3 ms·

Was anyone claiming it is the bottleneck? Seems like a straw man.

raffael_de 1y ago
I have seen it being claimed many times; especially here on hn. Context is usually optimized coding experience with respect to keyboard options and editors (vim/emacs vs modern IDEs).
gwervc 1y ago
A few weeks ago people were discussing here how their typing speed was making them code faster. On the other hand I haven't been limited by writing code, the linked article match my professional experience.
- Xss3 1y ago
  You have to be fluent on the keyboard, to type without thought or 'hunting and pecking' if you want your ideas to flow from brain to pc smoothly and uninterrupted. Speed is part of fluency and almost a shortcut to explaining the goal in real terms. Nobody is hunting and pecking at 80wpm.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Maybe nobody is hunting and pecking at 80wpm but I am not exaggerating when I say one of the best devs I've worked with was a hunt+peck typist The fact is that programming is not about typing lines of code into an editor
    - Xss3 1y ago
      I often out think my typing pace and have to cache ideas. The faster you can offload cache the less you end up having to manage. It's an effective way to rapidly reduce cognitive load and if it isn't in your toolbox then you're missing out on a valuable bit of kit.
- rgoulter 1y ago
  I think the better question is, "do I benefit from improving the speed here, for the cost it takes". Improving typing speed from "fast" to "faster" is very difficult. I think it's worth distinguishing between "typing faster is not useful" and "it's not worth the effort to try to type much faster". There are sometimes cases where it's worth paying a high cost even for some marginal benefit.
ozim 1y ago
All kinds of "low code"/"no code" tools that are out there which main selling point is that you won't have to write code. Loads of business people also think that code is some magical incantations and somehow clicking around in menu configuring stuff is somehow easier. For a lot of people reading is hard but no one will admit that. For years I was frustrated and angry at people because I didn't understand that someone can have trouble reading while they are proper adult working business role. I also see when I post online how people misread my comments.
noirscape 1y ago
In my experience, writing code can be a bottleneck in the sense that it's pretty easy to end up in a scenario where you're effectively "drudging" through a ton of similar LOC that you can't really optimize in any other way. GUI libraries are a pretty good example of this; almost all the time, you're probably gonna parse the form fields in the exact same way each time, but due to how GUI libraries work, what ends up happening is that you often write multiple lines of function calls where the only difference really is the key you're using to get the variables. You can't really turn it into a function or something like that either; it's just lines of code that have to be written to make the things work and although it should be really easy to predict what you need to do (just update the variable name and the string used in the function call), it can end up wasting non-marginal time. LLMs being able to help with this sort of thing I would however more consider to be a failure of IDEs being unable to help with it properly than anything else. This sort of task is rote, easy to predict and should even be autogeneratable. Some IDEs even let you, but it's typically hidden in a menu pretty deep in the interface, needing to be enabled by messing with their ever increasing settings menus (when it probably could just be something it can autodetect by checking the file; y'know, that's the reason why people use IDEs instead of a notepad program); it's as if at some point, IDEs changed from assisting you with making code quicker to write to only really being able to somewhat inspect and lint your codebase unless you spend hours configuring them to do otherwise. I mean, that was in part why Sublime Text and VS Code got their foot in the door, even though they have a much smaller feature list than most traditional IDEs; compared to IDEs they're lightweight (which is pretty crazy since VS Code is an Electron app) and they provide pretty much equivalent features for most people. LLMs can often predict what's going to happen next after you've written two or three of these rote lines, which is a pretty good way to get the boring stuff out of the way. Is that worth the sheer billions of dollars thrown at AI? Almost certainly not if you look at the entire industry (its a massive bubble waiting to pop), but on the customer fees end, for now the price-to-time-saved ratio for getting rid of that rote work is easily worth it in a corporate environment. (I do expect this to change once the AI bubble pops however.)

I have seen it being claimed many times; especially here on hn. Context is usually optimized coding experience with respect to keyboard options and editors (vim/emacs vs modern IDEs).

gwervc 1y ago

A few weeks ago people were discussing here how their typing speed was making them code faster. On the other hand I haven't been limited by writing code, the linked article match my professional experience.

Xss3 1y ago
You have to be fluent on the keyboard, to type without thought or 'hunting and pecking' if you want your ideas to flow from brain to pc smoothly and uninterrupted. Speed is part of fluency and almost a shortcut to explaining the goal in real terms. Nobody is hunting and pecking at 80wpm.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Maybe nobody is hunting and pecking at 80wpm but I am not exaggerating when I say one of the best devs I've worked with was a hunt+peck typist The fact is that programming is not about typing lines of code into an editor
  - Xss3 1y ago
    I often out think my typing pace and have to cache ideas. The faster you can offload cache the less you end up having to manage. It's an effective way to rapidly reduce cognitive load and if it isn't in your toolbox then you're missing out on a valuable bit of kit.
rgoulter 1y ago
I think the better question is, "do I benefit from improving the speed here, for the cost it takes". Improving typing speed from "fast" to "faster" is very difficult. I think it's worth distinguishing between "typing faster is not useful" and "it's not worth the effort to try to type much faster". There are sometimes cases where it's worth paying a high cost even for some marginal benefit.

ozim 1y ago

All kinds of "low code"/"no code" tools that are out there which main selling point is that you won't have to write code. Loads of business people also think that code is some magical incantations and somehow clicking around in menu configuring stuff is somehow easier. For a lot of people reading is hard but no one will admit that. For years I was frustrated and angry at people because I didn't understand that someone can have trouble reading while they are proper adult working business role. I also see when I post online how people misread my comments.

noirscape 1y ago

In my experience, writing code can be a bottleneck in the sense that it's pretty easy to end up in a scenario where you're effectively "drudging" through a ton of similar LOC that you can't really optimize in any other way. GUI libraries are a pretty good example of this; almost all the time, you're probably gonna parse the form fields in the exact same way each time, but due to how GUI libraries work, what ends up happening is that you often write multiple lines of function calls where the only difference really is the key you're using to get the variables. You can't really turn it into a function or something like that either; it's just lines of code that have to be written to make the things work and although it should be really easy to predict what you need to do (just update the variable name and the string used in the function call), it can end up wasting non-marginal time. LLMs being able to help with this sort of thing I would however more consider to be a failure of IDEs being unable to help with it properly than anything else. This sort of task is rote, easy to predict and should even be autogeneratable. Some IDEs even let you, but it's typically hidden in a menu pretty deep in the interface, needing to be enabled by messing with their ever increasing settings menus (when it probably could just be something it can autodetect by checking the file; y'know, that's the reason why people use IDEs instead of a notepad program); it's as if at some point, IDEs changed from assisting you with making code quicker to write to only really being able to somewhat inspect and lint your codebase unless you spend hours configuring them to do otherwise. I mean, that was in part why Sublime Text and VS Code got their foot in the door, even though they have a much smaller feature list than most traditional IDEs; compared to IDEs they're lightweight (which is pretty crazy since VS Code is an Electron app) and they provide pretty much equivalent features for most people. LLMs can often predict what's going to happen next after you've written two or three of these rote lines, which is a pretty good way to get the boring stuff out of the way. Is that worth the sheer billions of dollars thrown at AI? Almost certainly not if you look at the entire industry (its a massive bubble waiting to pop), but on the customer fees end, for now the price-to-time-saved ratio for getting rid of that rote work is easily worth it in a corporate environment. (I do expect this to change once the AI bubble pops however.)