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You Got Faster. Your Company Didn’t. (terriblesoftware.org)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 4 months ago* (3 children)

This article I think shares my thoughts on it, Arguably I don't know if the devs even got faster... Like its a nice resource but, there's so much trial and error involved now, and every prompt now requires essentially relearning a new codebank.

Like sure immediate result got faster... but you lose all that with the extended time taken learning how it works and why it works.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I work as a glorified code monkey. It feels faster, sort of, in fits and starts.

    When I start working on a task, the AI tooling almost feels like it's doing the job for me. It picks out the relevant part of the code base, makes changes in the right places, and even updates tests.

    Assuming that part all went well, the waiting game begins.

    Either run the "git" AI prompt or do it by hand. The prompt way has some nice bells and whistles in how it formats commit messages , but

    It's

    Just

    So

    Slow!

    Then, either way, my commit goes. Now I wait for the auto build and test pipeline, the code scanner job, and copilot's review pass. Sometimes it brings up helpful things, sometimes it raises silly objections.

    Then, ok, I think it looks good. I need approval from a busy coworker to actually click merge, so I send a link to the chat and hope someone isn't too busy.

    Once I get that approval, it's wait again for a build agent to deploy my changes.

    Now, hours later (sometimes the next day), I can load it up and see my change reflected in our test environment.

    The wheels sure are spinning, but I can't say for sure that we're going any faster.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    CI/CD is overflowing as the bottleneck for us, and AI isn't making running tests faster. It's making it slower, with more (truly good, useful, productive) unit tests and product features added every day than human teams could

    But that adds a square increase on CI/CD time and load.. And what do you do while waiting for your test run? Make and submit more PRs of course!

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    I can assure I work much faster. Maybe it is a bit different since I work in research and that's indeed different from working on a large established codebase. Most of my projects are greenfield.

    However, recently using Claude code I started many different projects I'd never have approached since I knew it would have taken me months to complete correctly. We are talking about porting file format readers and writers to new languages, then implementing novel algorithms to process such data and optimize it to work on different GPU architectures. Getting a working software takes about a week of work. A publishable cleaned up codebase 2/3 weeks. No way I could do this myself alone in such span of time.

    On the other hand, I have students working with me, using AI is definitely not helping them to learn how to code and how to reason. In several occasions I had them showing me a novel huge equation which apparently worked, but then looking at it properly was just over fitting data and they had no way to explain why such an equation should be used.

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