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Yes, it's copy pasting but it's tedious and it adds up fast. Even the doFoo to performBar is tedious because you need to catch all instances and your find/replace script strategy might have unintended victims. In this case indeed, it's just much more convenient.
don't LSPs and IDE's help with that?
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The languages I use the IDE literally does this for you, perfectly, deterministically. And instantly, certainly when compared to AI.
Which languages, just out of interest?
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Yes, it's copy pasting but it's tedious and it adds up fast. Even the doFoo to performBar is tedious because you need to catch all instances and your find/replace script strategy might have unintended victims. In this case indeed, it's just much more convenient.
The languages I use the IDE literally does this for you, perfectly, deterministically. And instantly, certainly when compared to AI.
Thanks for this insight and validation
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The languages I use the IDE literally does this for you, perfectly, deterministically. And instantly, certainly when compared to AI.
Which languages, just out of interest?
Ruby would be the one exception I’ve worked on in my head, and for they language, ctrl+f *usually* (but not always) finds the rest.
Ruby is particularly magical with being able to evaluate methods from dynamic strings into running, production code[0]; but otherwise, languages and capable IDEs, like IntelliJ and Visual Studio just support that. I don’t happen to use VS Code, but I assume it has basic refactor, too.
[0] Devise. https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/blob/main/lib/devise/co...
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The "right" abstraction seems like quite an art. Sometimes it's not obvious, or it takes multiple rounds of exploration and testing (I'm thinking here of the mental shift moving from HTML + JS, via jQuery, Backbone, Knockout and up to React/Vue or Angular). At all points, we thought we had reasonable abstractions for a while. Vue and Svelt, or NextJS, now are so far from the mental model of early 00s "DHTML". And I'm…
>> I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation > Are you saying we collectively need to get better at abstraction so that LLMs get better at abstraction (either by training, or our prompting), so that their code is easier to read? No - our current abstraction for coding agents is a loop where we express some freeform specification of a goal, then a sub loop kicks off where an llm…
As a dev with 40+ years behind me, I apply the same skills and tools to LLMs as I would to a small team of junior devs, except with a higher degree of rigor. I don’t feel that my skills are atrophying, in fact I’ve learned a bunch of new stuff in the process.
Depending on the work, I’m producing about 4x what I would have with a small team, and it is better code, better documented, more modularity, and less bugs than I was shipping with humans.
You have to keep a tight OODA loop, and write the code in specifications, protocols, interfaces, and implementation plans before the first executable line is put down. Iterate the code and docs together to minimize and document drift.
Treat a context window as a session. When it’s full, you start over with a new session, bring in the onboarding documentation, and go to work. I never cross context boundaries midstream, it’s always a disaster. 1m context is critical, I burn 150k just onboarding and orienting a new session.
Still shipping 4x at 1/10 the cost, and less bugs in the field (greenfield firmware development)
I don't know. I find that I'm moving up a level and improving my product-management skills while delegating most of the code to the agents. I'm still very much hands-on with the design and requirements, and I'm asking questions like, "What's our security story for XYZ?", "Are we accounting for colour-blindness?", etc. Not being down in the code allows me to prairie-dog a bit more and see the landscape better.
All of these posts are a replay of what Marx wrote about machinery and alienation from work and intensification of the workday.