5 ms·
My feeling has been that 'serious' software engineers aren't particularly suited to use these tools. Most don't have an interest in managing people or are attra
by arrowleaf 8mo ago
My feeling has been that 'serious' software engineers aren't particularly suited to use these tools. Most don't have an interest in managing people or are attracted to the deterministic nature of computing. There's a whole psychology you have to learn when managing people, and a lot of those skills transfer to wrangling AI agents from my experience.
You can't be too prescriptive or verbose when interacting with them, you have to interact with them a bit to start understanding how they think and go from there to determine what information or context to provide. Same for understanding their programming styles, they will typically do what they're told but sometimes they go on a tangent.
You need to know how to communicate your expectations. Especially around testing and interaction with existing systems, performance standards, technology, the list goes on.
- kaydub 8mo agoAll our best performing devs/engineers are using the tools the most. I think this is something a lot of people are telling themselves though, sure.
- lknuth 8mo agoBest performing by what metric? There aren't meaningful ways to measure engineer "performance" that makes them comparable as far as I know.
- kaydub 8mo agoYour org doesn't track engineering impact? What about git stats? I can tell you the guys that are consistently pushing code AND having the biggest impact are using LLM tools.
- direwolf20 8mo agoAre we measuring productivity by lines of code again? This was treated as unserious for decades.
- kaydub 8mo agoWhy ignore where I mention engineering impact??? Come on, be real here
- matkoniecz 8mo agoProbably because you mentioned "git stats". What you meant by that?
- kaydub 8mo agoHigh number of days with commits, merging and shipping code consistently (some people/project will ship multiple times a day/week, some projects move a little slower). That plus the completion of high impact projects makes good strong engineers. Those are the people I see using LLMs
- direwolf20 8mo agoSo quantity of code?
- ozozozd 8mo agoWhat git stats do you have that show “impact”? The OP was right to assume it was lines of code. Another assumption could be number of commits, which also doesn’t measure impact.
- HDThoreaun 8mo agoTrack engineering impact and git stats were two separate suggestions in that comment. Every org tracks impact through performance reviews.