no longer tenable. I’ve noticed this push to try to clothe hypocrisy in made up virtues like intellectual curiosity and mental plasticity a lot lately. All I can think…

I've noticed on hackernews in the past year, a certain type of comment. A deep suspicion to first call out a surface behavior, then psychoanalyze strangers with whatever the flavor of the month "deep observation" is.

You can't be a dick on this platform without fancy prose I guess.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#66

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…

That's an oppinion for sure, and a very shallow, general oppinion. Some people like solving problems, sometimes via code, while others tend to hide behind the 'Collaboration' banner, to help their own career progression. Both are legitimate tracks. To dismiss one, is to make the other appear 'non-Good'. But, perhaps data can be furnished as part of this post to support either as 'better'.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#67

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…

It's an astute observation but overstated. There are just as many programmers who view their activity as too sacred to consider using an LLM, even for relatively easy, predictable, or disposable work.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#68

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…

Is it hypocrisy or learning? A more charitable take - it wasn't too many years ago that I also decried the need for all the collaboration. But as I advanced in my career, that worldview just didn't hold up. In this case, maybe the introduction of agentic coding has accelerated that learning because now 'regular' engineers are forced to take on coordination roles.

[With that said, the specific implementations of such collaboration are often still very painful and counterproductive...]

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The community portion that unironically think AI is good enough now, are mostly managers and non/semi-technical people, and engineers who do not engage in critical or complex problems. HN has always been too much of the velocity-alignment-synergy class of professional talkers; it's just so much more obvious now that they feel emboldened in false confidence.

There's some of that, but more often it's developers whose arguments are a year behind the frontier models or, just as common, they're dramatically overstating their abilities.

It's an inherent tension that every discipline has to wrestle with. The most experienced developers are in the best position to evaluate where LLMs are, but those who are the loudest about their own abilities generally aren't in this camp. Humility tends to come with experience, and arrogance tends to come with inexperience.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#70

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…

> the same kind of engineer Who? There are millions of software engineers around the world. It's quite likely that they have a few different opinions and point of views!

But it is written there, and GP was quite specific:

>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

Seems pretty clear to me.

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