Why do they all look so angry?

Wow. I had no idea. That’s amazing.

Shame about all the Kanye on the track.

As someone whose employer is strongly pushing them to use AI assistants in coding: no. At best, it’s like being tied to a shitty intern that copies code off stack overflow and then blows me up on slack when it magically doesn’t work. I still don’t understand why everyone is so excited about them. The only tasks they can handle competently are tasks I can easily do on my own (and with a lot less re-typing.)

Sure, they’ll grow over the years, but Altman et al are complaining that they’re running out of training data. And even with an unlimited body of training data for future models, we’ll still end up with something about as intelligent as a kid that’s been locked in a windowless room with books their whole life and can either parrot opinions they’ve read or make shit up and hope you believe it. I’ll think we’ll get a series of incompetent products with increasing ability to make wrong shit up on the fly until C-suite moves on to the next shiny bullshit.

That’s not to say we’re not capable of creating a generally-intelligent system on par with or exceeding human intelligence, but I really don’t think LLMs will allow for that.

tl;dr: a lot of woo in the tech community that the linux community isn’t as on board with

Bro

Steps to test: “Idk try some shit”

Yep. This is the way. Also, you’d be surprised how many devs don’t run through their own QA steps before asking other people to verify.

Yuck.

A very long time ago I was on psychedelics at a Phish show. I had a blast at the show, but the venue also had an upcoming Guy Fieri event and I ended up confronted with massive posters that were just Guy Fieri’s weird head everywhere. I had a really bad time for a while until I got out of there. Just frosted tips and flames as far as the eye could see. I had welcome to flavortown on loop in my head and in that moment I experienced true cosmic horror at the idea that Guy Fieri existed in our universe and we were powerless to stop it.

This picture is like that.

“I’m a specialized clerk interested in mathematics” if you don’t wanna get burned.

At some point, they’re gonna have to debug it.

If you’re trying to pull your weight, and it sounds like you are, the problem is either with the tasks, the codebase, or the teammates:

Potential problems with the tasks:

• they’re not researched sufficiently
  • is this doable?
  • should we we even be doing this?
  • have we actually thought about how hard this will be, or did someone say “well that should be trivial” a bunch?
• there’s not enough info on the tickets
  • inexperienced leads tend to just shit out tickets with zero info and underpoint them
• they’re not broken down into small enough pieces
  • are you working “implement X” tickets while everyone else is working a series of “implement X: step N” tickets?

A ticket needs: clear repro documents (if necessary), screenshots, and clear steps to reproduce. It needs more than “Title: Add X to Y. Description: We need Y in X. Implement it.” unless you’re intimately familiar with the codebase. And even if you are, you still need a paper trail to back up what you’re doing. If you’re not closing tickets, be very chatty in the comments. Share where you are, problems you’re running into, and who you’re waiting on for help. If there’s a consistent theme to the things you’re fighting, keep a list of them and bring them to your manager. Be your own advocate and be very transparent about all the research you’re doing because other people didn’t.

Potential problems with the codebase:

• someone preemptively optimized it
• it’s not documented well
• it’s spidery bullshit code that someone has deep emotional attachment to

Hey, it works. But it’s not documented, someone decided to be clever instead of elegant, the local story sucks, or it’s optimized to such a degree that you have to refactor just to add a simple option ("lol why would we ever need that data here? It’s inefficient!)

Potential problems with teammates:

• they’re not supporting you
• they’re grabbing easy tasks because you’re the “code whisperer”
• they didn’t know what they were doing either so they’re vague when you ask them questions

Everyone pulls their weight. Everyone communicates in clear, declarative sentences and provides examples if necessary. “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer. Evasiveness, vagueness, specialized jargon, or acronyms point to the dev being insecure about their knowledge in that area. Be very suspicious of the word “should”: “that should work”, “that shouldn’t be hard”, “you should be able to…”

And, as an aside, I’ve seen this happen a lot. A new dev or contractor comes on, blows through tickets, gets good marks, and an existing dev or two get called out for not contributing with the same frequency. One of two things are happening here: the new devs are getting softballs, or they’re creating a lot of subtle tech debt that someone else will have to fix because they don’t have a full picture of the codebase. Eventually, those devs will be where everyone else is, but it’s still frustrating.

Hang in there.

I use a car analogy for these situations: You need a mechanic (IT professional.) I’m an engineer (coder.) They’re both technically demanding jobs, but they use very different skillsets: IT pros, like mechanics, have to think laterally across a wide array of technology to pinpoint and solve vague problems, and they are very good at it because they do it often.

Software engineers are more like the guy that designed one part of the transmission on one very specific make of car. Can they solve the same problems as IT pros? Sure! But it’ll take them longer and the solution might be a little weird.

Sometimes, very rarely, I tell my squad that today’s our unlucky day and we’re actually going to have to do math to the problem.

Oh hey, it’s a list of everything I’ve been ranting about for the past three years.

The horny brig? You mean the room Riker insists is just his satellite office?

“Who’s the guy in the back with the captain’s insignia and the log?” “We call him the Log Captain.”

“Number One, how did you find my Scrooge performance?”

“Grouchy, sir. Definitely grouchy.”

“Not… curmudgeonly?”

“Definitely whatever that is. And mean, smelly, and ugly too.”

“…”

RPN Gang unite!

It’s been ages, but we’d done rough calculations for the three controls so we roughly knew what we needed. Our teacher was big on manually tuning instead of just using formulas since he thought just running numbers “lacked artfulness.”

So we grabbed a point and started searching around manually. I think we were just tuning the derivative portion at that point, trying to get a fast response without the system without it going chaotic and noisy.