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Counterpoint: one thing I think AI will be able to do really well early on is refactoring. Code is often ugly because humans just don't have the time to make i
by asdfman123 4y ago
Counterpoint: one thing I think AI will be able to do really well early on is refactoring.
Code is often ugly because humans just don't have the time to make it look nice. But if I had a good AI tool, I could make my code beautiful.
This is hardly the first time humans have invented a tool to make complicated tasks easy. The sweet spot has always been knowing how to use the tools to maximize your productivity, but also knowing how to do it the hard way too in case something breaks.
- gavinhoward 4y agoCountercounterpoint: I doubt that AI will do as well in refactoring as me. I refactor religiously. I hate code that is subpar, so I'll refactor and refactor. In my current project, I have 180 commits that mention refactoring in the log message, and some of those are huge redesign commits. And I haven't even released it yet!
- asdfman123 4y agoI would do that if I could, but at my brand name tech company (and a lot of others) they seem to treat refactoring as completely wasted time.
- gavinhoward 4y agoThat sucks. I'm sorry.
- asdfman123 4y agoI manage to slip it in out of principle, but my whole career I've been cleaning up other people's messes and getting pushback. I think the original "10x engineer" study showed that engineers that wrote clean code maximize everyone else's productivity. (It's debatable, but certainly a good argument in favor of writing good code.) But most people seem to think that the most productive engineers are the ones who can create features as rapidly as possible.