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Write less code, be more responsible

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Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#121

Post by Rury »

bdangubic wrote: post #14
agentultra wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’ve never read Fred Brooks, I’d recommend it. The aphorism is a bit dated but rings true: you can’t add another developer and make the process go faster. It usually slows teams down. I’ve seen it time and again: startups move from their market-fit phase into an operational excellence phase on the backing of VC funding and they start hiring a ton of people. Most of those developers are highly educated, specializ…

> The aphorism is a bit dated but rings true: you can’t add another developer and make the process go faster. It usually slows teams down. I've been doing this for 30-years and this is another political slogan of sorts. this is true in every single imaginable job - new people slow you down, until they do not and become part of the well-oiled machine that is hopefully your team. not sure why people insist on saying th…

> new people slow you down, until they do not and become part of the well-oiled machine that is hopefully your team

This is true of training someone new to do a routine job. You spend some time teaching them, and they learning, and then that overhead of teaching/learning slowing you both down disappears.

But it's a little different with knowledge work, as the constant changes and creation of stuff means other team members have to constantly learn what you changed/created if they are to do anything with it. So you never reach this "well-oiled" state, unless you divy up the tasks so that the amount of information you need to deal amongst each other is minimal and unchanged. This principle even holds true in multithreaded programming as to performance, in that constant sharing and changing of data between threads can actually hurt performance in comparison to a single threaded process.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#122

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

drekipus wrote: post #117
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“more, better, faster,” I have heard these words, almost verbatim, from manager-yes-men coming from a FAANG background, and surprisingly concentrated in a certain demography (if someone find this offensive, I'll remove this part). My CTO wants us to "deliver as fast as possible", and my VP wants us to "go much faster, and more ownership". "Better" or anything related with quality was definitely mentioned, too, but al…

I'm interested in how you're probing for them? I haven't needed to change jobs but I'm worried that one day I'll have to

Just ask along the line "Do you have someone from FAANG as a director/VP? Because I have worked with a few and really loved the learning process" and do a bit of research once you know the name of the hiring manager.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#123

Post by h4kunamata »

agentultra wrote: post #2

I’m working as a single solo developer of a tiny video game. I’m writing it in C with raylib. No coding assistants, no agents, not even a language server. I only work on it for a few hours during the week. And it’s progressing at a reasonable pace that I’m happy with. I got cross-compilation from Linux to Windows going early on in a couple of hours. Wasn’t that hard. I’ve had to rework parts of the code as I’ve progr…

>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest

Numbers, it is all about numbers.

I have worked in a company where one release a week would drive the managers insane, by them we should have one release every minute.

Things break all the time because in order to deploy faster and faster, corners were cut and now one of the most visited online pet store in the country is down :)

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#124

Post by Pannoniae »

globnomulous wrote: post #119

I'm quite surprised by the negativity of the comments in this thread, especially contrasted with the positivity and enthusiasm I see in other threads. I'm an AI pessimist. I don't like it. I have resisted it. You'll find plenty of Rage against the Machine comments in my account history on Hacker News. The AI optimists drive me up the wall. And I can tell all of the nay-sayers in this thread, from first-hand experienc…

I think the unstated assumption here is that some of the criticism comes from different places.

1. what you have identified here, thinking they're useless

2. wanting them to be useless because they like the process of writing code itself, and AI makes that less important, so it's a form of wishful thinking.

3. having ethical concerns about AI, so they want it to fail. And part of that is dismissing their usefulness (after all, it's easier to get rid something which isn't that useful...)

I personally find the third one quite fascinating -- like the cognitive dissonance about how the whole free software movement started out as a way to subvert copyright and nowadays they're almost the biggest defenders of it... but I do understand the reasoning here.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#126

Post by anitil »

agentultra wrote: post #2

I’m working as a single solo developer of a tiny video game. I’m writing it in C with raylib. No coding assistants, no agents, not even a language server. I only work on it for a few hours during the week. And it’s progressing at a reasonable pace that I’m happy with. I got cross-compilation from Linux to Windows going early on in a couple of hours. Wasn’t that hard. I’ve had to rework parts of the code as I’ve progr…

I had a look at your github and blog but couldn't find the game, is it public? Or do I need to watch your streams to see it?

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#127

Post by lelanthran »

dpark wrote: post #107
lelanthran wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is that these are not separate activities. They are drawing a false distinction between thinking and coding I agree. > and implying that AI only helps with the coding bit. They did imply that. Do you think that AI only helps with the coding bit, helps with the thinking bits, or helps with neither? > Coding and thinking are often tightly intertwined, as rarely is the coding piece so straightforward that it…

> Do you think that AI only helps with the coding bit, helps with the thinking bits, or helps with neither? Both. I’m effectively using AI to generate code and to help me reason through design options. > If AI generates code faster than the time it takes to read it more than once, then it isn't "helping" in terms of sustainability This seems rather reductionist, especially as in this scenario you described we went fr…

> If reading the code is actually the bottleneck, then you described a 3X speed up.

But that's because we aren't reading it anymore. If you feel that reading the code has no value, then sure, that's a 3x speedup, otherwise it's a loss in knowledge.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#128

Post by lelanthran »

kjksf wrote: post #75
lelanthran wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if that process changes and the language you’re reading is a natural one instead of code? Okay, when that happens, then sure, you don't need to understand the codebase. I have not seen any evidence that that is currently the case, so my observation that "Continue letting the LLM write your code for you, and soon you won't be able to spot errors in its output" is still applicable today . When the situation chan…

The same logic applies to your statement: > Do that enough and you won't know enough about your codebase to recognise errors in the LLM output. Okay, when that happens, then sure, you'll have a problem. I have not seen any evidence that that is currently the case i.e. I have no problems correcting LLM output when needed. When the situation changes, then we can talk about pulling back on LLM usage. And the crucial poi…

> The same logic applies to your statement:

>> Do that enough and you won't know enough about your codebase to recognise errors in the LLM output.

> Okay, when that happens, then sure, you'll have a problem.

It's not exactly the same: how will you know that you are missing errors due to lack of knowledge?

> I now generate 90% of the code with LLM and I see no issues so far.

Well, that's my point, innit? "I see no errors" is exactly the same outcome from "missing the errors that are generated".

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#129

Post by lelanthran »

pdimitar wrote: post #103
lelanthran wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if that process changes and the language you’re reading is a natural one instead of code? Okay, when that happens, then sure, you don't need to understand the codebase. I have not seen any evidence that that is currently the case, so my observation that "Continue letting the LLM write your code for you, and soon you won't be able to spot errors in its output" is still applicable today . When the situation chan…

You do have a point but as the sibling comment pointed out, the negative eventuality you are describing also has not happened for many devs. I quite enjoy being much more of an architect than I could compared to 90% of my career so far (24 years in total). I have coded my fingers and eyes out and I spot idiocies in LLM output from trivially easy to needing an hour carefully reviewing. So, I don't see the "soon" in yo…

> I have coded my fingers and eyes out and I spot idiocies in LLM output from trivially easy to needing an hour carefully reviewing.

This is exactly the opposite experience of sibling, who reports not seeing any issues in the generated code.

You report spotting idiocies, he reports seeing nothing, and you are both making the same argument :-/

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#130

Post by dpark »

lelanthran wrote: post #127
dpark wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think that AI only helps with the coding bit, helps with the thinking bits, or helps with neither? Both. I’m effectively using AI to generate code and to help me reason through design options. > If AI generates code faster than the time it takes to read it more than once, then it isn't "helping" in terms of sustainability This seems rather reductionist, especially as in this scenario you described we went fr…

> If reading the code is actually the bottleneck, then you described a 3X speed up. But that's because we aren't reading it anymore. If you feel that reading the code has no value, then sure, that's a 3x speedup, otherwise it's a loss in knowledge.

I was referring to this:

> we read code once while writing it, we read it again while testing it/finding errors during tests, we read it again during review.

That’s 3x. If you only need to read AI generated code for review, you’re still reading it, but 1x.

If you give up reviewing code entirely there’s potentially an even bigger speed up but with bigger trade offs as well.

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