Writing code is only the tip of the iceberg. You actually have to:

• understand how the company works
• understand the use case you are managing and how it relates to other business flows
• understand strenghts and weaknesses of the technologies, libraries and frameworks involved
• decide which one to use and how
• thinking about all possible corner cases, evaluating their frequency and importance
• only at the end, write, test, optimize the code

While large language models can help in the last step, they are very limited in previous ones, except working as a search engine on steroids.

Whenever I'm learning a new resource/concept and pull up the example code, I have the habit of typing it out instead of copy-pasting. Is it slower? Definitely. But it does make a big difference in actually understanding what you're doing

Humans want to accomplish things, but business wants to get shit done. The two will always be at odds.

In order to be effective at software engineering, you must be familiar with the problem space, and this requires thinking and wrestling with the problem. You can’t truly know the pain of using an API by just reading its documentation or implementation. You have to use it to experience it. The act of writing code, despite being slower, was a way for me to wrestle with the problem space, a way for me to find out that my initial ideas didn’t work, a way for thinking. Vibe coding interfered with that.

If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.

– Leslie Lamport

Yep. This what I don’t get about people who are using these spaghetti-bots. How do they figure out the right solution to a problem without actually walking around the whole perimeter of the problem?

My guess is they are not, and they’re just waiting until someone complains and they’ll get a job somewhere else and leave the mess for someone else(‘s chatbot) to clean up.

Between that and the death of open source, our industry is about to become a disaster area.

If you automate all aspects of your life, what have you got?

As always, the process matters more than the result.

Journey before destination.

i hear rumors that as many person-hours are spent cleaning up the messes left by LLMs as are saved having them write the code. has anyone found that to be true or am i just talking out of my ass?

Reading only the headline: “why would you write code by hand? Would your fingers cramp up? How are you going to test it?”

Reading the article: “Oooohhhh.”

How do you compile it? Do you stick the paper in the CD tray?