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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#521

Post by adamtulinius »

stavros wrote: post #520
adamtulinius wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but "extensive documentation, scalable, high test coverage, perfect code style" seems to me to be the opposite of throwaway. It sounds like the kind of thing people will think surely must be very important and in use, because why go through all those hoops instead of doing a quick hack? But I guess we can just throw AI at the maintenance burden anyways..

I agree, so you should ask yourself "why would the expert do this?" I decided to go for the charitable interpretation of "the alternatives are close enough in functionality that writing by hand is not worth it", instead of the uncharitable interpretation of "these examples are completely made up".

Because the expert has forgotten. Skills that we don't use are forgotten, and there's nothing new in that. Except for the proverbial bicycle.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#522

Post by stavros »

adamtulinius wrote: post #521
stavros wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, so you should ask yourself "why would the expert do this?" I decided to go for the charitable interpretation of "the alternatives are close enough in functionality that writing by hand is not worth it", instead of the uncharitable interpretation of "these examples are completely made up".

Because the expert has forgotten. Skills that we don't use are forgotten, and there's nothing new in that. Except for the proverbial bicycle.

Ok, if you think the expert has forgotten that a problem can be solved by a bash one-liner and instead think they need a whole extensive CLI with documentation, our viewpoints are too far apart for fruitful discussion.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#523

Post by dgellow »

stavros wrote: post #519
jurgenburgen wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can a bash one-liner be more expensive to build than a full-blown CLI tool with the maintenance burden that comes with it?

What expert would build a cli tool to avoid writing a bash one-liner?

I cannot judge without more context. Depending on the one liner, the problem at hand, and overall situation that can be justified. A CLI is straightforward to create.

A bash oneliner can be a chain of 5+ programs, each buffering the stdin/out, what if the CLI is doing the same operation via streams instead? Just a random example but that can easily be worth it

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#524

Post by tomgp »

gleenn wrote: post #240
Merad wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> intelligent autocomplete I'm curious how much value others are finding in this. Personally I turned it off about a year ago and went back to traditional (jetbrains) IDE autocomplete. In my experience the AI suggestions would predict exactly what I wanted < 1% of the time, were useful perhaps 10% of the time, and otherwise were simply wrong and annoying. Standard IDE features allowing me to quickly search and/or bro…

Same, I use Claude but cannot stand typing and being constantly flashed with suggestions that aren't right and have to keep hitting escape to cancel them. It's either manual or full AI for me. This happens in a lot if web tools that have been enhanced with AI, like a few databases with web UIs that allow querying. They are so bad. I really wish they would just dump the whole schema into the context before I begin bec…

I have it on a long timer so that I have to pause for a while before the auto-complete prompt appears. I've found I tend to deliberately set things up for it to attempt when I know I'm going to have to type a bunch of boiler plate or some code that's logically straightforward but syntactically fiddly ie. I write a quick comment describing what the next few lines should do and then wait a seconds for it to make the suggestion

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#525

Post by Ylpertnodi »

gloflo wrote: post #496
Majikujanisch wrote: post #488

Someone i know found a Wonderful word for this: Inkompetenzkompensierungskompetenz This is German and basically just means that someone has the competency to compensate for their own incompetency's, just that AI now does that for us and we slowly notice how important that even is in the day to day life.

Since you can make up such words in the go in German, it's nothing special really. The same in English simply has spaces: Incompetence compensation competence.

'On the go'.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#526

Post by dingdongditchme »

stavros wrote: post #522
adamtulinius wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the expert has forgotten. Skills that we don't use are forgotten, and there's nothing new in that. Except for the proverbial bicycle.

Ok, if you think the expert has forgotten that a problem can be solved by a bash one-liner and instead think they need a whole extensive CLI with documentation, our viewpoints are too far apart for fruitful discussion.

and here I am reading an interaction and thinking you two are saying exactly the same thing. Language be, what it is I guess: open to interpretation.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#527

Post by leafarlua »

stavros wrote: post #519
jurgenburgen wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can a bash one-liner be more expensive to build than a full-blown CLI tool with the maintenance burden that comes with it?

What expert would build a cli tool to avoid writing a bash one-liner?

Perhaps the ones that were experts before letting their brain rotten by AI.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#528

Post by Pearse »

tapland wrote: post #330
abvdasker wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This paragraph hit home with me as well. I work at a large tech company that's a household name and the practice of using AI to pad out design documents has become totally out of control over the last 4 or 5 months. Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible. Why the fuck should I -- along with five other eng…

Taking a distance uni class now to maybe swap away from dev work and my submitted works that are to be reviewed and commented on by other students all come back with AI generated feedback and it's making me go insane. If I needed AI feedback I'd go ask an AI but for any communication now it's a cointoss if you're getting a human reply. /rant

I wonder could you ask for a video instead of a text, like a screen recording with a voice recorder.

Harder to fake.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#529

Post by weakfish »

jorisw wrote: post #490
danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

FWIW I was watching an interview with the founder of Claude Code and he claims that at Anthropic, no code is written by hand anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlGRN8jh2RI&pp=0gcJCQMLAYcqI...

That explains the spaghetti ball that is CC

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#530

Post by stavros »

dgellow wrote: post #523
stavros wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What expert would build a cli tool to avoid writing a bash one-liner?

I cannot judge without more context. Depending on the one liner, the problem at hand, and overall situation that can be justified. A CLI is straightforward to create. A bash oneliner can be a chain of 5+ programs, each buffering the stdin/out, what if the CLI is doing the same operation via streams instead? Just a random example but that can easily be worth it

Sure, then there's a point where the extra taste isn't worth its cost.

I just don't like the fictional straw man where an expert has somehow been brainwashed by AI into forgetting everything they ever knew.

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