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Codegen is not productivity

antifound.com

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Re: Codegen is not productivity

#101
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can You can because, I guess, your project may have a small scope, few people working on it, no dependencies etc. I cannot, because each line that I change has an effect in millions of other lines and hundreds of other people, and millions of users. Different situation, different needs.

> each line that I change has an effect in millions of other lines That sounds like an architectural problem.

> That sounds like an architectural problem.

Each time a Linux system library changes a space, billions or trillions of lines of code around the world are affected by it. To encapsulate complexity does not mean to eliminate complexity.

I do not work at that level, but I work low enough in our system as to potentially affect much of it on each change.

If your changes only affect your own code is because is high level enough as to not have anything build over it.

Context matters.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#102
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd recommend you read the book referenced in the conclusion: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-4221-6_... The full PDF is available for download. It's mostly a series of essays, so you can pick and choose and read nonlinearly. It's worth thinking about beyond nihilistic takes.

I'll look into it, thanks! It might sound nihilistic (what does that even mean in this context? anyway), but it's not. There are lot of good discussions about what good work actually means. I'm dismissing productivity discussions , not the whole set of belief systems .

> ALL OF IT is meaningless. It's a pointless discussion.

That is a nihilistic take. That it's pointless and everything about the domain (measurement of productivity) is meaningless.

"Productivity" is no more made up of a concept than "good work". The fact that many attempts to measure it are quite dumb (e.g., the idea of using LOC as a metric) does not mean the whole idea is not worth considering or discussing.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#103
Completely disagree. I have used code generation for years (way before modern LLM's) and it typically automates about 90% of the code I need to write to create an application.

However it is not AI. It is simply a program that takes a declarative spec as input and generates all the boiler plate code I would otherwise have to write by hand.

It is a huge productivity boost!

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