jagenabler2

How do you know your testing is complete if you're not sure what the underlying code does?

I don't think this argument holds. The OP made the very good point that most quality software teams are composed of both seniors and juniors, with the seniors (and even staff members sometimes) drawing the lines so that the system stays on rails.

If you're a manager now and your "team" is a bunch of coding agents, those agents are hardly junior engineers at best. It is equivalent or even worse than hiring a team of 3-5 junior engineers and letting them run rampant with your code.

Reading is beautiful because of language's inability to fully capture emotion and reality. Every author tries to tell a story in the way they think captures their perspective best. Every author and book you read is a different perspective on the world that shapes your own.

Reading writing from an LLM loses all that. It's just words, there is no expression. It's literally the most boring parts of reading.

you should really consider trying things that don't exactly fit your ideals. Listen to music you don't think you'll like, or watch a movie that you've never heard of. You find threads that you do like and learn to understand the parts you don't. Discomfort and friction is how we grow as people, it's how we gain perspective, and how our interests evolve.

Otherwise, if you're going to keep consuming the exact slop content that you're looking for, you're going to stagnate as a person.

this doesn't work in any truly complex system. If the entire organization's shared understanding could be captured in a few documents, software engineering would've been a solved problem ages ago.

Thanks, that makes sense! I’m realizing that’s how I’ve been learning to approach it too and seeing the best results.

Do you feel like the ideas you’re getting from brainstorming these days are the same level of quality as in the past? I’ve been doing some of the same, but I’ve also been feeling like the downtime where I’m genuinely stuck is where my most innovative solutions come to light. I’m not going as deep into problem spaces anymore.

I’ve also lost my ability to self-filter. In the past, I’d write down an idea and if I was stuck for too long, I’d discard it. Now I feel like I have an obligation to build everything.

Maybe it never mattered and the quantity of solutions is truly the most valuable thing.

The indigenous populations probably would.

I resent my recent ancestors for tearing up all our cities in favour of motorways, and grateful only that it wasn’t worse. They thought that was progress though, and that cars were the only way to move into the future.

I’m not against advancing in this area, but there is nuance. Progress can be short sighted.

Claude/ChatGPT is not good or elegant writing. Read a book or a short essay from a respected author and it becomes obvious why different styles of writing are actually discernible. AI-generated text feels void of life and unintentional, it is legitimately a chore to read.

The price of community is inconvenience

Proper rails, hygiene and architecture need to be actively maintained, they don’t just continue to exist in a developing codebase. Historically, a small proportion (the 10% as you say) had a disproportionate amount of influence on coding standards. When they can no longer keep up with that ongoing maintenance, which we’re seeing with the increased pressure to ship code, the hygiene will regress. We’re riding the tail of all the engineering practices we’ve developed as an industry.

This is what I’m seeing, anyways. Junior engineers are being rewarded for shipping so much code, it’s impossible to evaluate it all, and subtle changes in existing patterns are slipping through. Eventually all those subtle changes transform the rails.

I'm not sure where this idea that REAL ID is a form of citizenship came from. I am not a citizen and i was given a REAL ID just by proving my legal (non-immigrant) status.