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The Reviewer Isn't the Bottleneck (rishi.baldawa.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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When you call the humans who keep production safe “the bottleneck” you’re painting a very specific picture. The reviewer as the obstacle. The gate as friction. Something to route around. Cue in the Balrog scene from Lord of the Rings. That picture determines what you build. The tools to remove reviewers look different from tools to support them.

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[–] -3 points 8 months ago (7 children)

Writing lines of code was the bottleneck before. Vetting them is the bottleneck now, if LLMs are involved.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    writing lines has never been the bottleneck, that's only something a junior would say. The bottleneck is always requirements: changing, understanding them, making sure you don't miss test cases before writing any code.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    test dogmatist detected

    No, the bottleneck is not always requirements. Understanding requirements is a prerequisite to writing correct code, but it takes a fraction of the time.

    Obviously different domains have different complexities of requirements and code which changes the ratio

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Writing the requirements is what takes time.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Instead of spending 4 weeks writing requirements and 1 week implementing them, have you tried spending a day guessing at requirements, half a week writing a prototype, and then asking the customer if it works for them?

    Have you ever worked on a tools team where your customers are internal and your developers are also customers and so know the requirements inside-out?

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Hehe! I have.
    And what took the longest was for me to get used to the dual versioning of QML modules and fixing the UI code that was partially using stuff from both versions.

    Business logic was pretty small for me but that was because other engineers had already written most of it in Maths.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    The bottleneck was human ego and people not actually having enough experience for designing complex systems. Or people without enough experience setting up people systems that interfere with those who can actually design the systems.

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