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From Dan Luu (https://danluu.com/wat/ https://danluu.com/wat/): > When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real f

From Dan Luu (https://danluu.com/wat/ https://danluu.com/wat/): > When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I was told that it's fine because it affects everyone equally. Since the only thing that mattered was my stack ranked productivity, so I shouldn't care that it impacts the entire team, the fact that it's normal for everyone means that there's no cause for concern. Do not underestimate the ability of developers to ignore good ideas. I am not going to argue that AI is as good as version control. Version control is a more important idea than AI. I sometimes want to argue it's the most important idea in software engineering. All I'm saying is that you can't assume that good ideas will (quickly) win. Your argument that AI isn't valuable is invalid, whether or not your conclusion is true. P.S. Dan Luu wrote that in 2015, and it may have been a company that he already left. Version control has mostly won. Still, post 2020, I talked to a friend, whose organization did use git, but their deployed software still didn't correspond to any version checked into git, because they were manually rebuilding components and copying them to production servers piecemeal.

rossdavidh 1y ago
All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince. But "AI" promises increased productivity as an individual, in the here and now. It should not be a hard sell if people found it to work as advertised.
- krinchan 1y ago
  As someone who started out a GenAI skeptic, I’ve found the truth is in the middle. I write a TON of one off scripts now at work. For instance, if I fight with a Splunk query for more than five minutes, I’ll just export the entire time frame in question and have GHCP (work mandates we use only GHCP) spit out a Python script that gets me what I want. I use it with our internal MCP tools to review pull requests. It surfaces questions I didn’t think to ask about half the time. I don’t know that it makes me more productive, but it definitely makes me more attentive. It works great for brainstorming design ideas. The code generation isn’t entirely slop either. For the vast majority of corporate devs below Principal, it’s better than what they write and its basic CRUD code. So that’s where all the hyper productive magical claims come from. I spend most of my days lately bailing these folks out of a dead end fox hole GHCP led them into. Unfortunately, it’s very much a huge time sink in another way. I’ve seen a pretty linear growth in M365 Copilot surfacing 5 year old word documents to managers resulting in big emails of outdated GenAI slop that would be best summarized as “I have no clue what I’m talking about and I’m going to make a terrible technical decision that we already decided against.”
  - clickety_clack 1y ago
    What is GHCP?
    - hydhyd 1y ago
      It appears to be GitHub Copilot
      - clickety_clack 1y ago
        Ah! I was trying to fit 4 words into the acronym, like “GitHub Hosting Cloud Platform” or something.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  > it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell Writing unit tests where needed makes you more productive in the long run. Writing in modern languages makes you more productive. Remember how people writing assembly thought compiled languages would rot your brain! But people just resist change and new ways of doing things. They don't care about actual productivity, they care about feeling productive with the tools they already know. It's a hard sell when an application moves a button! People don't like change. Change is always a hard sell to a lot of people, even when it benefits them.
  - haskellshill 1y ago
    > Remember how people writing assembly thought compiled languages would rot your brain! Well, how'd you describe web apps of today if not precisely brainrot? > They don't care about actual productivity, they care about feeling productive Funny you'd say that, because that describes a large portion of "AI coders". Sure they pump out a lot of lines of code, and it might even work initially, but in the long run it's hardly more productive. > It's a hard sell when an application moves a button! Because usually that is just change for the sake of change. How many updates are there every day that add nothing at all? More than updates that actually add something useful, at least.
  - jacobolus 1y ago
    To the contrary, people resist change for good reasons: changes to tools rob attention and focus from the work, often for completely arbitrary or decorative reasons. Sometimes changes remove or break important aspects of the tool and force someone to waste time developing a new workflow which is, on average, no better than the previous one. It is vanishingly rare that the software team making the changes in question did sufficiently rigorous testing to show that the new version is a net "benefit" for most users of the software; they don't have time for that. All too often, no significant group of users was even consulted about the changes, which were made for reasons like advancing someone's career ("shipped X feature changes") or looking different for the sake of marketing something merely re-arranged as new ("the old style was so 2018"). The teams making changes to software are, on average, moderately worse than the teams who originally developed the software, if only because they missed out on the early development experience, and often don't fully understand the context and reasons for the original design and don't reason from first principles when making updates, but copy the aspects they notice superficially while undermining the principles they were originally established on. Even when the changes are independently advantageous, it is common for changes to one part of a system to gratuitously break a variety of other parts that are dependent on it. Trying to manage and fix a complex web of inter-dependent software which is constantly changing and breaking is an overwhelming challenge for individual humans, and unfortunately often not a sufficient priority for groups and organizations.
sys_64738 1y ago
[flagged]
- hluska 1y ago
  [flagged]
dcminter 1y ago
It's an excellent point - but a lot of the pressure to use AI in orgs is top-down and I've never seen that with useful tech tools before; they always percolated outward from the more adventurous developers. This makes me wary of the AI enthusiasm, even though I acknowledge that there is some genuine value here.
- torben-friis 1y ago
  We might be in the rare case where the current smoke and mirrors fad in leadership happens to be something actually useful. Let’s not let the smoke and mirrors dictate how we use the tool, but let us also not dismiss the tool just because it’s causing a fad.
  - dcminter 1y ago
    I'm wary rather than skeptical I think. There's clearly value here. Whether we're paying the true costs or not, however, won't be clear until all the VC fumes have cleared. Much like the internet era actually - obviously loads of value, but picking out the pets.coms from the amazon.coms ... well, it wasn't clear at the time which was which; probably both really (we buy our petfood online) except that only one of them had the cash reserves to make it past the dot com crash.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  > I've never seen that with useful tech tools before I've seen it all the time. Version control, code review, unit testing, all of these are top-down. Tech tools like git instead of CVS and Subversion, or Node instead of Java, may be bottom-up. But practices are very much top-down, so I see AI fitting the pattern very well here. It feels very similar to code review in terms of the degree to which it changes developer practices.
  - watwut 1y ago
    None of them was top down in companies I worked in at the time. They were all stuff developers read about and then pressured management and peers to start using. Management caught up and started to talk about them only years later.
bgwalter 1y ago
Version control has quickly won. It was so popular that people kept writing new systems all the time. CI was popular. Most major open source projects had their own CI systems before GitHub. "AI" on the other hand is shoved down people's throats by management and by those who profit from in in some way. There is nothing organic about it.
- hyperpape 1y ago
  Version control is almost 50 years old. It has very slowly won. AI adoption is, for better or worse, voluntarily or not, very fast compared to other technologies.
  - jabwd 1y ago
    .... which is the problem here. The internet took decades. The iPhone didn't change anything this quickly either. We're seeing massive brain rot in many studies, no real world data that actual shows productivity gains. This adoption rate / shoving is insane. It is not based on anything but dollars.
    - utyop22 1y ago
      The way I think of it is the difference between financial wealth and real wealth. No new real wealth can be created but financial wealth may transfer from the firms buying stuff to the large tech firms - thereby creating new financial wealth for big tech stockholders. In the long run the two should converge - but in the short run they can diverge. And I think that’s what we are seeing.
  - therein 1y ago
    The fervor with which some feel the need to defend AI is what is incredible. Adoption, innovation, impact, not so much. The attempt to compare it with Version Control, with sliced bread, with plumbing and sanitization practices. Think of any big innovation and compare it with it until people give in and accept this is the biggest bestest thing ever to have happened and it is spreading like wildfire. Even AI wouldn't defend itself this passionately but it conquered some people's hearts and minds.
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
Surprisingly enough, and pretty ironic given this discussion is about GitHub, the company Dan Luu is talking about there is Microsoft (specifically the SmartNIC team), based on his Linked description of his 2015-2016 job.
CamperBob2 1y ago
Sounds like a company full of seriously-terrible developers, from which no valid general conclusions can be drawn. I use AI a lot myself, but being forced to incorporate it into my workflow is a nonstarter. I'd actively fight against that. It's not even remotely the same thing as fighting source control adoption in general, or refusing to test code before checking it in.

rossdavidh 1y ago

All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince. But "AI" promises increased productivity as an individual, in the here and now. It should not be a hard sell if people found it to work as advertised.

krinchan 1y ago
As someone who started out a GenAI skeptic, I’ve found the truth is in the middle. I write a TON of one off scripts now at work. For instance, if I fight with a Splunk query for more than five minutes, I’ll just export the entire time frame in question and have GHCP (work mandates we use only GHCP) spit out a Python script that gets me what I want. I use it with our internal MCP tools to review pull requests. It surfaces questions I didn’t think to ask about half the time. I don’t know that it makes me more productive, but it definitely makes me more attentive. It works great for brainstorming design ideas. The code generation isn’t entirely slop either. For the vast majority of corporate devs below Principal, it’s better than what they write and its basic CRUD code. So that’s where all the hyper productive magical claims come from. I spend most of my days lately bailing these folks out of a dead end fox hole GHCP led them into. Unfortunately, it’s very much a huge time sink in another way. I’ve seen a pretty linear growth in M365 Copilot surfacing 5 year old word documents to managers resulting in big emails of outdated GenAI slop that would be best summarized as “I have no clue what I’m talking about and I’m going to make a terrible technical decision that we already decided against.”
- clickety_clack 1y ago
  What is GHCP?
  - hydhyd 1y ago
    It appears to be GitHub Copilot
    - clickety_clack 1y ago
      Ah! I was trying to fit 4 words into the acronym, like “GitHub Hosting Cloud Platform” or something.
crazygringo 1y ago
> it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell Writing unit tests where needed makes you more productive in the long run. Writing in modern languages makes you more productive. Remember how people writing assembly thought compiled languages would rot your brain! But people just resist change and new ways of doing things. They don't care about actual productivity, they care about feeling productive with the tools they already know. It's a hard sell when an application moves a button! People don't like change. Change is always a hard sell to a lot of people, even when it benefits them.
- haskellshill 1y ago
  > Remember how people writing assembly thought compiled languages would rot your brain! Well, how'd you describe web apps of today if not precisely brainrot? > They don't care about actual productivity, they care about feeling productive Funny you'd say that, because that describes a large portion of "AI coders". Sure they pump out a lot of lines of code, and it might even work initially, but in the long run it's hardly more productive. > It's a hard sell when an application moves a button! Because usually that is just change for the sake of change. How many updates are there every day that add nothing at all? More than updates that actually add something useful, at least.
- jacobolus 1y ago
  To the contrary, people resist change for good reasons: changes to tools rob attention and focus from the work, often for completely arbitrary or decorative reasons. Sometimes changes remove or break important aspects of the tool and force someone to waste time developing a new workflow which is, on average, no better than the previous one. It is vanishingly rare that the software team making the changes in question did sufficiently rigorous testing to show that the new version is a net "benefit" for most users of the software; they don't have time for that. All too often, no significant group of users was even consulted about the changes, which were made for reasons like advancing someone's career ("shipped X feature changes") or looking different for the sake of marketing something merely re-arranged as new ("the old style was so 2018"). The teams making changes to software are, on average, moderately worse than the teams who originally developed the software, if only because they missed out on the early development experience, and often don't fully understand the context and reasons for the original design and don't reason from first principles when making updates, but copy the aspects they notice superficially while undermining the principles they were originally established on. Even when the changes are independently advantageous, it is common for changes to one part of a system to gratuitously break a variety of other parts that are dependent on it. Trying to manage and fix a complex web of inter-dependent software which is constantly changing and breaking is an overwhelming challenge for individual humans, and unfortunately often not a sufficient priority for groups and organizations.

sys_64738 1y ago

[flagged]

hluska 1y ago
[flagged]

dcminter 1y ago

It's an excellent point - but a lot of the pressure to use AI in orgs is top-down and I've never seen that with useful tech tools before; they always percolated outward from the more adventurous developers. This makes me wary of the AI enthusiasm, even though I acknowledge that there is some genuine value here.

torben-friis 1y ago
We might be in the rare case where the current smoke and mirrors fad in leadership happens to be something actually useful. Let’s not let the smoke and mirrors dictate how we use the tool, but let us also not dismiss the tool just because it’s causing a fad.
- dcminter 1y ago
  I'm wary rather than skeptical I think. There's clearly value here. Whether we're paying the true costs or not, however, won't be clear until all the VC fumes have cleared. Much like the internet era actually - obviously loads of value, but picking out the pets.coms from the amazon.coms ... well, it wasn't clear at the time which was which; probably both really (we buy our petfood online) except that only one of them had the cash reserves to make it past the dot com crash.
crazygringo 1y ago
> I've never seen that with useful tech tools before I've seen it all the time. Version control, code review, unit testing, all of these are top-down. Tech tools like git instead of CVS and Subversion, or Node instead of Java, may be bottom-up. But practices are very much top-down, so I see AI fitting the pattern very well here. It feels very similar to code review in terms of the degree to which it changes developer practices.
- watwut 1y ago
  None of them was top down in companies I worked in at the time. They were all stuff developers read about and then pressured management and peers to start using. Management caught up and started to talk about them only years later.

bgwalter 1y ago

Version control has quickly won. It was so popular that people kept writing new systems all the time. CI was popular. Most major open source projects had their own CI systems before GitHub. "AI" on the other hand is shoved down people's throats by management and by those who profit from in in some way. There is nothing organic about it.

hyperpape 1y ago
Version control is almost 50 years old. It has very slowly won. AI adoption is, for better or worse, voluntarily or not, very fast compared to other technologies.
- jabwd 1y ago
  .... which is the problem here. The internet took decades. The iPhone didn't change anything this quickly either. We're seeing massive brain rot in many studies, no real world data that actual shows productivity gains. This adoption rate / shoving is insane. It is not based on anything but dollars.
  - utyop22 1y ago
    The way I think of it is the difference between financial wealth and real wealth. No new real wealth can be created but financial wealth may transfer from the firms buying stuff to the large tech firms - thereby creating new financial wealth for big tech stockholders. In the long run the two should converge - but in the short run they can diverge. And I think that’s what we are seeing.
- therein 1y ago
  The fervor with which some feel the need to defend AI is what is incredible. Adoption, innovation, impact, not so much. The attempt to compare it with Version Control, with sliced bread, with plumbing and sanitization practices. Think of any big innovation and compare it with it until people give in and accept this is the biggest bestest thing ever to have happened and it is spreading like wildfire. Even AI wouldn't defend itself this passionately but it conquered some people's hearts and minds.

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

Surprisingly enough, and pretty ironic given this discussion is about GitHub, the company Dan Luu is talking about there is Microsoft (specifically the SmartNIC team), based on his Linked description of his 2015-2016 job.

CamperBob2 1y ago

Sounds like a company full of seriously-terrible developers, from which no valid general conclusions can be drawn. I use AI a lot myself, but being forced to incorporate it into my workflow is a nonstarter. I'd actively fight against that. It's not even remotely the same thing as fighting source control adoption in general, or refusing to test code before checking it in.