51–60 of 232 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine code reviewing is a very different sort of skill than coding. When you vibe code (assuming you're reading teh code that is written for you) you become a coder reviewer... I suspect you're learning a new skill.
It’s easier to write code than read it.
Many top labs [1] [2] already have heavily automated code review already and it's not slowing down. That doesn't mean I'm trusting everything blindly, but yes, over time, it should handle less and less "lower level" tasks and it's a good thing if it can.
[1] https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/ [2] https://claude.com/blog/code-review
Further I want to vent about two things:
- Things can be improved.
- You are allowed to complain about anything, while not improving things yourself.
I think the mid 2010s really popularized self improvement in a way that you can't really argue with (if you disagree with "put in more effort and be more focused", you're obviously just lazy!). It's funny because the point of engineering is to find better solutions, but technically yes, an always valid solution is just "suck it up".
But moreover, if you do not allow these two premises, what ends up happening in practice for a lot of people, is that basically you can just interpret any slightly pushback as "oh they're just a whiner", and if they're not doing something to fix their problem this instant, that "obviously" validates your claim (and even if they are, it doesn't count, they should still not be a "debbie downer", etc.).
Sometimes a premise can sound extreme, but people forget that premises are not in a complete logical vaccuum, you actually live out and believe said premises, and by taking on a certain position, it's often more about what follows downstream from the behavior than the actual words themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who would I possibly be astroturfing for? The entire industry is all-in on LLMs.
I can't speak for you specifically, it's just a trend I'm seeing and unfortunately your 2 day old account falls into that bucket. There's a lot of people who have a lot to lose or who are very afraid of what LLMs will do. There's plenty of incentive to do this. I would be curious to see if I'm just imaging this or it really is a trend.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what to think about comments like this. So many of them come from accounts that are days or at most weeks old. I don't know if this is astroturfing, or you really are just a new account and this is your experience. As somebody who has been coding for just shy of 40 years and has gone through the actual pain on learning to run a high level and productive dev team, your experience does not match mine. Even…
> The velocity is up AND the quality is up. This is not my experience on a team of experienced SWEs working on a product worth 100m/year. Agents are a great search engine for a codebase and really nice for debugging but anytime we have it write feature code it makes too many mistakes. We end up spending more time tuning the process than it takes to just write the code AND you are trading human context with agent cont…
We've spent years reducing old debt and modernizing our application and processes. The places where we've made that investment are where we are currently seeing the additional acceleration. The places where we haven't are still stuck in the mud, but per your "search engine for a codebase" comment our engineers are starting to engage with systems they would not have previously touched.
There are areas for sure where LLMs would fall down. That's where we need the experts to guide them and restructure the project so that it is LLM friendly (which also just happens to be the same things that make the app better for human engineers).
And I'm serious about the quality comment. Maybe there's a difference in how your team is using the tools, but I have individuals on my team who are learning to leverage the tools to create better outputs, not just pump out features faster.
I'm not saying LLMs solve everything, FAR from it. But it's giving a master weapon to an experienced warrior.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't speak for you specifically, it's just a trend I'm seeing and unfortunately your 2 day old account falls into that bucket. There's a lot of people who have a lot to lose or who are very afraid of what LLMs will do. There's plenty of incentive to do this. I would be curious to see if I'm just imaging this or it really is a trend.
At the same time you have astro-turfing from LLM producers though, so...
There's probably a Codex equivalent, but I don't know what it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the upper limit is your ability to decide what to build among infinite possibilities. How should it work, what should it be like to use it, what makes the most sense, etc. The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine…
I've found writing the code massively helps your understanding of the problem and what you actually need or want. Most times I go into a task with a certain idea of how it should work, and then reevaluate having started. While an LLM will just do what you ask without questing, leaving you with none of the learnings you would have gained having done it. The LLM certainly didn't learn or remember anything from it.
I've written it up here, including the transcript of an actual real session:
https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
I find working more asynchronous with the agents help. I've disabled the in-your-face agent-is-done/need-input notifications [1]. I work across a few different tasks at my own pace. It works quite well, and when/if I find a rhythm to it, it's absolutely less intense than normal programming. You might think that the "constant" task switching is draining, but I don't switch that frequently. Often I keep the main focus…
I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…
I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent. But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Review…