41–50 of 234 posts
Before 2023 I remember everyone here on HN championed that removing lines of code was the strongest senior metric
Simplification is still good. I remember one senior that only removed code when he joined the company I was at until he became a manager!
It is now significantly harder to figure out who understands the systems and is using AI effectively and who doesn't know shit and is just slinging LLM copypasta around. Before 2025, the underperformers/coasters were at least relatively identifiable by the paucity of their contributions. Now all of the sudden every single engineer is filing PRs, code reviews, technical design documents, and every other artifact under…
LLMs are prolific and they love to add shit. Truly capable engineers are able to achieve more business outcomes with less code / fewer moving parts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The old model couldn't do math, the new one solved a big open problem.
"Open AI claims that its model disproven an Erdős conjecture, therefore my crappy way of arguing about software quality is valid." I really don't know how I'm supposed to reply to stuff like this.
It is now significantly harder to figure out who understands the systems and is using AI effectively and who doesn't know shit and is just slinging LLM copypasta around. Before 2025, the underperformers/coasters were at least relatively identifiable by the paucity of their contributions. Now all of the sudden every single engineer is filing PRs, code reviews, technical design documents, and every other artifact under…
Chalk up yet another echo of the 1920s Gilded Age? Between all these economic spasms and the simultaneous tilting towards fascism, I think there is way too much historical rhyming going on right now...
It is now significantly harder to figure out who understands the systems and is using AI effectively and who doesn't know shit and is just slinging LLM copypasta around. Before 2025, the underperformers/coasters were at least relatively identifiable by the paucity of their contributions. Now all of the sudden every single engineer is filing PRs, code reviews, technical design documents, and every other artifact under…
So, in other words, all the "awesome engineers" can't really tell good code from bad unless it's really obvious? Why should we listen to you about AI code being crap, then? Maybe, in the end, you don't really know. Maybe AI is better at it than you?
> Those are not code problems. They are evaluation problems. > Code becomes precious when it is the only place knowledge lives. Reading AI code all day is _agonizing_. Just, a horrible way to live, and it melts people's brains at the moment you need them to be the most capable. Manual programming has this really productive and gratifying feedback loop, where you read the code, write the code, and fix it until it comp…
If a coworker dumped a 5k-line code review on you, you'd tell them to come back when it's broken down into smaller, reviewable chunks. Large dumps of code are basically unreviewable by humans, but it seems like a lot of people have forgotten about that when it comes to LLMs.
But it's also the exact sort of thing that LLMs are literally perfect for in my experience so there's really no excuse anymore. I've never seen Claude fail to turn a 5k PR into a well-decomposed Graphite stack.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure this article had enough thought put into it. For example: What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight. I…
I think the point is that there are better engineering artifacts to review instead of lines of code. Encoding the decisions, structure, requirements, testing, monitoring, then reviewing those and having AI generate and regenerate code based on them. The code itself doesn't matter if enough thought and rigor has gone into the structure that produces the code. > What does "ideal" mean here? When I was growing up "show…
They’re important for discussion and brainstorming. They’re also important for sharing context before reviewing. But code is the only perfect representation in terms of semantics of what the computer will do.
You can have all the diagram and all the proses you want, but they’re still ambiguous.
I have a doubt that one of Three Virtues of a Programmer, laziness is still considered a virtue on AI coding era. Now that AI coding speed and performance outperformed most of human. But AI still need human to be commanded. Yes, you can let AI agent manage sub-agents but still, human is at the top of manager who order AI what should be written. So human must command and final say on when it's done. Is laziness still…
If you buy that, then it follows that the more work you accomplish with AI, the "lazier" of a dev you are.
I liked this article, and I see a lot of other commenters didn't, so I'll give my take: When starting on a new codebase, how do you make yourself into a helpful contributor as quickly as possible? I go straight for the humans and their human docs. What problem was the system originally built to solve? What was the original design, and what were its biggest problems? Who is currently using it? If you know these, readi…
I liked this article, and I see a lot of other commenters didn't, so I'll give my take: When starting on a new codebase, how do you make yourself into a helpful contributor as quickly as possible? I go straight for the humans and their human docs. What problem was the system originally built to solve? What was the original design, and what were its biggest problems? Who is currently using it? If you know these, readi…
I wonder if the reception is so variable due to differing exposure to 1) infra as code and 2) engineering teams that don't produce any artifacts outside of their code. > When starting on a new codebase, how do you make yourself into a helpful contributor as quickly as possible? I go straight for the humans and their human docs. What problem was the system originally built to solve? What was the original design, and w…