Eh, agents commits are always too verbose. I don't need a 3 paragraph mini novel. Design can go in a design docs folder, project info goes in the issue tracker.
The commit should be a short summary <1 paragraph for quick context
You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
31–40 of 157 posts
Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
#32All above comes at a cost of author slowly starting to understand less and less code in their own projects. Then in other projects as well. After the initial boost is over they will have to pay money just to stay afloat because they have already outsourced their thinking. I’m not anti AI, but I’m very worried about this bragging “you are not better engineer if you do things yourself”. Yes, you are, it all comes in sm…
How do you justify it against all the other abstractions you've accepted and no longer know how to do (or never learned in the first place). Why are the current set of manual steps the right level to be permanently aware of?
The best engineers hand-edit .git
Edit: But actually, one of my favorite Git explainers is https://wildlyinaccurate.com/a-hackers-guide-to-git/
Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
#33[flagged]
Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
#34What is with all these people that are so interested in other people's workflow to the point of writing weirdly aggressive manifestos like this. "If you don't do it like me, you're wrong!" I would like to be the first person to state that I don't give a damn about your workflow. Do whatever you want!
Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
#35IDK, you need a few tools to unbreak a wedged box so you can get to your fancy tools even if you only want the low effort tools. Otherwise when the Cursor config file is wedged? Or the machine came up and doesnt see the network? The agent doesn't do you any good if you can't launch it.
"Mr. Anderson, what good will a Claude Max plan do for you if you can't quit vim?"
Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
#36All above comes at a cost of author slowly starting to understand less and less code in their own projects. Then in other projects as well. After the initial boost is over they will have to pay money just to stay afloat because they have already outsourced their thinking. I’m not anti AI, but I’m very worried about this bragging “you are not better engineer if you do things yourself”. Yes, you are, it all comes in sm…
>already outsourced their thinking
With the reliability of current LLMs, if you're outsourcing that much of your thinking, you're producing mainly slop and were never a good engineer to begin with.
If you have a quality threshold beyond "it appears to work" then agents still require a lot of hand holding and guidance
Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
#37All above comes at a cost of author slowly starting to understand less and less code in their own projects. Then in other projects as well. After the initial boost is over they will have to pay money just to stay afloat because they have already outsourced their thinking. I’m not anti AI, but I’m very worried about this bragging “you are not better engineer if you do things yourself”. Yes, you are, it all comes in sm…
How do you justify it against all the other abstractions you've accepted and no longer know how to do (or never learned in the first place). Why are the current set of manual steps the right level to be permanently aware of?
AI prompts aren't a new abstraction layer, it's automating the same abstraction layer, only with less understanding
It would be like saying being an engineering manager is a different abstraction layer. It's not. It's an entirely different domain, managing people and resources instead of programming machines directly
Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
#38All above comes at a cost of author slowly starting to understand less and less code in their own projects. Then in other projects as well. After the initial boost is over they will have to pay money just to stay afloat because they have already outsourced their thinking. I’m not anti AI, but I’m very worried about this bragging “you are not better engineer if you do things yourself”. Yes, you are, it all comes in sm…
Remembering and typing git commands does not improve the code or your understanding of it.
Reading the code yourself, human- or LLM-generated, does.
Vibe coders intentionally don't read LLM-generated code. That is the whole point, the definition of vibe coding.
But those kinds of people aren't likely to read code hand-written by their human colleagues either.
It's not whether an LLM or a human generates the code or not, it's about whether you take the time and effort to read it.
Accusing non-vibe LLM-using coders of outsourcing their thinking is only valid if they don't bother reading code, and that makes them vibe coders.
If you read the code, you're insourcing and internalizing the LLM's thinking, and you're then qualified to criticize it and ask the LLM to fix it, or fix it yourself.
I try to be a conscientious objector -- repossessing the term like reclaiming queer: conscientious about objects, prototypes, and code; conscientiously objecting to evil or sloppy work. Named at a Kaleida meetup with David Ungar's Self team and the ScriptX object-system designers; Joe Weizenbaum's line runs through Heinz Lemke's PIXIE history too.
This week, discussing light pens and PDP-7 drivers with Heinz, Alan Kay, and Lars Brinkhoff, we joked about issuing Conscientious Objector club cards for our wallets -- to show when someone asks us to write terrible, unethical, poorly designed code. Wallet-sized ethics beats /pr-merge-dev skills that merge after one day with no human review.
Not everybody here is a vibe coder. Some of us are just trying to read the diffs.
Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
#39All above comes at a cost of author slowly starting to understand less and less code in their own projects. Then in other projects as well. After the initial boost is over they will have to pay money just to stay afloat because they have already outsourced their thinking. I’m not anti AI, but I’m very worried about this bragging “you are not better engineer if you do things yourself”. Yes, you are, it all comes in sm…
How do you justify it against all the other abstractions you've accepted and no longer know how to do (or never learned in the first place). Why are the current set of manual steps the right level to be permanently aware of?
A farmer producing meat is a better farmer than me even if I hire my own farmer.
If we invent a meta-farmer profession (for those who hired a farmer) I will be great meta-farmer, but still suck as a farmer
Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
#40These days, I am leaning heavily on Claude to deal with all the git issues that I never wanted to be bothered with. A rebase that can't just fast-forward? That's a job for Claude. A merge conflict that really shouldn't be a problem? Claude deals with it. These are things I never wanted to have to learn in the first place, and I don't feel like reserving a part of my brain to remember how to deal with these things is worthwhile. In almost all cases, there is no actual decision that needs to be made, it's purely a mechanical process.