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747s and coding agents
11–20 of 97 posts
Re: 747s and coding agents
#12> I do read the code, but reviewing code is very different from producing it, and surely teaches you less. If you don’t believe this, I doubt you work in software. I work in software and for single line I write I read hundredths of them. If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times, over and over again. If writing programs taught me something, it is how to read progr…
>hundredths of them Man, it would rule so much if programmers were literate and knew how to actually communicate what they intend to say.
Man it would rule so much if programmers could manage not to be assholes by default so much of the time.
It's ironic that the more ignorant one is the one calling another ignorant.
Alright I've had my fun with the name-calling. I will now explain the stunningly obvious. Not a thing anyone should have to for someone so sharp as yourself but there we are...
For someone to produce that text after growing up in an English speaking environment, they would indeed be comically inept communicators. Which is why the more reasonable assumption is that English is not in fact their native language.
Not merely the more generous assumption. Being generous by default would be a better character trait than not, but still arguably a luxury. But also simply the more reasonable assumption by plain numbers and reasoning. So, not only were you a douche, you had to go out of your way to select a less likely possibility to make the douche you wanted to be fit the situation.
Literate programmers indeed.
Re: 747s and coding agents
#13> I do read the code, but reviewing code is very different from producing it, and surely teaches you less. If you don’t believe this, I doubt you work in software. I work in software and for single line I write I read hundredths of them. If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times, over and over again. If writing programs taught me something, it is how to read progr…
> If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times I think here lies the difference OP is talking about. You are reading your own code, which means you had to first put in the effort to write it. If you use LLMs, you are reading code you didn't write.
If I need to change someone's code, I also read it. several times.
Re: 747s and coding agents
#14> I do read the code, but reviewing code is very different from producing it, and surely teaches you less. If you don’t believe this, I doubt you work in software. I work in software and for single line I write I read hundredths of them. If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times, over and over again. If writing programs taught me something, it is how to read progr…
>hundredths of them Man, it would rule so much if programmers were literate and knew how to actually communicate what they intend to say.
Not everyone has English as a first language.
Re: 747s and coding agents
#15> I do read the code, but reviewing code is very different from producing it, and surely teaches you less. If you don’t believe this, I doubt you work in software. I work in software and for single line I write I read hundredths of them. If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times, over and over again. If writing programs taught me something, it is how to read progr…
>hundredths of them Man, it would rule so much if programmers were literate and knew how to actually communicate what they intend to say.
It's obvious from the context here what the intended meaning was. Everyone makes typos sometimes.
Re: 747s and coding agents
#16> For example, to add pagination to this website, I would read the Jekyll docs, find the right plugin to install, read the sample config, and make the change. Possibly this wouldn’t work, in which case I would Google it, read more, try more stuff, retest, etc. In this process it was hard not to learn things.
How is this any different than building Ikea furniture? If I build my "Minska" cupboard using the step-by-step manual, did I learn something profound?
Re: 747s and coding agents
#17I am not sure how many other people on here are old enough to remember, but I first learned to program before I had the internet. I had to read books, and then if I was trying to figure out how to do something, I would have to figure out which book to look it up in, and then figure out where in the book to find it and how to apply it to my situation. It made me learn a ton, because I would have to read a lot of books to even know where to look; I had to do my own ‘scraping and indexing’.
I remember as the internet took off and you could just search for things, I thought it made programming too easy. You never had to actually learn how it worked, you can just search for the specific answer and someone else would do the hard work of figuring out how to use the tools available for your particular type of problem.
Over the years, my feelings shifted, and I loved how the internet allowed me to accomplish so much more than I could have trying to figure it all out from books.
I wonder if AI will feel similar.
Re: 747s and coding agents
#18> For example, to add pagination to this website, I would read the Jekyll docs, find the right plugin to install, read the sample config, and make the change. Possibly this wouldn’t work, in which case I would Google it, read more, try more stuff, retest, etc. In this process it was hard not to learn things. How is this any different than building Ikea furniture? If I build my "Minska" cupboard using the step-by-step…
If you've never put a cupboard together, you would have learned what the different parts, what size of screws to use (in the rough sense),... You may have forget it right after, but when someone ask you to help them, you will be a bit more proficient than someone with no experience.
But the nice thing about a cupboard and its components is that they are real objects, so the remembrance is done with the whole body (like the feeling of a screw not correctly inserted). Software development is 90% a mental activity.
Re: 747s and coding agents
#19[flagged]
Re: 747s and coding agents
#20I find the opposite is true for me. In my wheelhouse I can use an agent to do a thing, and I can be very critical of the implementation. Outside of my wheelhouse I actually learn quite a lot by watching the agent solve a problem. Since I do have a strong background I am still able to judge the overall approach and identify obvious stupid things the agent tries to do. I would say the code quality is probably a bit worse in those situations than I would have ended up with, but takes about 1/3 of the time. The most difficult part is opening a PR and worrying there might be a couple stupid blips left that I missed, didn’t affect the implementation, but my coworkers are going to look at and ask me wtf I was thinking