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Except you should at least try to write code for someone else (and probably of lower level of competence - this also helps for your own debugging later) - obscu
by BlueTemplar 3y ago
Except you should at least try to write code for someone else (and probably of lower level of competence - this also helps for your own debugging later) - obscure one-liners like these should be rejected.
- Zababa 3y agoAssuming there is a comment just above the one-liner saying "find all directories named 'bar', find all files named '*.foo' in those directories, search those files for 'baz'", this code is perfectly clear. Even without the comment, it's not hard to understand.
- flir 3y agoI wouldn't call it obscure, just bog standard command line stuff. How would you have done it?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- radiator 3y agoTo me, the only obscure thing about this is that it is a one-liner. If you write it in three lines, it is fine. Although, I guess the second find and the grep could be shortened, combined into one command.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoI agree - but my point still stands.
- techbuttman 3y agoThe lower level person need only plug that one liner into chatGPT and ask for a simple explanation. We're in a different era now.
- maegul 3y agoYep! It’s something some aren’t seeing. The AI coding assistant is now part of the abstraction layers over machine code. Higher level languages, scripting languages, all the happy paths we stick to (in bash, for example), memory management with GCs and borrow checkers, static analysis … now just add GPT. Like mastering memory management and assembly instructions … now you also don’t have to master the fiddly bits of core utils and bash and various other things. Like memory management, whole swathes of programming are being taken care of by another program now, a Garbage Collector, if you will, for all the crufty stuff that made computing hard and got in between intent and assessment.
- Nullabillity 3y agoThe difference is that all of them have theories and principles backing them, and we understand why they work. LLMs (and "AI" in general) are just bashing data together until you get something that looks correct (as long as you squint hard enough). Even putting them in the same category is incredibly insulting.
- maegul 3y agoThere are theories and principles behind what an AI is doing and a growing craft around how to best use AI that may very well form relatively established “best practices” over time. Yes there’s a significant statistical aspect involved in the workings of an AI, which distinguishes it from something more deterministic like syntactic sugar or a garbage collector. But I think one could argue that that’s the trade off for a more general tool like AI in the same way that giving a task to a junior dev is going to involve some noisiness in need of supervision. But in grand scheme of software development, is devs are in the end tools too, apart of the grand stack, and I think it’s reasonable to consider AI as just another tool in the stack. This is especially so if devs are already using it as a tool. Dwelling on the principled v statistical distinction, while salient, may very well be a fallacy or irrelevant to the extent that we want to talk about the stack of tools and techniques software development employs. How much does the average developer understand or employ said understanding of a principled component of their stack? How predictable is that component, at least in the hands of the average developer making average but real software? When the end of the pipeline is a human and it’s human organisation of other humans, whether a tool’s principled or statistical may not matter much so long as it’s useful or productive.
- emidln 3y agoIf the someone elses on my team can't read a short shell pipeline then I failed during interviewing.