| ▲ | senko 3 hours ago |
| I recently did some work on a codebase I last touched 4 years ago. I didn't remember every line but I still had a very good grasp of how and why it's put together. (edit: and no, I don't have some extra good memory) |
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| ▲ | copperx 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Lucky you. I always go "huh, so I wrote this?". And this was in the pre-AI era. |
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| ▲ | seba_dos1 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | These feelings aren't mutually exclusive. I'm often like "I have no memory of this place" while my name stares at me from git blame, but that doesn't mean my intuition of how it's structured isn't highly likely to be right in such cases. | | |
| ▲ | datsci_est_2015 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Like a painter not remembering a specific stroke, but being able to recreate it instantly because of years of muscle memory. |
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| ▲ | suzzer99 22 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | It feels like that at first, especially as I get older. But I still think it comes back to me a lot quicker if I once understood it than if I was learning it from scratch. Possibly just because I know how I think. |
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| ▲ | vjvjvjvjghv an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I definitely understand my own code better than what other people wrote, even from 10 years ago. I often see code and think "this makes sense to do it this way". Turns out I wrote it years ago. |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I find this to be the case if it was something I was deeply involved with. Other times, I can make a small change to something that doesn't require much time, and once it's tested and committed, I quickly lose any memory of even having done it. |
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| ▲ | senko 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah I did pour a lot of sweat and thinking into that codebase all those years ago. When I do a drive-by edit, I probably don't remember it in a week. Which is why the "cognitive debt" from the article is relevant, IMHO. If I just thoroughly review the plan and quickly scan the resulting code, will that have a strong enough imprint on my mind over time? I would like to think "yes", my gut is telling me "no". IMHO the LLMs are now "good enough" for coding. These are hard questions we'll have to grapple with this in the next year or two (in context of AI-assisted software development). |
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