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You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

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Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#141

Post by g-b-r »

browski wrote: post #125
g-b-r wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and have been successful in hardware and software engineering for almost 30 years now. as shown by your one day old account

Yeah I am mostly retired in late 40s having saved as much as possible as fast as possible and have time on my hands. Am exploring social media I largely ignored while staying busy working. Besides even if it was 3 years old account it still wouldn't tell the story correctly. That's a measure as dumb as lines of code = productivity. I understand; your parents made your account when you were born in 2017. Being 9 expla…

Yeah, sure

> hardware and software engineering

So, it's firmware or embedded stuff what you had worked on?

And maybe you're an electronic engineer?

That could make things a bit more understandable, I would be less surprised that you don't give a fuck about the quality of source code (and probably wouldn't be able to write good code in any case).

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#142

Post by nomel »

TheSamFischer wrote: post #137
nomel wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that you’re choosing to frame as a “best practice”, I don't follow. > because you do not want to put in the work. Yes, just as nobody wants to type opcodes, or write their own http clients, or etc. It's why most of us use higher level languages. Leave the solved things solved, and work on actually interesting/new things! That doesn't mean not understanding, it just means not wasting time on the same boilerplate/cod…

If you think software performance is a solved problem today, there is nothing more I have to say. Consumer software is slower than ever. And only getting worse.

Please reread this comment thread. I never spoke to software performance being solved.

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#143

Post by TheSamFischer »

nomel wrote: post #142
TheSamFischer wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think software performance is a solved problem today, there is nothing more I have to say. Consumer software is slower than ever. And only getting worse.

Please reread this comment thread. I never spoke to software performance being solved.

> just as nobody wants to type opcodes, or write their own http clients

This is how you get faster software. You literally look “into” the code, see why stuff is slow, remove the extra work in the library that you do not need, and now your software has a faster server.

Abstractions make software “easy” to build. We’re not looking for done easily, we’re looking for done well.

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#144

Post by cratermoon »

PxldLtd wrote: post #4
cratermoon wrote: post #2

If you can't be bothered to write it, why should I bother reading it?

Hmm, if you read his previous blog posts pre-ai the tone is not much different. I hate the idea that this dude may just sound like AI at this point by accident.

Everyone here is taking my comment as saying the blog post was written by AI, and that’s wrong. The author says he uses AI to write commit messages and code comments. Those are what I’m saying are not worth my time or effort to read.

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#145

Post by ajju »

dnoberon wrote: post #102
yulker wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you justify it against all the other abstractions you've accepted and no longer know how to do (or never learned in the first place). Why are the current set of manual steps the right level to be permanently aware of?

Heard a quote I liked today. “In order to be effective working at any layer of abstraction you must have in-depth knowledge of the layer below where you’re at”. To be the most effective at AI assisted engineering (if treated as an abstraction layer) you need to understand how code works, behaves, architectures etc. and what well performing, well built things look like. Doesn’t necessarily mean you have to know everyt…

Super useful succinct crystallization!

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#146

Post by meerita »

davidd_1004 wrote: post #67

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I've always found the git GUIs more confusing than just typing out the commands. They never seem to map well to how I work.

You are not alone. I got huge amount of frustration with the diffs tools in git GUIs over the years I always ended up on the command line.

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#147

Post by 112233 »

alex_x wrote: post #8

All above comes at a cost of author slowly starting to understand less and less code in their own projects. Then in other projects as well. After the initial boost is over they will have to pay money just to stay afloat because they have already outsourced their thinking. I’m not anti AI, but I’m very worried about this bragging “you are not better engineer if you do things yourself”. Yes, you are, it all comes in sm…

I have slightly different experience. Any time during deep work on codebase when I need to stop and switch lanes to study how exactly did .SECONDEXPANSION work or which of "git reset" "git checkout" flavours will do the thing I need instead of wiping all my work, or what magic sauce ingredient again prevents Dockerfile running on Podman — that is when I start understanding less the source code of my project. Because I am trying to multitask two deep study sessions. Going "computer, make this branch contain that stuff" and then proceeding with debugging kernel crash sits very well with me

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#148

Post by arw0n »

alex_x wrote: post #8

All above comes at a cost of author slowly starting to understand less and less code in their own projects. Then in other projects as well. After the initial boost is over they will have to pay money just to stay afloat because they have already outsourced their thinking. I’m not anti AI, but I’m very worried about this bragging “you are not better engineer if you do things yourself”. Yes, you are, it all comes in sm…

I've recently had an interesting discussion on AI usage by students with a couple of friends who are all professors or lecturers in different fields. They report that AI makes their job harder, especially because it widens the gap between students:

Students who would have straight up failed before now produce passable essays/projects, but do not understand what they are handing in. They outsource their thinking and are overall worse than before. Students who would have excelled already pre-ai, are now even better. They use AI to learn more effectively, do broader research, and have more time to do deep research because they can outsource the grindy stuff.

This is very similar for software engineers. I'm not much faster at implementing features than before AI, despite heavily relying on agentic coding (95% of code is ai generated), but I've had significantly fewer bugs in production, less feature change requests (because w spend much more time designing/experimenting), and we are able to drive-by refactors or vulnerability fixes we would have grudgingly ignored before.

My coding skills are atrophying, but that was never interesting to me anyway. I'm getting better at systems design, cyber sec, data modelling and requirements engineering, because I have much more time to spend on it now. If LLMs disappeared tomorrow, I'd have to relearn coding, but I think it is significantly more likely that hand coding will become a specialist niche for experts.

Re: You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand

#149

Post by ozlikethewizard »

graypegg wrote: post #83
yulker wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you justify it against all the other abstractions you've accepted and no longer know how to do (or never learned in the first place). Why are the current set of manual steps the right level to be permanently aware of?

IMO, you are a better engineer if you understand how the abstraction works, at any layer of abstraction. You need to pick the point of diminishing returns for yourself, but I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say a developer that understands how a compiler works, and will dig around in a hex editor from time to time will be more knowledgeable and more likely to notice issues sooner than a developer that assumes th…

Yea you're completely correct, any computer science degree worth it's salt will cover computer architecture, networks, basic maths, etc. Do I remember every little detail about how transistors,the memory bus, or every network topology works? nah of course not, but does having a reasonable overview of how it all works under hood help inform system design when you're tackling the hard problems, performance, reliability, security,etc? Knowledge is power, so more knowledge can never be a bad thing.
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