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The bottleneck was never the code

thetypicalset.com

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#131

Post by layer8 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #121

> What may save us it that agents are unreasonably good at reading exhaustively. An agent will read every PR comment, every closed issue, every commit message, every stale design doc ... > Not just “this module exists,” but “this module is weird because the migration had to preserve old behavior,” or “this benchmark matters because a previous optimization silently changed the distribution.” The thesis here is that an…

It also bakes in the LLM quality at the time the documentation was generated, into the documentation. It potentially worsens the performance of future LLMs if they ingest the documentation produced by older LLMs. It’s not clear why documentation wouldn’t instead be generated on demand, using the newest SOTA LLM.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#132

Post by nottorp »

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…

> 2. It's annoying and disruptive to be interrupted when doing work that requires deep focus.

Steering a LLM also requires deep focus. Unless you want to end up on accidentally quadratic or have a CVE named after your project.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#133

Post by skydhash »

stronglikedan wrote: post #119
xquce wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a false dichotomy. I agree with OP and I can say for certain that if you are one of the few developers that is "fond of meetings with customers" you are not the the type of person OP is talking about, and you are more rare than you think. I am a former Dev turned PO/PM and now CEO, I can tell you many a developers are not fond of those meetings you are fond of and people like myself don't insert our selves where…

> you are more rare than you think. Truth. I'm that person and didn't appreciate how rare I was until I became an EM and learned that most of my team would actively avoid conversations with the customer. Even though I have no way to quantify it, I'm sure it's benefitted my career.

Are those people in contact with the customer able to make decisions regarding the roadmap or feature design? It’s a miserable position to be in front of unhappy customers while having no power to solve anything (which is why I tend to be polite with customer support).

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#134

Post by peab »

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…

The amount of cognitive dissonance I'm seeing on HN right now is concerning.

I'm seeing both these beliefs right now:

• Belief A: "I am a skilled professional whose value lies in my unique ability to solve complex problems."

• Belief B: "An LLM can now solve many of these problems in seconds for pennies."

This thread is great at showing how people are rationalizing by moving the goal posts, so to say

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#135

Post by yxhuvud »

TheLudd wrote: post #107
paldepind2 wrote: post #100

From the article: > Jevons Paradox: when something gets cheaper, you tend to use more of it, not less. That's a butchering of Jevons paradox. What's stated is not a paradox, but a very natural effect. Obviously usage of something goes up when it gets cheaper. What Jevons paradox actually describes is the situation where usage of a resource becomes more efficient (which means less of it is needed for a given task), bu…

Should the paradox not be that we PAY more for it? Or, if some process is made more effective, i.e. takes shorter time, we spend more time in that process.

Unit cost is down but aggregate cost is up.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#136

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

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…

That's just scarcity based economics doing its thing.

I don't think it's hilarious, I think it's rather sad to see people so easily trampled by the whims of an irrational market. Generally speaking, we benefit when people stick by their values, and yet we play this awful game where winning means abandoning our values in pursuit of "value" whatever that is.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#137

Post by wuliwong »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #103
sermah wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

til https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

That’s kind of just strawman with an origin story isn’t it?

I think the Goomba is distinct. Strawman is disingenuously representing an argument, Goomba is assuming contradictions are coming from the same person, presumably b/c it's coming to the Goomba through the same app.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#139

Post by jmilloy »

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…

My sense is that it's the opposite. The people who complain about meetings, managers, and methodologies also complain about agentic coding. The people who are excited about frameworks, methodologies, and project management tooling are excited about agentic coding.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#140

Post by skydhash »

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #112
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A - they are replaceable and their work isn't that unique and B - they are the bottleneck, not the process or workload. The problem rather is: often good programmers have quite good ideas how these problems could be solved, but for "organizational politics" reasons they are not allowed to apply these solutions. Thus: Concerning (B): Because they are not allowed to apply their improvement ideas, they are the bottlen…

And I totally respect that, I get it, I really do. But it's really obvious when people are being territorial and any contractor will tell you this happens every time. I suspect that a lot of the times, I'm hired to "teach them a lesson" in that "Hey, velocity sucks and I'm hearing a lot of whining, so if you don't like doing it, this guy will" and people snap into shape.

Unless the team are seriously bad developers, many times, it’s the manager fault. As a hired consultant, you often benefit many freedom that team is lacking. As someone that has been hired as a consultant, one of those are meetings and not having to worry about office politics.
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