Posted by phire 6 days ago
As someone who shamefully falls more in the hobbyist camp, even when they code in the workplace, and has always wanted to cross what I perceived as a chasm, I’m curious, where did most people who code for a living learn these skills?
Great teams do take that in account and will train newcomers in what it means to be a “professional” developer. But then the question becomes, how do you find such a team? And I don’t think there is a trick here. You have to look around, follow people who seem great, try to join teams and see how it goes
Practice clearly and concisely expressing what you understand the problem to be. This could be a problem with some code, some missing knowledge, or a bad process.
Check to see whether everyone understands and agrees. If not, try to target the root of the misunderstanding and try again. Sometimes you’ll need to write a short document to make things clear. Once there is a shared understanding then people can start taking about solutions. Once everyone agrees on a solution, someone can go implement it.
Like any skill, if you practice this loop often enough and take time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t, you slowly find that you develop a facility for it.
This is what I’m working on fixing at wispbit.com
Multimodal LLMs take it even further. I've given Claude 4 a screenshot and simply said, “There’s too much white space.” It correctly identified the issue and generated CSS fixes. That kind of feedback loop could easily become a regression test for visual/UI consistency.
This isn’t just about automating code generation—it’s about augmenting the entire development cycle, from specs to testing to visual QA.
And now instead of having to get the help or code from an actual programmer, as a non-programmer but technical person, I can generate or alter any small trivial applications I want. I'm not going to be writing an OS or doing "engineering" but if I want to write a GUI widget to display my PCs temps/etc, or alter a massive complex C++ program to have some feature I want (like adding checkpointing to llama.cpp's fine-tune training), suddenly it's trivial and takes 15 minutes. Before it'd take days if it were feasible without help at all.
If I have to manually review the boilerplate after it generates then I may as well just write it myself. AI is not improving this unless you just blindly trust it without review, AND YOU SHOULDN'T
If there's a secret, silent majority of seasoned devs who are just quietly trying to weather this, I wish they would speak up
But I guess just getting those paycheques is too comfy