3 ms·

IDEs enable us to not bother memorizing the number and order of arguments, long names beyond the first word or two, etc. the impact is comparable, freeing some

by vlyan 1mo ago

IDEs enable us to not bother memorizing the number and order of arguments, long names beyond the first word or two, etc. the impact is comparable, freeing some of the very limited space in our memory for more important things. sure, students and juniors shoot themselves in the dick if they let LLMs do everything, but they're fucked anyway so it doesn't matter,

zaneyard 1mo ago
With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code. I would not say something that helps me remember a function name is comparible.
- brookst 1mo ago
  I’m genuinely curious why it matters to make abstract moral judgments about the differences between remembering function names and deep understanding of the syntax used in a function. Why don’t we just care about results? Code quality, performance, clarity are all measurable. Why bother with philosophical positions on these?
  - AlotOfReading 1mo ago
    How do you trust the results of a black box that are hard to verify? Most of us use proxies that are easier to check, like historical competence and maturity. For example, it's difficult to verify my compiler produces a binary that correctly implements the code I wrote. I can partially validate the result with testing, but when I send it out into the world to handle unknown inputs I'm trusting that the compiler has done its job correctly. I can have that trust because I know the compiler people (in aggregate) have thought very hard about correctness, and the project is mature enough that bugs are rare. If the GCC developers tomorrow were to start merging anything that passed the test suite and some other list of objective metrics, my trust would rightly decrease.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
- newswasboring 1mo ago
  That's because you are used to it. I am old enough to have been there during the rise of things like intellisense and language servers, people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. I'm sure for IDEs themselves there were similar arguments and it goes all the way back to Socrates' warning against writing. These arguments always end with "but this time it's different". And inevitably each time it's not.
  - inquirerGeneral 1mo ago
    Go back to 2007 on this blog archive. It's incredible to read https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/
  - insanitybit 1mo ago
    > That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. This was maybe 15 years ago.
    - skydhash 1mo ago
      > Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. It was not unless you were part of some very weird circle. There was always manuals and other references that listed everything about a platform or library. Then we got ‘man’ and ‘info’. And I remember being able to download the full docs of windows’ various documentation. That’s like saying as a writer you were looked down at because you had to look at a dictionary every once in a while.
      - insanitybit 1mo ago
        I'm not sure what you're saying, or how it is not what I'm saying? You're giving examples of places to read documentation, and I'm saying that the expectation was that behaviors caused by not checking documentation would be your fault. If that isn't your experience, cool, it was definitely mine when posting on forums online 15-16 years ago.
- insanitybit 1mo ago
  > With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code. Writing, definitely. Reading, maybe. Thinking is another thing. I can think about code in a lot of ways just by reading a description of the code, or knowing how I directed the code to be written, etc. I think people are thinking about the code differently.
- vlyan 1mo ago
  code didn't matter even before LLMs. we only ever cared about the product of it. the current pace of LLM advancement only has to keep for five more years for handmade code to be considered a liability. I wouldn't worry about being able to recall obscure APIs or whiteboard leetcode. I'm far more worried about having to change careers at 40.
  - zaneyard 1mo ago
    I've seen the result of "code doesn't matter" and it's difficult to change and maintain. I guess if your business is ok with frequent P1 incidents or ships a complete product and never touches it again, but I've never been part of one. I've also never been in a position that cared about leetcode or remembering APIs, so it's possible my experience is completely different from yours.
    - vlyan 1mo ago
      ah, but if there are incidents then the product is faulty. by "code doesn't matter" I mean exactly that we don't care what's under the hood as long as it runs. code with "good enough" quality delivered in a week is most often preferable to premium quality code delivered in a month, and even "it's ugly, slow, and there are edge cases when it breaks"-quality code hacked together during the lunch break is often sufficient for the product to function.
cassianoleal 1mo ago
It's really not. Number and order of arguments, long names, etc. are just bureaucracy. Knowing them doesn't mean you understand the codebase any better than if you rely on the IDE for it. It's a bit like remembering the exact date an historical event happened vs. knowing at which point in history it did, what other events relate to it, etc. Neither makes you better or worse at knowing and understanding the history of the event.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
hn_submit 1mo ago
Tools like Resharper and IntelliSense make me more productive but don't inhibit my thinking, which is what LLMs seem to do.
digitaltrees 1mo ago
Juniors are only in trouble if us seniors stop hiring, training and mentoring. Don’t. We need to continue the tradition of elevating humans through mentoring or we won’t have a future scaffolding for work to be done.
- lrvick 1mo ago
  I spend a ton of time mentoring Jrs in FOSS communities, but I confess as a startup founder myself I could simply not justify hiring anyone but self-directed seniors until we are profitable enough to set some money on fire for what would effectively be just a long term investment in creating a few new Srs. But Jr hiring will never again be what it was unless it gets subsidized somehow as partial charity.

by vlyan 1mo ago

zaneyard 1mo ago

With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code. I would not say something that helps me remember a function name is comparible.

brookst 1mo ago
I’m genuinely curious why it matters to make abstract moral judgments about the differences between remembering function names and deep understanding of the syntax used in a function. Why don’t we just care about results? Code quality, performance, clarity are all measurable. Why bother with philosophical positions on these?
- AlotOfReading 1mo ago
  How do you trust the results of a black box that are hard to verify? Most of us use proxies that are easier to check, like historical competence and maturity. For example, it's difficult to verify my compiler produces a binary that correctly implements the code I wrote. I can partially validate the result with testing, but when I send it out into the world to handle unknown inputs I'm trusting that the compiler has done its job correctly. I can have that trust because I know the compiler people (in aggregate) have thought very hard about correctness, and the project is mature enough that bugs are rare. If the GCC developers tomorrow were to start merging anything that passed the test suite and some other list of objective metrics, my trust would rightly decrease.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
newswasboring 1mo ago
That's because you are used to it. I am old enough to have been there during the rise of things like intellisense and language servers, people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. I'm sure for IDEs themselves there were similar arguments and it goes all the way back to Socrates' warning against writing. These arguments always end with "but this time it's different". And inevitably each time it's not.
- inquirerGeneral 1mo ago
  Go back to 2007 on this blog archive. It's incredible to read https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/
- insanitybit 1mo ago
  > That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. This was maybe 15 years ago.
  - skydhash 1mo ago
    > Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. It was not unless you were part of some very weird circle. There was always manuals and other references that listed everything about a platform or library. Then we got ‘man’ and ‘info’. And I remember being able to download the full docs of windows’ various documentation. That’s like saying as a writer you were looked down at because you had to look at a dictionary every once in a while.
    - insanitybit 1mo ago
      I'm not sure what you're saying, or how it is not what I'm saying? You're giving examples of places to read documentation, and I'm saying that the expectation was that behaviors caused by not checking documentation would be your fault. If that isn't your experience, cool, it was definitely mine when posting on forums online 15-16 years ago.
insanitybit 1mo ago
> With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code. Writing, definitely. Reading, maybe. Thinking is another thing. I can think about code in a lot of ways just by reading a description of the code, or knowing how I directed the code to be written, etc. I think people are thinking about the code differently.
vlyan 1mo ago
code didn't matter even before LLMs. we only ever cared about the product of it. the current pace of LLM advancement only has to keep for five more years for handmade code to be considered a liability. I wouldn't worry about being able to recall obscure APIs or whiteboard leetcode. I'm far more worried about having to change careers at 40.
- zaneyard 1mo ago
  I've seen the result of "code doesn't matter" and it's difficult to change and maintain. I guess if your business is ok with frequent P1 incidents or ships a complete product and never touches it again, but I've never been part of one. I've also never been in a position that cared about leetcode or remembering APIs, so it's possible my experience is completely different from yours.
  - vlyan 1mo ago
    ah, but if there are incidents then the product is faulty. by "code doesn't matter" I mean exactly that we don't care what's under the hood as long as it runs. code with "good enough" quality delivered in a week is most often preferable to premium quality code delivered in a month, and even "it's ugly, slow, and there are edge cases when it breaks"-quality code hacked together during the lunch break is often sufficient for the product to function.

cassianoleal 1mo ago

It's really not. Number and order of arguments, long names, etc. are just bureaucracy. Knowing them doesn't mean you understand the codebase any better than if you rely on the IDE for it. It's a bit like remembering the exact date an historical event happened vs. knowing at which point in history it did, what other events relate to it, etc. Neither makes you better or worse at knowing and understanding the history of the event.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

hn_submit 1mo ago

Tools like Resharper and IntelliSense make me more productive but don't inhibit my thinking, which is what LLMs seem to do.

digitaltrees 1mo ago

Juniors are only in trouble if us seniors stop hiring, training and mentoring. Don’t. We need to continue the tradition of elevating humans through mentoring or we won’t have a future scaffolding for work to be done.

lrvick 1mo ago
I spend a ton of time mentoring Jrs in FOSS communities, but I confess as a startup founder myself I could simply not justify hiring anyone but self-directed seniors until we are profitable enough to set some money on fire for what would effectively be just a long term investment in creating a few new Srs. But Jr hiring will never again be what it was unless it gets subsidized somehow as partial charity.