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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

#131

Post by blooalien »

blooalien wrote: post #95

Funny how all that stuff one spends so much time and effort learning was "a waste of time and effort" to everyone that has zero idea how anything works "under the hood", but the moment it breaks, you're always the guy that has to fix it in the end. I honestly believe that's one of the biggest contributing factors to "developer burn-out". Being ignored and ridiculed repeatedly (Shut up, Nerd. Nobody wants to hear you…

> @meerita: I think you are arguing against a point I did not make. (Sorry, it won't let me directly reply to your comment for some odd reason.)

I'm not actually "arguing against a point" you made or that anyone else made. It was more of a random rant triggered by how things are these days, and how they got there. Sometimes some of these articles just really rub some salt in the wounds... Also, I totally agree with the rest of your statements there following the above comment. Automation is not at all a bad thing, and neither is AI, when used properly by folks that "know how to hold the tool properly". ;)

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

#132

Post by meerita »

bulbar wrote: post #124
bloody-crow wrote: post #117

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 doubt you can beat a skill command. It's just /my-skill-do-the-job and that's it.

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

#133

Post by 27183 »

bloody-crow wrote: post #128
27183 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

When I read commit messages and comments Claude makes a large fraction of the time they don't seem terribly related to the code, nor necessarily relevant to the problem at hand. The commits don't generally make a great deal of logical, linear sense either. Reviewing Claude PRs commit-by-commit is kind of nauseating. I only have 12yrs of experience though so I must be wrong. I'll defer to you guys. Sure would be nice to know wtf everyone's so excited about though I just don't get it.

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

#134

Post by blooalien »

meerita wrote: post #114
JeremyHerrman wrote: post #50

it's tough for people here to admit, but AI is good at summarizing and that includes commit messages and PR fields but that does NOT mean you get to skip understanding the code & whipping the AI in line during implementation my preferred workflow: - think hard about the problem before touching the keyboard - back and forth with the AI, swatting down bad implementation ideas and poking holes - settle on a detailed imp…

This is what I do mainly. I spend more time designing the solution, iterating by hand when it matters and anything that should be automated, let it be.

Yeah, one developer I recently had a chat with on Chatto (recently featured here on Hacker News) actually wrote the core code and project layout by hand before invoking the LLM and found that he had to hand-hold it a lot less because he had given it solid foundation to work from. That design stage you speak of there and the "iterating by hand when it matters" is a big part of what really helps the models do their part of the job a lot better. That's what the "vibe coders" (and often their bosses) don't seem to understand (yet), but they'll figure it out eventually I'm sure. Or maybe not. I guess we'll have to wait and see how it all turns out. In the meantime, we can have fun playing with the new tools they've given us. ;)

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

#135

Post by bloody-crow »

27183 wrote: post #133
bloody-crow wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 o…

When I read commit messages and comments Claude makes a large fraction of the time they don't seem terribly related to the code, nor necessarily relevant to the problem at hand. The commits don't generally make a great deal of logical, linear sense either. Reviewing Claude PRs commit-by-commit is kind of nauseating. I only have 12yrs of experience though so I must be wrong. I'll defer to you guys. Sure would be nice…

News flash: you can tell LLMs how to do shit and they're generally pretty good at following instructions.

Those things are good enough to solve novel math problems I've never even heard about, surely it can figure out how you like your commit messages and apply it a million times over in the time it'd take you to make yourself a cup of coffee.

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

#137

Post by TheSamFischer »

nomel wrote: post #106
TheSamFischer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of people who understand the stack and ship actually fast software. This might be a skill issue that you’re choosing to frame as a “best practice”, because you do not want to put in the work. Our end users are who should benefit. You’re the pilot in the seat who doesn’t know what the throttle is and you’re telling the passenger it’s the plane’s fault it’s slow.

> that you’re choosing to frame as a “best practice”, I don't follow. > because you do not want to put in the work. Yes, just as nobody wants to type opcodes, or write their own http clients, or etc. It's why most of us use higher level languages. Leave the solved things solved, and work on actually interesting/new things! That doesn't mean not understanding, it just means not wasting time on the same boilerplate/cod…

If you think software performance is a solved problem today, there is nothing more I have to say.

Consumer software is slower than ever. And only getting worse.

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

#138

Post by aleqs »

meerita wrote: post #93
aleqs wrote: post #48

At the end of the day LLM output is not deterministic, and the burden shifts from writing code to reviewing it. It makes sense to cover the review surface with deterministic checks/validations as much as possible - unit test, linters, static analysis tools, e2e integration test etc. one gap I noticed when it comes to such tools is that they are generally language/stack specific and don't cover things like file/direct…

I have my own tooling set in every project https://www.minid.net/2026/6/1/my-ai-workflow . I have couple dozens of make commands, that perform all the checks. I can do them manually after I finish coding or, I relegate these to the AI. If something is wrong, that's when I intervene. If nothing is wrong, that's because I've spent quite some time checking every single change.

I'm curious what validations/checks you find most useful in your workflows? alint basically started with me taking a bunch of make/shell scripts I already had and combining them into one tool, with some added niceties, and much better performance.

I find manually reviewing every change simply does not scale past a certain point. You need to rely on AI reviews and deterministic static analysis tooling, tests, modeling/verification, etc. to do the much of the heavy lifting.

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

#140

Post by cognitiveinline »

munk-a wrote: post #109
cognitiveinline wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manual knowledge of git to get out of tricky situations will be as passe as using log book for multiplication. It's just not required anymore.

Who will get you out of such a tricky situation?

Any model, including inexpensive ones. It's not a hard problem.
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