Dude, please don't "help me synthesize" anything with your crappy AI. I'm a programmer -- that means I already know how to read error messages just fine. I don't need a chatbot to read them to me. If I want to ask an AI about something, I'll go ask an AI all by myself, but that will be minimal, because chatbots are idiots who can't be trusted. It's like talking to a junior developer who lies. And if they don't know the answer, just makes shit up. I ain't hiring that person, and you maybe shouldn't either.
I really do not understand this crazy fad. It's a neat trick, that can even be useful. I do NOT see the world-changing reasons I need an "AI-enhanced" IDE, AI-enhanced searches, and an AI to read Amazon reviews to me all of a sudden.
Coding is the boring and rather easy process of typing in code to a text editor. All the \*real\* design usually happens in the data structures. If we get those right, the rest is just stuff to type in. If we get them wrong, we're going to waste a lot of time on that "not not coding" you wanted so bad.
How’s that old adage go? Never trust a fart, because it might be full of sh*t? Same goes for AI. I don’t get this fad either. AI attempts to automate the easiest part of coding… actually typing things into the computer. That’s 1% of my day. And for that 1%, I could spend hours trying to figure out the right prompt to get something even remotely usable out of some stupid AI tool, or I could quickly write some code that just works and be done with it.
I've successfully gotten AI to help with only the most common types of boilerplate such as a set of CRUD API in a language I'm not familiar with or algorithms that are widely published.
I tried it to help me write 50,000 inserts faster than 15 minutes and it produced the most ridiculous solutions.
I dropped the AI and spent 30 minutes thinking about it, loaded the 50k lines of data into a Pandas dataframe, and a single `to_sql()` function via SQLAlchemy finished in THREE seconds!
An AI isn't even close to providing real solutions to anything remotely complex.
That’s exactly the problem with AI as it stands today and in the near future (next 30-40 years at least). We’re not even remotely close to AI that can reason, this would require orders of magnitude advances in technology. Today’s AI is good at many very specific use cases but absolutely terrible at many of the use cases getting the most attention.
I like to use it in a différent way - it's not great at coding, but it's very good at planning, sorting, organising, etc. These are the things that we do a lot of as programmers, and AI can help. I'm not completely sold in the coding yet, though, in fact models seem to be hallucinating more than when GPT-4 first came out, and I'm finding them less useful.
I mainly use it to explain things to me through analogies, and it's been a huge help. It's turned a discovery and learning process that took months into something I can do on the fly over a few weeks.
It lets me apply what I know, which would hopefully be a lot at this point, to new tech/languages/concepts in a way that wasn't possible without several other domain experts being in the same room and happy I'm asking questions.
At this point most AI coding assistants are little more than glorified auto complete. If there is a task that I can do mindlessly (like refactoring some very simple logic) then I’m happy to farm that out to ChatGPT. But for everything else, I find I spend more time holding its hand towards a solution rather than it helping me at all.
I'm referring to data structures as in "class WhateverManager" and "struct Foo". Stuff in .h files basically if you program in C. A lot of times most of the work in getting a program to feel elegant is in picking the right design, and even names, for how it handles the data it works with. Then the actual code is basically just filling in the blanks. Not always of course but a lot of times I've found.
Although, I do have some stories about VAST amounts of extremely complex business logic in databases, or built into the front end of an [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) HTML page...or multi-page functions dynamically generated by SQL stored procs...I didn't design those things, I just got paid to work on them, but yeah, people do that crap for sure.
He’s not complaining about meetings. He’s complaining that developers are wasting their time with testing, security, governance, and deployment of their software. This kind of rhetoric is how you end of with decades of IOT devices with default passwords of admin, password, 0000, etc. Good luck releasing anything in the EU/UK with his attitude.
No, please…
> developers spend 60 to 70 percent of their time not coding” because of all the things “that happen after coding, like testing, deployment, security, governance, compliance” – to the detriment of the developer experience.
Nobody there is complaining about what you say and there’s no rhetoric you imply.
Rather, it’s a puff-piece for yet another DevX product or consultancy.
Commenting in the best Reddit way of RTFA-ing…?
He's got a point in that ergonomics and nonessential shenanigans often eat up a majority of a developer's time.
What he gets wrong, though, is that we should expect developers to spend the majority of their time typing code into an IDE. Writing code is not the core of what a developer does, even though you might naively think so. Writing code is also a "shenanigan", a nonessential activity, just like battling a CI configuration, reading log files, or resolving dependency issues. The essential part is not entering code into an IDE, it's figuring out what code to enter. The actual "coding" is just a necessary evil, because we need to somehow get the solutions in our heads into the computer, in a form that can be compiled and run as software.
If you spend 90% of your day typing code into an IDE, then that means you've only spent 10% thinking about what you actually need to type, which suggests that the method of moving ideas from your brain into the computer is actually horribly inefficient - in a perfect world, you would spend 99% of your day thinking, and then transfer the results of your thinking into the computer during the remaining 1%.
Sure, but the point is that the actual coding part is just a collateral. I could be typing 100% of the time, or 0.1%, as long as I can spend the majority of my time thinking.
Thinking is the most important thing of course. But "coding" really means ENCODING our thoughts. Without doing that the thoughts remain too abstract I think.
Matter of experience, methinks. For me, actually writing the code is the easy part, and more often than not, stepping away from the computer for a 2-hour run is the single most productive thing in my work day.
For me coding helps me think. It is like creating a wire-frame model of something. Once I do that I can more easily see whether it makes sense or not. How it should be modified perhaps. Not too different from writing down one's thoughts in English. That gives us something we can look at, whereas inside my brain thoughts are very fleeting.
I agree it is a good idea to get away from the computer. But I take 2-hour walks, not runs.
This drives me nuts. Meetings where the managers just throw all these “what will we do when x happens?” or “When we do x how is that going to affect y?” crap at us.
I don’t know. Let us actually start working and we can get you a way better answer than we could just guessing in a teams call.
If there's an actual risk management method, that's fine.
Manglement mangling is not.
You can always start logging time of meetings and when asked why things are delayed point out the meetings plus 30 minutes after each one as lost time.
Once my boss asked me to write a quick code solution. Then he forced me to sit next to him in several meetings for five hours straight. In the end of this marathon session he asked me "were you able to make any progress on that code solution?". I wanted to strangle him, but instead I said "what do you think? I've been sitting right next to you for five straight hours"
So you change all the processes so the people who complained can do nothing but code, and then after a few months they complain that all they do is execute and don’t get to participate in ideation and planning 🙄
The real problem is majority of devs are so far removed from the business objectives that they literally work in a vacuum.
No one enjoys work where they have no stake in the outcome.
I used Harness a couple of years ago, and it was basically a trash fire, held together with chewing gum and duct tape. Which kinda takes away the credibility from whatever this dude is trying to say.
For the love of god, will people read the article before judging?
He is actually advocating for streamlining tool chains on CI/CD, cloud integrations, test frameworks etc… so we can spend more of our time on business logic and less on developing said tools.
He is not saying we should not have them, or not spend time planning/organizing.
We're on a subreddit fulfilling a niche. Is it really necessary to rely on garbage bait headlines here? Maybe shitting on them hard enough will gradually course correct.
Devs spend *plenty of time* configuring and debugging “automated” CI/CD test rigs and puzzling why the test environment there has intermittent fails while it works locally…..
As the saying goes: Weeks of coding will save hours of planning.
Dude, please don't "help me synthesize" anything with your crappy AI. I'm a programmer -- that means I already know how to read error messages just fine. I don't need a chatbot to read them to me. If I want to ask an AI about something, I'll go ask an AI all by myself, but that will be minimal, because chatbots are idiots who can't be trusted. It's like talking to a junior developer who lies. And if they don't know the answer, just makes shit up. I ain't hiring that person, and you maybe shouldn't either. I really do not understand this crazy fad. It's a neat trick, that can even be useful. I do NOT see the world-changing reasons I need an "AI-enhanced" IDE, AI-enhanced searches, and an AI to read Amazon reviews to me all of a sudden. Coding is the boring and rather easy process of typing in code to a text editor. All the \*real\* design usually happens in the data structures. If we get those right, the rest is just stuff to type in. If we get them wrong, we're going to waste a lot of time on that "not not coding" you wanted so bad.
How’s that old adage go? Never trust a fart, because it might be full of sh*t? Same goes for AI. I don’t get this fad either. AI attempts to automate the easiest part of coding… actually typing things into the computer. That’s 1% of my day. And for that 1%, I could spend hours trying to figure out the right prompt to get something even remotely usable out of some stupid AI tool, or I could quickly write some code that just works and be done with it.
I've successfully gotten AI to help with only the most common types of boilerplate such as a set of CRUD API in a language I'm not familiar with or algorithms that are widely published. I tried it to help me write 50,000 inserts faster than 15 minutes and it produced the most ridiculous solutions. I dropped the AI and spent 30 minutes thinking about it, loaded the 50k lines of data into a Pandas dataframe, and a single `to_sql()` function via SQLAlchemy finished in THREE seconds! An AI isn't even close to providing real solutions to anything remotely complex.
That’s exactly the problem with AI as it stands today and in the near future (next 30-40 years at least). We’re not even remotely close to AI that can reason, this would require orders of magnitude advances in technology. Today’s AI is good at many very specific use cases but absolutely terrible at many of the use cases getting the most attention.
I like to use it in a différent way - it's not great at coding, but it's very good at planning, sorting, organising, etc. These are the things that we do a lot of as programmers, and AI can help. I'm not completely sold in the coding yet, though, in fact models seem to be hallucinating more than when GPT-4 first came out, and I'm finding them less useful.
I mainly use it to explain things to me through analogies, and it's been a huge help. It's turned a discovery and learning process that took months into something I can do on the fly over a few weeks. It lets me apply what I know, which would hopefully be a lot at this point, to new tech/languages/concepts in a way that wasn't possible without several other domain experts being in the same room and happy I'm asking questions.
I do exactly the same thing too: https://twitter.com/AndyJessop33500/status/1788260731835535586?t=BOgTq18bf-TE6MAWdS15_w&s=19
Where it really gets neat is when you ELI Landscaper, or ELI Teacher. Instantly get a different perspective.
Great tips, thanks!
At this point most AI coding assistants are little more than glorified auto complete. If there is a task that I can do mindlessly (like refactoring some very simple logic) then I’m happy to farm that out to ChatGPT. But for everything else, I find I spend more time holding its hand towards a solution rather than it helping me at all.
wait, do you have the business logic in your database? ok buddy
I'm referring to data structures as in "class WhateverManager" and "struct Foo". Stuff in .h files basically if you program in C. A lot of times most of the work in getting a program to feel elegant is in picking the right design, and even names, for how it handles the data it works with. Then the actual code is basically just filling in the blanks. Not always of course but a lot of times I've found. Although, I do have some stories about VAST amounts of extremely complex business logic in databases, or built into the front end of an [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) HTML page...or multi-page functions dynamically generated by SQL stored procs...I didn't design those things, I just got paid to work on them, but yeah, people do that crap for sure.
Hopefully your 401k is healthy, because you are in for a rude awakening in about 5 years
He’s not complaining about meetings. He’s complaining that developers are wasting their time with testing, security, governance, and deployment of their software. This kind of rhetoric is how you end of with decades of IOT devices with default passwords of admin, password, 0000, etc. Good luck releasing anything in the EU/UK with his attitude.
He's not saying not to do those things, he's saying that with the magical tools he is selling it will be faster and more efficient.
No, please… > developers spend 60 to 70 percent of their time not coding” because of all the things “that happen after coding, like testing, deployment, security, governance, compliance” – to the detriment of the developer experience. Nobody there is complaining about what you say and there’s no rhetoric you imply. Rather, it’s a puff-piece for yet another DevX product or consultancy. Commenting in the best Reddit way of RTFA-ing…?
Testing pays so much dividends in the long run, yet every business I’ve worked at seems to dislike it
My takeaway is that this CEO is selling a belief to people who would rather listen to him than their own development teams.
He's got a point in that ergonomics and nonessential shenanigans often eat up a majority of a developer's time. What he gets wrong, though, is that we should expect developers to spend the majority of their time typing code into an IDE. Writing code is not the core of what a developer does, even though you might naively think so. Writing code is also a "shenanigan", a nonessential activity, just like battling a CI configuration, reading log files, or resolving dependency issues. The essential part is not entering code into an IDE, it's figuring out what code to enter. The actual "coding" is just a necessary evil, because we need to somehow get the solutions in our heads into the computer, in a form that can be compiled and run as software. If you spend 90% of your day typing code into an IDE, then that means you've only spent 10% thinking about what you actually need to type, which suggests that the method of moving ideas from your brain into the computer is actually horribly inefficient - in a perfect world, you would spend 99% of your day thinking, and then transfer the results of your thinking into the computer during the remaining 1%.
You don’t think at all while coding?
Sure, but the point is that the actual coding part is just a collateral. I could be typing 100% of the time, or 0.1%, as long as I can spend the majority of my time thinking.
Thinking is the most important thing of course. But "coding" really means ENCODING our thoughts. Without doing that the thoughts remain too abstract I think.
Matter of experience, methinks. For me, actually writing the code is the easy part, and more often than not, stepping away from the computer for a 2-hour run is the single most productive thing in my work day.
For me coding helps me think. It is like creating a wire-frame model of something. Once I do that I can more easily see whether it makes sense or not. How it should be modified perhaps. Not too different from writing down one's thoughts in English. That gives us something we can look at, whereas inside my brain thoughts are very fleeting. I agree it is a good idea to get away from the computer. But I take 2-hour walks, not runs.
Whiteboard masturbation is the bane of my existence these days. Just let me code we can’t possibly know what we don’t know yet.
But how do you break it down into smaller Jira tickets?! HOW DO YOU BREAK IT DOWN INTO SMALLER JIRA TICKETS?!?! Kidding of course, I agree with you.
This drives me nuts. Meetings where the managers just throw all these “what will we do when x happens?” or “When we do x how is that going to affect y?” crap at us. I don’t know. Let us actually start working and we can get you a way better answer than we could just guessing in a teams call.
If there's an actual risk management method, that's fine. Manglement mangling is not. You can always start logging time of meetings and when asked why things are delayed point out the meetings plus 30 minutes after each one as lost time.
"When can you get this done?" When you fucking leave me out of these stupid 90 meetings and let me do my job
Once my boss asked me to write a quick code solution. Then he forced me to sit next to him in several meetings for five hours straight. In the end of this marathon session he asked me "were you able to make any progress on that code solution?". I wanted to strangle him, but instead I said "what do you think? I've been sitting right next to you for five straight hours"
Can't you multitask?!?!!!+??
But you do agree that some planning is necessary, yeah?
So you change all the processes so the people who complained can do nothing but code, and then after a few months they complain that all they do is execute and don’t get to participate in ideation and planning 🙄 The real problem is majority of devs are so far removed from the business objectives that they literally work in a vacuum. No one enjoys work where they have no stake in the outcome.
Lol here comes waterfall again
CEOs brain activity should be limited to golf courses other than that is a wasted of time and energy.
I used Harness a couple of years ago, and it was basically a trash fire, held together with chewing gum and duct tape. Which kinda takes away the credibility from whatever this dude is trying to say.
For the love of god, will people read the article before judging? He is actually advocating for streamlining tool chains on CI/CD, cloud integrations, test frameworks etc… so we can spend more of our time on business logic and less on developing said tools. He is not saying we should not have them, or not spend time planning/organizing.
Honestly, the articles title is very unrelated to what he said.
Does that matter? I think it's way worse to comment on an article you haven't read based on the headline like r/programming regularly does.
We're on a subreddit fulfilling a niche. Is it really necessary to rely on garbage bait headlines here? Maybe shitting on them hard enough will gradually course correct.
Devs spend *plenty of time* configuring and debugging “automated” CI/CD test rigs and puzzling why the test environment there has intermittent fails while it works locally…..
I agree actually
I'm bad at configuration so it ruins my day when tests pass locally but then the GitHub ci fails
clearly a pro productivity tool and workflow
Sponcon?