5 ms·

This reminds me of the quote by Robert C. Martin[1]: "the ratio of time spent reading [code] versus writing is well over 10 to 1". If programmers spend 90%+ of

This reminds me of the quote by Robert C. Martin[1]: "the ratio of time spent reading [code] versus writing is well over 10 to 1". If programmers spend 90%+ of their time reading code rather than writing it, then LLM-generated code is optimizing only a small amount of the total work of programming. That seems to be similar to the point this blog is making. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/835238-indeed-the-ratio-of-time-spent-reading-versus-writing-is https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/835238-indeed-the-ratio-of-...

kgwgk 1y ago
Even worse, in some cases it may be decreasing the writing time and increasing the reading time without reducing the total work.
pragmatic 1y ago
Unfortunately, the micro-methods his clean coding style oroduce ends up doing the exact opposite. Context is never close at hand, it is scattered all over the place defeating the purpose.
JonChesterfield 1y ago
That ratio no longer holds if people don't look at the code, they just feed it back into a new llm. People used to resist reading machine generated output. Look at the code generator / source code / compiler, not at the machine code / tables / xml it produces. That resistance hasn't gone anywhere. Noone wants to read 20k lines of generated C++ nonsense that gcc begrudgingly accepted, so they won't read it. Excitingly the code generator is no longer deterministic, and the 'source code prompt' isn't written down, so really what we've got is rapidly increasing piles of ascii-encoded-binaries accumulating in source control. Until we give up on git anyway. It's a decently exciting time to be in software.
draw_down 1y ago
[dead]
emporas 1y ago
No one is hiring though for reading code. I have read 10 million lines of code, roughly, I have written not one line. Now I have produced a lot of programs, just by reading them. People should also learn how to read programs. Most open source code is atrocious, corporate code is usually even worse, but not always. As Donald Knuth once said, code is meant to be read. The time of literate programming is gonna come at some point, either in 100 years or in 3 years.
Ma8ee 1y ago
But the reason we read code is to be able to change it or extend it. If we don’t need to change it extend it, the need to read it disappears too.

kgwgk 1y ago

Even worse, in some cases it may be decreasing the writing time and increasing the reading time without reducing the total work.

pragmatic 1y ago

Unfortunately, the micro-methods his clean coding style oroduce ends up doing the exact opposite. Context is never close at hand, it is scattered all over the place defeating the purpose.

JonChesterfield 1y ago

That ratio no longer holds if people don't look at the code, they just feed it back into a new llm. People used to resist reading machine generated output. Look at the code generator / source code / compiler, not at the machine code / tables / xml it produces. That resistance hasn't gone anywhere. Noone wants to read 20k lines of generated C++ nonsense that gcc begrudgingly accepted, so they won't read it. Excitingly the code generator is no longer deterministic, and the 'source code prompt' isn't written down, so really what we've got is rapidly increasing piles of ascii-encoded-binaries accumulating in source control. Until we give up on git anyway. It's a decently exciting time to be in software.

draw_down 1y ago

[dead]

emporas 1y ago

No one is hiring though for reading code. I have read 10 million lines of code, roughly, I have written not one line. Now I have produced a lot of programs, just by reading them. People should also learn how to read programs. Most open source code is atrocious, corporate code is usually even worse, but not always. As Donald Knuth once said, code is meant to be read. The time of literate programming is gonna come at some point, either in 100 years or in 3 years.

Ma8ee 1y ago

But the reason we read code is to be able to change it or extend it. If we don’t need to change it extend it, the need to read it disappears too.