HN user
If loop time is a concern, I am surprised the author does not mention tests. Is it still worth it to wait for your test suite to run when an LLM can get it right quick ?
Edit: I dont quite buy that argument, in case it was not clear.
Edit2: oh, is it specifically about incremental compile time? In which case I understand that tests can be run piece-wise quick indeed.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've found a bug that was due to a type issue.
Most bugs aren't type issues until you make them be type issues by expressing some business invariant in types.
Refactoring makes an exception not being caught the same way as before ? Type issue. Mixing up some ids ? Type issue. Etc.
Now that can also be emulated with extensive tests. But isn't that a concern for OP as well ?
I bet a lot of parents would buy them for their kids.
That changes the default from "anyone can do anything" to "gotta ask parents". Defaults matter at scale. It adds friction.
Software engineers are not artists nor shoemakers. They are factory makers.
A good analyst makes a hand-crafted, custom report in a day. A programmer makes a factory that makes thousands of reports per second for a thousand clients.
I am yet to find a factory at HomeGoods.
Now the kind of factories we make might change, but isn't it the fun part?
I use Unhook on firefox and disabled the YouTube app.
Groups resist to change - the bigger the group, the most resistance there is.
As a leader, pushing for rapid change cannot really be nuanced lest the push dissipates into the organization's entropy.
This works but it does not let other modules define such methods.
Aaah nice! Thank you!
The point is to mark the constructor as "private" so that it is easy to spot unintended use during code reviews (or using linters).
Funny, I ran into the same pattern just a few months ago!
In practice, I found it difficult for coworkers to read and understand so I dropped the idea.
Another limitation I found is that it breaks down when you start using inheritance. For example:
```
class _A: pass
A = NewType("A", _A)
class _B(_A): pass
B = NewType("B", _B)
def foo(a: A) -> None: pass
b = B(_B())
foo(b) # Mypy is not happy: Argument 1 to "foo" has incompatible type "B"; expected "A"
foo(A(b)) # Mypy is OK
```
We're all adults here and we know the consequences of reaching into implementation details.
I wish you were right but, IMHE, it requires a lot of communication once teams grow and many team member do not fully understand the consequences of what they do. It is nice to have something that helps when reviewing code.
If you have members that users probably shouldn't touch, you prepend them with an underscore
Well, this is precisely what TFA does. It prepends the constructor with an underscore.
Sometimes I feel like "doing it with AI" is the new "rewriting python in rust".
Rewriting in rust does makes things faster but if an algorithm is O(n²), the improvement won't take us much farther.
Similarly with AI, if complexity is not structurally adressed, the velocity gains are but temporary.
Would we regard that as a major achievement of the mathematician? I don’t think we would.
1. Does it matter, really? 2. Is it very different from previous computer-aided proofs, philosophically?
They don't have "etron" thought, which might explain some poor naming by Audi ?
Only the actual code that gets compiled.
And tests, linter configuration, doc...
Oh, it is obvious.
My point is: if you try to force people into inaction, chances are they will bypass you.
Does this mean an adblocker could man-in-the-middle at the browser layer and strip the "single_advertiser_ad_unit" from the server responses ? But the ofc OpenAI would change its system to evade this... and so on
I think the hope for 2 is that those programmers would be forced into inaction by the language safety, rather than being allowed to cause problems.
Ah! That's funny :)
In practice there are always ways to circumvent safety, especially when it is easier than the alternative.
In a Typescript codebase I work on, I configured the type-checker to fordbid `any`. Should be easy enough to use `object` When we don't know the type, right? Well then things started being serialized into `string` way more often than I'd like...
In the end most challenges for a business holding them back to better code quality are organizational, not technical.
This is true. And I get sad every time it is used as an argument not to improve tooling. It feels like sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy: an organizational problem that prevents us from investing into technical improvements... is indeed an organizational problem.
Oops
No idea, but I'll fix them just in case ^^'
Funny, just tried a few runs of the car wash prompt with Sonnet 4.6. It significantly improved after I put this into my personal preferences:
"- prioritize objective facts and critical analysis over validation or encouragement - you are not a friend, but a neutral information-processing machine. - make reserch and ask questions when relevant, do not jump strait to giving an answer."
My late mom couldn't receive the verification SMS from her bank. After investigation, it appeared it was actually an MMS that required a smartphone.
She could still go to her bank counter but service there degraded considerably for everyday things, and she was always told to do things online.
In the end the bank rep was kind enough to give her an old smartphone. But, for her, it sucked because it was much more complicated, had to be charged constantly and so on...
As a technologist, it is eye opening to do the tech support of loved ones...
Oh yeah. Must be an anti-fraud/child abuse/money laudering/terrorism/fake news thing. All real problems with no known good solution (to my knowledge, please prove me wrong).
Edit: typos
No-one replaced developers when we got IDEs and CIs and such. We just produced more software faster.
Same with LLMs. This is a race. Competent people are in demand.
Heehee, I'm still laughing about the Audi e-tron ^^
Still, better than letting the problem find you.
That's a good point indeed.
For this particular case I like to put in a comment next to the weird thing that seems out of place. It can be a short summary and the link to a specific ticket for example.
Also, tests.
Edit: actually id like to emphasize the need for tests. One must be able to refactor code without fearing to break undocumented requirements.
Sometime the best way to why a (Chesterton's) fence is blocking the road is... to remove it and see what happens!
Sorry, not really an answer to your problem. But I feel you, this is a genuinely hard problem.
Keep in mind that, pretty often, the reason something is the way it is comes down to "no real reason", "that seemed easier at the time" or "we didnt know better". At least if you don't work on critical systems.
Money is a function of demand, availability and leverage. Value is only an indirect part of it: a factor that drives demand.
It is easy to find examples of money not being a judgement of value in practice: think about thief or extortion for example, or pushing drugs.