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Write less code, be more responsible

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Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#31

Post by dpark »

agentultra wrote: post #20
bdangubic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you’ve heard it a number of times and refuse to consider what people are saying then maybe I can’t help you. I’m talking from personal experience of well over twenty years as both a developer, and for a while, a manager. The slow part isn’t writing code. It’s shipping it. You can have every one vibe coding until their eyes bleed and you’ve drained their will to live. The slowest part will still be testing, verifyi…

> If you’ve heard it a number of times and refuse to consider what people are saying then maybe I can’t help you.

What someone says “I’ve heard this a thousand times, but…”, it could be that the person is just stupidly obstinate but it could also mean that they have a considered opinion that it might benefit you to learn.

“More people slow down projects” is an oversimplified version of the premise in The Mythical Man Month. If that simplistic viewpoint held, Google would employ a grand total of maybe a dozen engineers. What The Mythical Man Month says is that more engineers slow down a project that is already behind. i.e. You can’t fix a late project by adding more people.

This does not mean that the amount of code/features/whatever a team can produce or ship is unrelated to the size of the team or the speed at which they can write code. Those are not statements made in the book.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#32

Post by dpark »

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…

> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time

Does your coding not involve thinking? And if not, why are you not delighted to have AI take that over? Writing unthinking boilerplate is tedious garbage work.

Today I wanted to address a bug I found on a product I work on. At the intersection of platform migration and backwards compatibility I found some customers getting neither. I used an LLM to research the code paths and ensure that my understanding of the break was correct and what the potential side effects of my proposed fix would be. AI saved me stepping through code for hours to understand the side effects. I asked it for a nice description of the flow and it gave it to me, including the pieces I didn’t really know because I’d never even touched that code before. I could have done this. Would it have been a better use of my time than moving on to the next thing? Probably not. Stepping through function calls in an IDE is not my idea of good “thinking” work. Tracing through glue to understand how a magical property gets injected is a great job for a machine.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#33

Post by slopinthebag »

sublinear wrote: post #21
koolba wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it. Using AI to generate code is only faster if you try and skip that step - which leads to an inevitable disaster It’s more than just typing though. A simple example remembering the exact incantation of CSS classes to style something that you can easily describe in plain English. Yes, you could look them up or maybe eve…

This is not correct. CSS is the style rules for all rendering situations of that HTML, not just your single requirement that it "looks about right" in your narrow set of test cases. Nobody writing production CSS for a serious web page can avoid rewriting it. Nobody is memorizing anything. It's deeply intertwined with the requirements as they change. You will eventually be forced to review every line of it carefully a…

Eh, I've written so much CSS and I hate it so much I use AI to write it now not because it's faster or better at doing so, just so I don't need to do it.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#34

Post by slopinthebag »

bdangubic wrote: post #3
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…

> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. I see this on HN just so much and I am not sure what this is, almost seems like a political slogan that followers keep repeating. I had to do some rough math in my head but in the last 5 years I have been involved with hiring roughly 40 SWEs. Every single one of them was hired because writing the code was THE bottleneck (the only o…

It sounds like you just aren't very good at managing teams of programmers tbh. If your bottleneck is producing code, very rarely does hiring more programmers actually help.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#35

Post by slopinthebag »

bdangubic wrote: post #13
ahefner wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how much time per week does an SWE actually spend writing code?

another one, this is 2nd most frequent thing people write here, not sure how to even approach answering :) so I’ll do what I was thought in first grade to never do and answer a question with a question - how much time per week does a brick layer spend laying bricks? they are looking at these new “robots” laying bricks automatically and talking on BrickLayerNews “man, the brick laying has not been a bottleneck for a l…

I think you comparing software development to brick laying says all anyone needs to hear about your approach to software development.

It's like saying the bottleneck in mathematics is arithmetic.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#36

Post by EagnaIonat »

koolba wrote: post #17
20k wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time and if that goes away well… I dunno, that’s weird. I will understand it even less. This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its unde…

> The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it. Using AI to generate code is only faster if you try and skip that step - which leads to an inevitable disaster It’s more than just typing though. A simple example remembering the exact incantation of CSS classes to style something that you can easily describe in plain English. Yes, you could look them up or maybe eve…

> It lowers the cost for experimentation. A whole series of “what if this was…”

Anecdotal, but I've noticed while this is true it also adds the danger of knowing when to stop.

Early on I would take forever trying to get something exactly to whats in my head. Which meant I would spend too much time in one sitting then if I had previously built it by hand.

Now I try to time box with the mindset "good enough".

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#37

Post by osm3000 »

I am a machine learning engineer. I've been in the domain almost 12 years now (different titles and roles).

In my current role (and by no means that is unique), I don't know how to write less code.

Here are problems I am facing: - DS generating a lot of code - Managers who have therapy sessions with Gemini, and in which their ideas have been validated - No governance on DS (you want this package? import it) - No governance on Infrastructure (I spent a couple of months upskilling in a pipeline technology that were using: reading documentation and creating examples, until I became very good it...just for the whole tech to be ditched) - Libraries and tools that have been documentation, or too complex (GCP for example)

The cognitive overload is immense.

Back few years ago, when I was doing my PhD, immersing in PyTorch and Scipy stack had a huge return on investment. Now, I don't feel it.

So, how do I even write less code? Slowly, I am succumbing to the fact that my tools and methods are inappropriate. I am steadily shifting towards offloading this to Claude and its likings.

Is it introducing risks? For sure. It's going to be a disaster at one point. But I don't know what to do. Do I need a better abstraction? Different way to think about it? No clue

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#38

Post by ozim »

colechristensen wrote: post #29
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…

>Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. Then we're doing different things. I didn't like GitHub so I wrote my own. 60k lines of code later... yes writing code was the bottleneck which has been eliminated. The bottleneck is now design, review, and quality assessments that can't be done trivially. This isn't even the project I wanted to be doing, the tools that were availab…

We do different things, I do code for other people to use.

Once we tried shipping features and updates every week, because we could ideate, code, test and deploy that fast.

No user wanted that - product owners and business wanted that or they thought they wanted, until users came with torches and pitchforks.

Don’t forget there is user adoption and education.

Churning out features no one will use because they don’t know about is useless.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#39

Post by gbro3n »

My current take is that AI is helping me experiment much faster. I can get less involved with the parts of an application that matter less and focus more (manually) on the parts that do. I agree with a lot of the sentiment here - even with the best intentions of reviewing every line of AI code, when it works well and I'm working fast on low stakes functionality, that sometimes doesn't happen. This can be offset however by using AI efficiencies to maintain better test coverage than I would by hand (unit and e2e), having documentation updated with assistance and having diagrams maintained to help me review. There are still some annoyances, when the AI struggles with seemingly simple issues, but I think that we all have to admit that programming was difficult, and quality issues existed before AI.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#40

Post by __mharrison__ »

osm3000 wrote: post #37

I am a machine learning engineer. I've been in the domain almost 12 years now (different titles and roles). In my current role (and by no means that is unique), I don't know how to write less code. Here are problems I am facing: - DS generating a lot of code - Managers who have therapy sessions with Gemini, and in which their ideas have been validated - No governance on DS (you want this package? import it) - No gove…

I've seen some success teaching data scientists how to write better code. SWE concepts like modularity, testing, and refuse. Things that they normally ignore or choose to throw out the window.

(Disclosure: I'm a corporate trainer)

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