Software is made between commits

I love that man, and I hate that man. For many of the reasons already listed in this thread. He is smarter than Feynman, but also dumber than Feynman.

Where are these developers who are willing to talk to you about your code and hash out ideas? Everyone I’ve ever worked with is always too busy, too many other priorities. Sounds nice though.

Unrelated: I started using Zed a few weeks ago and really love it, it is everything it promises to be.

Like most/all engineers (I assume), I have entire notebooks that are filled front to back and in the margins with scratch. Random calculations and notes, equations running into each other, any piece of information that was too fleeting to stay in my head or overspill from an already full working memory.

Most engineers I know keep such notebooks when they're full, because it's kind of neat to open a random page and see a brain dump scrawled out. Nobody has ever looked at another engineer's scratch notes and drawn useful insight. Frankly, I wouldn't even want to other than for novelty.

It's interesting that your experience/workflow is so much different than mine. This (claims to) solve a real problem that I deal with every day.

My company is remote-only, and my coworkers mostly don't live anywhere near me. We see each other a couple of times a day on video chat, but communicate mostly during the day via Slack.

We're also, uh, pretty far along the curve in adopting LLM agents to write good code for us. With a good model and the extremely good guardrails our of specific coding harness, LLMs are writing the majority of our code these days.

So on a typical day I'll grab a ticket off the top of the stack, point my LLM at it, and start working with it to solve the problem. We'll make architectural decisions, etc, create a plan and execute the plan. The feature I shipped most recently cost $19 in tokens and the LLM was churning without my input for like half an hour at one point in the thick of it.

MAYBE if there's a question I'm not sure which way is best I'll post a question in the team chat for my teammates to weigh in on. But a lot of my tickets are done completely autonomously.

Then I'll open a PR, and post a link to the PR in Slack, requesting their review and my teammates will see the implementation for the first time. They sometimes have questions! Often, they'll post these questions in the Slack thread rather than as PR comments, because we're having a fast real-time conversation and GitHub comments aren't a great fit for that.

These questions have answers in the chat log with the LLM that lives on my laptop, but I can't trivially show it to them.

So I end up playing telephone with the LLM -- copying my teammate's questions from Slack to the LLM chat, pasting the answers back, etc

The idea that my coworkers and the LLM and I can all be more easily a part of the same conversation appeals to me greatly

None of this means the Zed team is on the right track. Nor that my team might work better in a different way! But we're too "successful" with this approach for there to be much institutional pressure to change our ways at the moment.

Hope that helps.

health inspector is a literal job that needs to know how messy the process of making the sausage is, so they can enforce health standards so nobody gets sick when eating it.

if you're calling what you're doing engineering, you are following a standard best practice, and should easily be able to run through a checklist and show your work at each step.

not every thought needs to be expressed sure. its irrelevant what you thought about your lunch. Its important how you picked what latency numbers are important, and how you went about predicting volume, including what factors your did and didnt look at.

software developers havent been rigourous engineers over the last several decades, and that isnt a good thing