A lot of people are slowly realizing that code generation was not the bottleneck in their internal development process, and waving a magic wand to make that go faster doesn't actually lead to more revenue.

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jordanb 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One of the weirdest things about the whole AI boom is the mass formation psychosis where everyone started acting like lines of code written was an important metric for software development productivity.

We've known for decades that more lines of code isn't good. Bill Gates was joking about it in the OS/2 days!

We've known for decades that the actual creation of the code is the smallest part of an actual software developer's job.

We've known for decades that "every line of code is a business decision" that has to be written with an understanding of the underlying goal, and the hardest part of training up software engineers is making them understand that.

We threw all that out because "the chatbox writes code really fast, software is a solved problem!"

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thrw045 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This is a rewriting of history that I don't really like. Back before LLMs and before that again, it was very hard to write code. That's why so many people asked questions and figuring out how to write a piece of code was a big part of the value add of a programmer. It separated the ones who knew their stuff from the ones who didn't. Yeah sure software design was also important but it was less important than the actual writing of the code, which is why a lot of old code had bad designs. It took decades to figure that stuff out.

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yurish an hour ago | parent [-]

> Back before LLMs and before that again, it was very hard to write code. That's why so many people asked questions and figuring out how to write a piece of code was a big part of the value add

This may be true if you work in unfamiliar area or on frontier of programming. But this is not were most of programmer jobs are. That writing code itself is hard is a view of non-programmer. Programmers know that past some threshold of familiarity designing and weighting decisions becomes central problem.

	▲	thrw045 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sure it may be that way now. But if you go back 20 years to for example video game programming, the hard part was figuring out how to solve the problem, not spend weeks or months trying to figure out the abstract design of the code itself. 10-20 years ago a lot of the value of programming was figuring out how to do something, which is by its nature about writing the code, I would argue. Edit: Also, even outside of video games, I don't remember people being obsessed about software design 10-20 years ago the way they are now. You had some design principles of course and there were obviously bad or redundant ways of doing things, but it's on a whole other level the past 5 years at least from what I remember.

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fidotron 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Next you'll be telling me that using number of PRs deployed in a week as a KPI is a bad idea.