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The Economic Benefit of Refactoring

martinfowler.com

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Re: The Economic Benefit of Refactoring

#131

Post by weiliddat »

pydry wrote: post #129
weiliddat wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't disagree that that's the system not working well. You're lucky to be in a system that works out for you. Not everyone is in such a lucky position. LLMs help automate the tedium out of their job, and hopefully, have a bit more extra energy to make a better system within their immediate locus of control.

it's to do with skill, not position and I don't think that was about luck.

I'm sure you're where you are in some part due to hard work, skill, decisions. But surely you don't believe that it's purely down to skill where one lives/works at?

Re: The Economic Benefit of Refactoring

#132

Post by necovek »

pydry wrote: post #111
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s much easier to get your AI agents to do something consistently than it is to get your human colleagues to do it. Heck, personally we know these things are the right things to do, but we are just too busy and our minds wander to what we think our more productive uses of our time. That completely changes when it’s agents being instructed to do the work instead. The crazy thing is that it s looking like AI might be…

They'd be 10x better than us already if task tedium was the problem. It's design sense that they're missing. I find that in the areas where people think that LLMs excel at coding and don't like doing manually it's usually because the human was inclined to slop out repetitive boilerplate and thought that was the only way. Tests are usually like this, sadly. LLMs are definitely good at providing reams of duct tape (whi…

Plenty of languages are rich with boilerplate (think Java, C++...). Expressing intent succinctly is non-trivial, and especially so when you want to provide a rich vocabulary like modern languages do.

While modern tooling helps, the form of expression still means cognitive load (in reading code, deciding what to copy-paste and refactoring later).

And sometimes, tooling which is succinct brings a whole can of worms with it (think pytest with assertion rewriting and unexpected behaviour of your .pyc files — if you are familiar with Python as your nickname seems to suggest :)).

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