7 ms·
> An LLM can be instructed to just figure all that shit out. Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development me
by puttycat 1y ago
> An LLM can be instructed to just figure all that shit out. Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better.
Well, except that in order to fix that 1% you'd need to read and understand whatever the LLM did and then look for that 1%. I get the shills just thinking about this, whether the original programmer was human or not. I'd rather just write everything myself to begin with.
- nojito 1y agoReading code is vastly quicker than writing it from scratch.
- tines 1y agoBut creating a mental model and then interacting with it is slower than interacting with a mental model you already have.
- abenga 1y agoThis is a lie, unless you are just speaking of the mechanics of cursorily skimming it. Reading code to understand it enough to commit it in my name is harder and slower than writing it myself.
- dymk 1y agoFirstly, you are not the other poster, so I don't know how you can say it's a lie with conviction. Second, reading code to understand it is a skill that you need to practice to get better at. That might be your issue.
- sarchertech 1y agoIt’s not the OP’s issue. That reading code is harder than writing it is as close to a consensus belief as we get in this industry. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- simonw 1y agoWhich is why it's a key skill that differentiates professional software engineers from amateurs.
- sarchertech 1y agoYou think Joel is an amateur? And the scores of other professional engineers who have written about this are also amateurs? I mean they could be wrong, but I don’t think you can call them amateurs.
- simonw 1y agoI think Joel is a professional, and that's why he says "reading code is harder than writing code". You seem to be misunderstanding me. I'm not saying "anyone who thinks reading code is harder than writing code is an amateur". I'm saying "reading code IS harder than writing code, which is why being good at reading code is what separates experienced programmers from beginners."
- sarchertech 1y agoOk so you disagree with the person that kicked this off with “Reading code is vastly quicker than writing it from scratch”
- simonw 1y agoOnly if you're not very good at reading code. If you've invested a lot of effort in improving your code reading and code review skills you can work a lot more productively with LLMs than people who don't have good code reading skills.
- sarchertech 1y agoSo you think that reading code is harder, but if you put in equal amounts of practice at reading and writing code you’ll get faster at reading code than writing code? Sounds to me like you don’t think reading code is harder.
- abenga 1y agoThe problem is not that I don't know how to do it. I am just asserting that Effort(Reading Code) > Effort(Writing Code) especially if `git blame` will spit out my name, not saying anything about their absolute difficulty.
- nojito 1y agoSo you don’t use any libraries in your code? How about reading documentation? Or reviewing PRs? Or go through source code to build out new features?
- abenga 1y agoI don't commit entire libraries as written by me. Documentation is also far easier to read. Reviewing PRs is quite involving, since I want to do it well. Easier than typing code for sure.