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I am not saying we should be apologetic about it at all. However, I am saying we can improve the effectiveness of the time we spend by an order of magnitude wi

I am not saying we should be apologetic about it at all. However, I am saying we can improve the effectiveness of the time we spend by an order of magnitude without much effort. We just need to want it. Interestingly, I also observed that solving problems without reading code leads to increased happiness, too.

pdimitar 6y ago
I completely agree but currently, the way things are, we'd need very intelligent tooling that would be able to parse an entire project and give you some meaningful insights -- in order for you to have a shorter and more impactful onboarding. Thing is, nobody wants to produce such tools for free. Plus, they'd be a huge competitive advantage so even if a company invents such a tool they're very likely to use it for their own gain and not to help the entire programming area at large.
- cxr 6y ago
  The choice of what to treat as bedrock is essential to the parent's comment remark that, "We just need to want it." The notion that a person or a team should be able to use whatever development methods and architectural style they feel like coming up with at the time and then throw it into intelligent tooling to figure it out—rather than, say, spending a little more time learning another paradigm that doesn't require general artificial intelligence to be a solved problem—is something that qualifies as wanting something but still not wanting it bad enough to do anything about it. Consider a closely related topic: source control. Nowadays, not using any form of control sounds crazy, but there was a time when that wasn't the case. What was standing in the way? A subset of working developers who just wanted to code without having to think about the task of systematically capturing a record of a codebase's history. But having a reliable, exhaustive record of changes is more useful than not having it, and the default stance today is that you need to use source control. What did it take to get here? Programmers getting over themselves and putting in upfront work to attain a level of competence where basic source control operations are natural. The tools that the author has created and the work they're doing is in "clearly better than what many people are doing now" territory, but it's completely unworkable so long as programmers are unwilling to get over themselves and keep opting instead to just do things the way they've always done them.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    What you say is sadly 100% correct. I think it's economical incentives and supply/demand games above all else these days though, not so much about technical prowess (which is IMO aplenty in most teams I ever have been in). I have met some extremely intelligent lawyers and business managers and a good chunk of them are VERY KEENLY aware that most programmers are of low quality and are unwilling to change their (barely learned and never revised) ways. They know, trust me. But they sleep better knowing there is a bigger supply pool out there because they mostly care how do they manipulate the tech worker into their agendas and objectives -- and thus [want to] view IT workers as replaceable cogs, even if we all know (them included) that this is factually untrue. That's a huge cultural problem. Not because I feel threatened by some 20 y/o smart guy who feels like a God after two JS hackathons, no; it's mostly because the shot-callers play on people's egos. Meritocracy is still mostly a theoretical construct. --- RE: "we need to want it bad enough", I do want it very badly both ways: (a) have intelligent AGI-level of tooling and (b) people not shoving their current hype-train ideas into a 5-year old project -- but I personally am not willing the put the work in both because both are not my job. And even if they are made my job, I am 99% sure I will not be paid enough to (1) deliver direct business value with my tech expertise, (2) mentor youngsters and (3) work on automating myself out of the job, all in parallel. So while I do agree with you on all accounts, I think the incentives outside of our tech bubble are wildly misaligned with our interests and objectives.
- tudorgirba 6y ago
  Well, we just built that platform and we made it free and open-source. Take a look at gtoolkit.com. And you are right in saying that it can provide a huge competitive advantage. The only difference is that the tooling does not give you meaningful insights unless you ask it questions. Well, unless you program your questions. But, that is actually much less difficult than it appears.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    Thank you, I definitely will! Much respect for making this tool and open-source it even. <3

pdimitar 6y ago

I completely agree but currently, the way things are, we'd need very intelligent tooling that would be able to parse an entire project and give you some meaningful insights -- in order for you to have a shorter and more impactful onboarding. Thing is, nobody wants to produce such tools for free. Plus, they'd be a huge competitive advantage so even if a company invents such a tool they're very likely to use it for their own gain and not to help the entire programming area at large.

cxr 6y ago
The choice of what to treat as bedrock is essential to the parent's comment remark that, "We just need to want it." The notion that a person or a team should be able to use whatever development methods and architectural style they feel like coming up with at the time and then throw it into intelligent tooling to figure it out—rather than, say, spending a little more time learning another paradigm that doesn't require general artificial intelligence to be a solved problem—is something that qualifies as wanting something but still not wanting it bad enough to do anything about it. Consider a closely related topic: source control. Nowadays, not using any form of control sounds crazy, but there was a time when that wasn't the case. What was standing in the way? A subset of working developers who just wanted to code without having to think about the task of systematically capturing a record of a codebase's history. But having a reliable, exhaustive record of changes is more useful than not having it, and the default stance today is that you need to use source control. What did it take to get here? Programmers getting over themselves and putting in upfront work to attain a level of competence where basic source control operations are natural. The tools that the author has created and the work they're doing is in "clearly better than what many people are doing now" territory, but it's completely unworkable so long as programmers are unwilling to get over themselves and keep opting instead to just do things the way they've always done them.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  What you say is sadly 100% correct. I think it's economical incentives and supply/demand games above all else these days though, not so much about technical prowess (which is IMO aplenty in most teams I ever have been in). I have met some extremely intelligent lawyers and business managers and a good chunk of them are VERY KEENLY aware that most programmers are of low quality and are unwilling to change their (barely learned and never revised) ways. They know, trust me. But they sleep better knowing there is a bigger supply pool out there because they mostly care how do they manipulate the tech worker into their agendas and objectives -- and thus [want to] view IT workers as replaceable cogs, even if we all know (them included) that this is factually untrue. That's a huge cultural problem. Not because I feel threatened by some 20 y/o smart guy who feels like a God after two JS hackathons, no; it's mostly because the shot-callers play on people's egos. Meritocracy is still mostly a theoretical construct. --- RE: "we need to want it bad enough", I do want it very badly both ways: (a) have intelligent AGI-level of tooling and (b) people not shoving their current hype-train ideas into a 5-year old project -- but I personally am not willing the put the work in both because both are not my job. And even if they are made my job, I am 99% sure I will not be paid enough to (1) deliver direct business value with my tech expertise, (2) mentor youngsters and (3) work on automating myself out of the job, all in parallel. So while I do agree with you on all accounts, I think the incentives outside of our tech bubble are wildly misaligned with our interests and objectives.
tudorgirba 6y ago
Well, we just built that platform and we made it free and open-source. Take a look at gtoolkit.com. And you are right in saying that it can provide a huge competitive advantage. The only difference is that the tooling does not give you meaningful insights unless you ask it questions. Well, unless you program your questions. But, that is actually much less difficult than it appears.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Thank you, I definitely will! Much respect for making this tool and open-source it even. <3