11–20 of 83 posts
I'm definitely gonna get hate for saying this but: the rise of coding with LLM assistants is going to worsen an issue our industry is already struggling with: we have tons of developers out there who do not know their fundamentals in programming, who are utterly rudderless without heaps upon heaps of framework code doing lots of work for them, who are now being further enabled by machines that write even that code fo…
Good engineers must also be responsive to their teammates, managers, customers, and the business. Great engineers also find a way to weave in periods of focus.
I’m curious how others navigate these?
It seems there was a large culture shift when Covid hit and non-async non-remote people all moved online and expected online to work like in person. I feel pushed to be more responsive at the cost of focus. On the flip side, I’ve given time and space to engineers so they could focus only to come back and find they had abused that time and trust. Or some well meaning engineers got lost in the weeds and lost the narrative of *why* they were focusing. It is super easy to measure responsiveness: how long did it take to respond. It’s much harder to measure quality and growth. Especially when being vulnerable about what you don’t know or the failure to make progress is a truly senior level skill.
How do we find balance?
The flip side of focus (to me) is responsiveness. A post to SO might deliver me the exact answer I need, but it will take focus to write the correct question and patience to wait for a response and then time spent iterating in the comments. In contrast an LLM will happily tell me the wrong thing, instantaneously. It’s responsive. Good engineers must also be responsive to their teammates, managers, customers, and the…
I've been struggling with finding balance for years as a front-line manager who codes. I need to be responsive-ish to incoming queries but also have my own tasks. If I am too responsive, it's easy for my work to become my evening time and my working hours for everybody else.
The "weaving" in of periods of focus is maintained by ignoring notifications and checking them in batches. Nobody gets to interrupt me when I'm in focus mode (much chagrin for my wife) and I can actually get stuff done. This happened a lot by accident, I get enough notifications for long enough that I don't really hear or notice them just like I don't hear or notice the trains that pass near my house.
However the future is uncertain, when we reach a point where most developers have used generated code most of their lives, and never developed the coding skills that are required to fully understand the code.
I guess we'll adapt to it. We always do. I mean for example, I can no longer do long division on paper like I did in elementary school, so I rely totally on computers for all calculating.
> Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result). LLMs, however, do not give this choice. I've actually found that LLMs are great at exploration for me. I'd argue, even better than exploitation. I've solved many a complex problem by using an LLM as a thought partner. I've refined many ideas by getting the LLM to brainsto…
I've started doing something that I have been meaning to do for years, which is to go through all the seminal papers on concurrency and make a minimal implementation of them. I did Raft recently, then Lamport timestamps, then a lot of the common Mutex algorithms, then Paxos, and now I'm working on Ambient Calculus.
I've attempted this before, but I would always get stuck on some detail that I didn't fully grasp in the paper and would abandon the project. Using ChatGPT, I've been able to unblock myself much easier. I will ask it to clarify stuff in the paper, and sometimes it doesn't even matter if it's "wrong", so much as it's giving me some form of feedback and helps me think of other ideas on how to fix things.
Doing this, I manage to actually finish these projects, and I think I more or less understand them, and I certainly understand them more than I would have had I abandoned them a quarter of the way through like I usually do.
Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user. What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support explora…
If I'm pulled 27 different ways. Then when I finally get around to another engineer’s question “I need help” is a demand for my synchronous time and focus. Versus “I’m having problems with X, I need to Y, can you help me Z” could turn into a chat, or it could mean I’m able to deliver the needed information at once and move on. Many people these days don’t even bother to write questions. They write statements and expect you to infer the question from the statement.
On the flip side, a thing we could learn more from LLMs is how to give a good response by explaining our reasoning out loud. Not “do X” but instead “It sounds like you want to W, and that’s blocked by Y. That is happening because of Z. To fix it you need to X because it …”
Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user. What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support explora…
Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user. What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support explora…