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Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

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Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#271

Post by a_bonobo »

kevinventullo wrote: post #259
a_bonobo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This lead to a kind of effort inversion, where senior devs spent much more time on these PRs than the junior authors themselves. It's funny, I have the same problem, but with subject matter expertise. I work with internal PR people and they clearly have shifted their writing efforts to be AI-assisted or even AI-driven. Now I as the SME get these AI-written blog posts and press releases and I spend a far more time on…

… I can do that myself. So then you see where this is going.

Yep! I'll have 3 jobs, but I'll be paid for 1.

Edit: actually, that's the story of my life. I've been working for 20 years and every 5 years or so, stuff gets reshuffled so I have 3 more jobs instead of 1. It feels like I have 20 jobs by now, but still the same salary. And yes I've switched employers and even industries. I guess the key is to survive at the end of the funneling.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#272

Post by whatevsmate »

OvbiousError wrote: post #251
raincole wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People think juniors submitting LLM-generated code to seniors to review is a sign of how bad LLM is. I see it as a sign of how bad juniors are, and the need of seniors interacting with LLM directly without the middlemen.

LLMs are so easy to use though, it's addictive. Even as a senior I find myself asking LLMs stuff I know I should be looking up online instead.

I use LLMs to code. I think they’re great tools and learning the new ropes has been fun as hell. Juniors should use them too. But any claim that the LLM is responsible for garbage code being pushed into PRs is misreading the actual state of play imo.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#273

Post by JonChesterfield »

mgaunard wrote: post #12

Right, we all know this. LLMs write a lot of bad code that cannot be realistically reviewed. I've even had code submitted to me by juniors which didn't make any sense. When I ask them why they did that, they say they don't know, the LLM did it. What this new trend is doing is generating a lot of noise and overhead on maintenance. The only way forward, if embracing LLMs, is to use LLMs also for the reviewing and maint…

> When I ask them why they did that, they say they don't know, the LLM did it.

This should resolve itself via rounds of redundancies, probably targetting the senior engineers that are complaining about the juniors, then by insolvency.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#274

Post by lokar »

zhobbs wrote: post #268
throwaw12 wrote: post #73

I will disagree with the author. If you look from the lenses of BigTech and corporations, yes code was not a bottleneck. But, if you look from the perspective of startups, rigorous planning was because resources to produce features were limited, which means producing a working code was a bottleneck, because in small teams you don't have coordination overhead, idea and vision is clear for them -> to produce something…

I think another generalization people make here is around complexity. Many developers work on apps that just aren't that complex. Glorified CMS's mostly doing CRUD with well established code patterns. Sure, LLMs might create slop on novel problems, but a non-tech company that needs to "create a new CRUD route" and an accompanying form, LLMs are smart enough.

I agree. I spent most of my career on complex distributed infrastructure. I spent most of my time reading and thinking, not coding.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#275

Post by moi2388 »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #22

My most recent example of this is mentoring young, ambitious, but inexperienced interns. Not only did they produce about the same amount of code in a day that they used to produce in a week (or two), several other things made my work harder than before: - During review, they hadn't thought as deeply about their code so my comments seemed to often go over their heads. Instead of a discussion I'd get something like "go…

This is exactly my experience. Plus documentation is no longer being read because the LLM already generated the code, so the juniors don’t even know what to check before handing in their PR

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#276

Post by whatevsmate »

intended wrote: post #262
whatevsmate wrote: post #120

Wow a lot of the stories people are writing here are super depressing. If a junior developer is delivering you a pile of code that doesn’t work, hasn’t been manually tested and verified by them, hasn’t been carefully pared down to its essential parts, and doesn’t communicate anything about itself either through code style, comments or docs … then you are already working with an LLM ; it just so happens to be hosted i…

Why should a Jr dev NOT use an LLM? Its the skill of the future, its even an underlying plank in your argument! Jr Devs are responding to incentives to learn how to LLM, which we are saying all coders need to. So now we have to torture the argument to create a carve out for junior devs - THEY need to learn critical thinking and taking responsibility. Using an LLM directly reduces your understanding of whatever you us…

Nothing I wrote is in counterpoint to this.

There’s no carve out. Anyone pushing thoughtless junk in a PR for someone else to review is eschewing responsibility.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#277

Post by SkyBelow »

jameshart wrote: post #138
thisoneisreal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is going to look a lot like the same problem in education, where the answer is that we will have to spend less time consuming written artifacts as a form of evaluation. I think effective code reviews will become more continuous and require much more checking in, asking for explanations as the starting point instead of "I read all of your code and give feedback." That just won't be sustainable given the r…

Evaluating written artifacts is broken in education because the end goal of education is not the production of written artifacts - it is the production of knowledge in someone’s mind and the artifacts were only intended to see if that knowledge transfer had occurred. Now they no longer provide evidence of that. A ChatGPT written essay about the causes of the civil war is not of any value to a history professor, since…

This is a key difference, but I think it plays less of a role than it initially appears because growing knowledge of employees helps building better artifacts faster (and fixing them when things go wrong). Short term, the login form is desired. But long term, someone with enough knowledge to support the login form, for when the AI doesn't quite get it all right, is desired.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#278

Post by imiric »

Sammi wrote: post #79
dizhn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Many bugs were of a new kind (to me), the code would look like it does the right thing but actually not work at all, or just be much more broken than code with that level of "polish" would normally be. This reminded me of a quarter million dollar software project one of my employers had contracted to a team in a different country. On the face of it - especially if you go and check by the spec sheet - everything w…

I'm expecting to see so much more poor quality software being made. We're going to be swimming in an ocean of bad software. Good experienced devs will be able to make better software, but so many inexperienced devs will be regurgitating so much more lousy software at a pace never seen before, it's going to be overwhelming. Or as the original commenter described, they're already being overwhelmed.

> I'm expecting to see so much more poor quality software being made. We're going to be swimming in an ocean of bad software.

That's my expectation as well.

The logical outcome of this is that the general public will eventually get fed up, and there will be an industry-wide crash, just like in 1983 and 2000. I suppose this is a requirement for any overly hyped technology to reach the Plateau of Productivity.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#279

Post by kevindamm »

LunicLynx wrote: post #226
Sammi wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm expecting to see so much more poor quality software being made. We're going to be swimming in an ocean of bad software. Good experienced devs will be able to make better software, but so many inexperienced devs will be regurgitating so much more lousy software at a pace never seen before, it's going to be overwhelming. Or as the original commenter described, they're already being overwhelmed.

Did anyone say react in the windows start menu? Folks, we already have bad software. Everywhere. And nobody cares.

People care, it's just that they're not the ones shipping as often.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#280

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

pydry wrote: post #172
pjmlp wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As participant in many kinds of similar projects, lets put it this way, the crew already knows that the ship has a few holes while at the harbour, but captain decides for sailing anyway. Eventually you will find yourself on deep waters, with the ship lower than it should be, routinely taking out buckets of water, whishing for the nearest island, only to repair ship with whatever is on that island, and keep sailing to…

This almost seems to be a weird artefact of capitalism. Ive worked on several projects which at some point became obviously doomed to almost everybody in the trenches but management/investors/owners kept believing. Perception of reality did not permeate the class divide. I wish I could make $$$ off this insight somehow but im not sure it's possible.

I think this is driven more by hierarchy and power games rather than capitalism. Basically, if your superiors don't want to hear bad news, then either you'll tell them good news only or you'll be replaced by someone who will.

Source: I've been replaced by this process a number of times.

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