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You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

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Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#121
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author had 27 years of experience but still found "babysitting git" was painful. I couldn't remember what's the last time git got in my way. I guess such benefit from AI is probably very specific to their setup. I don't know, maybe the author had some really complex workflow or used some super advanced git features.

I have only about 17 years of experience and I consider myself a moderately advanced git user — I do interactive rebases with squashes, rewords or reordering and I do chunk manipulation per commit all the time. Or at least I used to. Now I just type into the LLM what I want it do with git and it does it for me, much much quicker. I did not find "babysitting" git painful before, but I today I do feel like doing it man…

In my experience, those operations require understanding, judgement, and taste. But all of that only matters if I care about the codebase enough for it to matter.

So I don't think the disagreement is really about git. It's about how much of the thinking you're comfortable outsourcing. I do have some repos that's highly vibed up, in those repos I just let AI do whatever it want.

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#122
post #92

> Then, when it was time to review or merge something, we spent even more time digging through the code just to understand what the commit or PR was supposed to do. > Now I delegate that work to AI. > […] > If one day passes and nobody on the team reviews the PR, we merge it It’s not clear to me whether or not the author is reviewing the code their agent is committing on their behalf, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprise…

Author here: All code before removing [WIP] in a PR has been humanly reviewed, tested, then double and tripled checked with /skills. Then it comes code review, answering comments, etc.

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#123
post #47

> AI does this job better. Why do these posts always state things like this with maximum confidence and then not even make any attempt to show evidence? "I've got x years of experience trust me bro" is pretty weak.

This is a subjective statement. What kind of evidence you're expecting here?

Like:

— My new car is much better than my old car — Hurr durr, how can you make those confident statements without showing any evidence, huh?

It's not that deep.

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#124
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author had 27 years of experience but still found "babysitting git" was painful. I couldn't remember what's the last time git got in my way. I guess such benefit from AI is probably very specific to their setup. I don't know, maybe the author had some really complex workflow or used some super advanced git features.

I have only about 17 years of experience and I consider myself a moderately advanced git user — I do interactive rebases with squashes, rewords or reordering and I do chunk manipulation per commit all the time. Or at least I used to. Now I just type into the LLM what I want it do with git and it does it for me, much much quicker. I did not find "babysitting" git painful before, but I today I do feel like doing it man…

What do you mean with "manually"? Did you type complex commands by hand? Simple commands or using an GUI is faster than explaining an AI what you want to do, no?

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#125
post #86
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and have been successful in hardware and software engineering for almost 30 years now. as shown by your one day old account

Yeah I am mostly retired in late 40s having saved as much as possible as fast as possible and have time on my hands. Am exploring social media I largely ignored while staying busy working.

Besides even if it was 3 years old account it still wouldn't tell the story correctly.

That's a measure as dumb as lines of code = productivity.

I understand; your parents made your account when you were born in 2017. Being 9 explains such shoddy reasoning. Oh wait is that when you got your first job; making an HN account some universal ritual for all new workers? Shoot too bad I missed out in 1999 when I landed my first real hardware engineer job.

You might need to logoff and go live in the real world a while. Coming off like one of those snowflakes I have heard about

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#126
post #47

> AI does this job better. Why do these posts always state things like this with maximum confidence and then not even make any attempt to show evidence? "I've got x years of experience trust me bro" is pretty weak.

This is a subjective statement. What kind of evidence you're expecting here? Like: — My new car is much better than my old car — Hurr durr, how can you make those confident statements without showing any evidence, huh? It's not that deep.

Subjective or not, there wasn't a single example of a "good" AI generated commit message or refactoring or whatever in the whole thing. If they're so good why not just show it? It's just weird.

"My new car is much better than my old car" is not something you'd reference your 27 years of car experience as evidence for--you'd just say what's good about your new car and what was bad about your old one, right?

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#128
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a subjective statement. What kind of evidence you're expecting here? Like: — My new car is much better than my old car — Hurr durr, how can you make those confident statements without showing any evidence, huh? It's not that deep.

Subjective or not, there wasn't a single example of a "good" AI generated commit message or refactoring or whatever in the whole thing. If they're so good why not just show it? It's just weird. "My new car is much better than my old car" is not something you'd reference your 27 years of car experience as evidence for--you'd just say what's good about your new car and what was bad about your old one, right?

"Newer cars are much better than older cars". How about this?

It'd be weird to ask for evidence of that statement cause it's very generic and there's like a million instances of newer cars that are shit and old cars that are brilliant. But in general the statement totally holds and you'd need to be insane to be arguing otherwise.

Having 27 years of driving cars experience would add weight to the opinion stated, but otherwise not provide any substantive credible evidence.

I only have 17 years of experience and I fully agree with the author here. This is my personal opinion and I would not be fucked to respond to any demands for evidence since those demands are not meant to be satisfiable in the first place.

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#130
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have only about 17 years of experience and I consider myself a moderately advanced git user — I do interactive rebases with squashes, rewords or reordering and I do chunk manipulation per commit all the time. Or at least I used to. Now I just type into the LLM what I want it do with git and it does it for me, much much quicker. I did not find "babysitting" git painful before, but I today I do feel like doing it man…

What do you mean with "manually"? Did you type complex commands by hand? Simple commands or using an GUI is faster than explaining an AI what you want to do, no?

I've never seen a GUI that could do anything git faster than me just doing CLI stuff in my terminal. Not even close.

> What do you mean with "manually"?

I type `git rebase -i head~15`, I select the commits I want to include, rearrange lines manually, mark the ones that I want to edit, squash, or reword. I save the buffer, exit, git starts giving me individual commits to edit/reword, so I edit chunks for manually type in the reworded messages etc

These days I just tell LLM what I want and it does git for me as a byproduct and it looks more or less the way I want, except with like 1% typing on my part and 100x times faster.

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