81–90 of 157 posts
Picking on a particular nit here, but I think it is indicative of the broader flaw with this argument: To rename `PostgreSQLClient`, I press F2 and type the new name, and I'm done. I don't have to wait for an agent to "perform the refactor, update references, run the tests, fix the missing pieces, and mark the relevant checkboxes in the ticket" (btw, what checkboxes..?) I press a key, type my change, and I'm done. Wa…
All 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…
Code is just storage medium. The hardware ultimately decides a lot that's out of our hands anyway; hardware never runs code in any structured way so getting intimate with the source structure is wasted effort. You're a worse engineer being a bottleneck in deference to bike shedding.
End of the day code is just labels on a mathematical algorithm that fits a biz edge case. Like a k:v store; sumAllCustomerBalances() is a to the a value (the function logic) that serves a business need. If the business is reliant on that behavior it won't go anywhere. And algorithms need to change as data sets change or new better algorithms are discovered.
Code is disposable. We aren't building bridges.
Whole lot of romanticizing the machine seems to have occurred since I started in this industry back in the 00s. Imo a result of people being online debating the (from my perspective) same old since slashdot was the new hotness.
In conclusion I have a different view and have been successful in hardware and software engineering for almost 30 years now.
Ymmv
All 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?
"But what about what runs the compiler! What about what runs the OS! What about the physics involved in electron transfer!" Diminishing returns I guess? No one's ever said you needed to understand everything, but understanding or at least being aware of a few layers under you seems to have been common sense forever. Taking one abstraction layer step up doesn't really change that.
Commit messages now do double duty: log of the changes, but also signing off that you've read and understand the code, are taking responsibility for it under your own name. The second part is an emerging convention but it's fairly common from what I've seen. IDK maybe no one will be reading or writing code in 18 months but if they are we'll need to separate these two things. Secondarily but probably more importantly:…
All 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…
That's a self selecting vain perspective to conclude with. Code is just storage medium. The hardware ultimately decides a lot that's out of our hands anyway; hardware never runs code in any structured way so getting intimate with the source structure is wasted effort. You're a worse engineer being a bottleneck in deference to bike shedding. End of the day code is just labels on a mathematical algorithm that fits a bi…
as shown by your one day old account
>Ironically, the audience that values all that structure the most is now LLMs. LLMs are not people and they don't have values.
I still tell the AI exactly what to do and you need to understand what reset, rebase, pull, and checkout actually do. Otherwise you end up with a mess.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I've always found the git GUIs more confusing than just typing out the commands. They never seem to map well to how I work.