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>[...]"Churn" is the percentage of code that was pushed to the repo, then subsequently reverted, removed or updated within 2 weeks. This was a relatively infreq
by nzach 3y ago
>[...]"Churn" is the percentage of code that was pushed to the repo, then subsequently reverted, removed or updated within 2 weeks. This was a relatively infrequent outcome when developers authored all their own code -- only 3-4% of code was churned prior to 2023, although there is also a hint of the coming uptick in 2022, when Churn jumped 9%. 2022 was the first year Copilot was available in beta, and the year that ChatGPT became available.
I think this is a bad take on this issue. It implies that if either chatgpt or the devs were just "smarter" this would not happen. This also implies that churn is a bad thing. And I don't think neither of these are true.
The real problem is that debugging is twice as hard as programming and now for the first time we got to the point that people can create software that "works" but they cannot fully grasp why exactly it works.
Of course you can go with the easy answer (these people are just lazy/dumb and should not be in this field) but this doesn't help. But the reality is that we don't really have anything better than printf and gdb to understand what the is happening inside our computers.
Hopefully now we will have more incentives to create better tools to help our understanding of what happens under the hood.
- squigz 3y ago> we got to the point that people can create software that "works" but they cannot fully grasp why exactly it works. It seems to me that this is the real problem. The difference between a sub-par programmer and a competent one is that the latter can create code that they understand and can therefore more easily debug. Being able to create code that "works", but you then have to spend hours/days trying to grok in order to debug it, seems to me to be more harmful than productive.
- stinos 3y agofor the first time we got to the point that people can create software that "works" but they cannot fully grasp why exactly it works. The huge amount of times I saw //This makes everything work somehow sleep(1) begs to differ