Yep and after 6 hours don't reach for LLM, instead:

* Ask someone to come over and look

* Come back the next day, work on something else

* Add comment # KNOWN-ISSUE: ...., and move on and forget about it.

But year spent days on a bug at work before ha ha!

Now imagine someone else reading this and genuinely considering 20 minutes a long time to wait :-)

Often when LLMs give me some command option or advice I haven’t seen before I try to independently verify it. And I’ve often been frustrated just how hard it is to find this info from the source documents.

Though a lot of the time this is more an inefficiency of the documentation and Google rather than something only LLMs could do.

YES. I don't know how many multi WEEK sessions of debugging I've been through in my career. Frustrating, but so many valuable lessons learned in the process. LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important.

Well when the fashions change, the old ways are “old fashioned” but only literally

I can't tell if OP is satire... I've just seen so many unhiged takes that this article reads completely in line with the discourse...

fellow RC'er here - hi! I was Fall 2 '23.

> It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.

It's not though. It's fundamentally different because TurboTax will still work with clear deterministic algorithms. We need to see that the jump to AI is not a jump from hand written math to calculators. It's a jump from understanding how the math works to another world of depending on magic machines that spit out numbers that sort of work 90% of the time.

From what I remember, typical new C++ debugged code speed is about 20-25K lines per year, lines that are non-blank, non-comment and not completely verifiable by compiler. E.g., standalone bracket or comma or semicolon are not lines of code, function header is too not a line of code, but computation, conditions and loops are. This is from old IBM statistics, I learned about it circa 2007.

If we assume that there are 50 weeks per year, this gives us about 400-500 lines of code per week. Even at long average 65 chars per line, it goes not higher than 33K bytes per week. Your comment is about 1250 bytes long, if you write four such comments per day whole week, you would exceed that 33K bytes limit.

I find this amusing.

> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code.

So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers?

Serious question.

> It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.

That is exactly been the situation for years. Once graduated accountants are not doing maths. They are using software (Exel, Xero etc.). They do need to know some basic formulas eg. NPV.

What they need to know is the law, current business practices etc.

> It will be relevant for a long time.

Why would you think that? The landscape is fast-moving. Prompting tricks and "AI skills" of yesterday are already dated and sometimes actively counterproductive. The explicit goal of the companies working on the tech is to lower the barriers to entry and make it easier to use, building harnesses and doing refinement that align LLMs to an intuitive mode of interaction.

Do you think they'll fail? Do you think we've plateaued in terms of what using a computer looks like and your learnings for wrangling the agents of this year will be relevant for whatever the new hotness is next year? It's a strong claim that demands similarly strong argument to support.

> It’s really hard

How? I just open multiple terminal panes, use git tree, and then basically it’s good old software dev practices. What am I missing?

The agents are already learning to manage agents, if it’s relevancy you’re looking for you might want to take up plumbing instead.

What has been most valuable for you?

It is hard indeed. I find it really quite exhausting.

Personally, I feel like I have always been a very competent programmer. I'm embracing the new way of working, but it seems like quite a different skillset. I somewhat believe that it will be relevant for a long time, because there is an incredibly large gap in outcomes between members of my team using AI. I've had good results so far, but I'm keen to improve.

For the average and mundane stuff, sure do whatever everyone is doing.

For the good stuff, there’s no alternative but to know and to have taste. Llms change nothing.

If they're so great, then we will end up somewhere where it's easy to pick up.

You will be relevant for 6 months until they manage themselves.

Yeah, it's really difficult to remember to tell it "make no mistakes". Typing a prompt is also really hard, especially when you have to remember the cli command to open the agent. Sometimes I even forget if I need to use "medium", "high", or "xhigh" for a task.

> It will be relevant for a long time.

Citation needed.

I see you got downvoted by I agree. I went through a massive valley of despair and turned back to hand crafting only to realize that for me coding was always a means to an end and I really didn't care at all about how I got there. Now I'm having a lot of fun building out all kinds of wonky projects.