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Posted by phire 6 days ago

Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck(ordep.dev)
764 points | 385 commentspage 6
aosmith 4 days ago|
This resonates a little, it's problems that you need to consider... When I quit smoking I noticed my code quality dropped. It wasn't because I missed the cigarettes, it was the mental break with a solid social excuse I was missing. I started taking smoke breaks, without the smoke and things returned to normal.
AbstractH24 4 days ago||
The difference between a hobbyist who codes and a professional is all of the things listed in this article.

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?

dgellow 4 days ago||
To answer the “where”, the response is in a workplace environment. Some people seem to be able to develop that set of skills by joining serious open source projects. But really, you have to learn that on the spot.

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

mreid 4 days ago|||
A lot of those skills come from thinking about development in a team as a system and ask where do things frequently go wrong or take too long?

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.

tigroferoce 4 days ago||
years of experience and iterations
aitchnyu 4 days ago||
Has anybody previously had Gantt chart paths "non-code-1 -> code-1 -> non-code-2 =-> code-2" and transformed them into coding tasks, and taking advantage of the newfound coding speed? What did you do? I would need buy-in from people.
virgilp 4 days ago||
TBH, I feel like the biggest help Cursor gives me is with understanding large-ish legacy codebases. It's an excellent (& active) "rubber duck". So I'm not sure the argument holds - LLMs don't just write code.
gabrielso 4 days ago||
I'm not having the same positive experience on a >25yo insanely large and codebase built with questionable engineering practices
octo888 4 days ago||
Or is it just giving you a limited understanding but pretending it's grokked the entire codebase AND data?
zeroCalories 4 days ago|||
Yeah I've run several SOTA tools on our gnarly legacy codebase(because I desperately need help), and the results are very disappointing. I think you can only evaluate how well a tool understands a codebase if you already know it well enough to not need it. This makes me hesitant to use it in any situation where I do need it.
virgilp 3 days ago|||
But that's already way better than a physical rubber duck. That was my point.
dearilos 4 days ago||
Agreed. Tribal knowledge and communication is the biggest bottleneck. As soon as your team starts growing, you spend most of your time in communication and not writing code.

This is what I’m working on fixing at wispbit.com

injidup 4 days ago||
LLMs are surprisingly good at writing test cases—something many developers either skip or struggle with. If you structure your workflow around TDD (Test-Driven Development), the LLM can generate and continuously rerun those tests as it iterates on the code. This creates a powerful closed-loop system where the spec (your unit tests) and the implementation evolve together.

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.

superkuh 4 days ago||
Maybe it was never the bottleneck for paid software engineering at incorporated entities but it was definitely, 100%, the bottleneck for most human people.

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.

oc1 4 days ago||
Yep, code won't matter in the future. Code isn't the bottleneck anymore and it's a good liberation for us professional developers. Now we can move on.
bluefirebrand 4 days ago|
Code never was the bottleneck though
pjmlp 4 days ago||
That is why there is a being difference between being a sofware engineer, or software developer roles, and a plain coder, and titles carry more than words.
dmezzetti 4 days ago|
There has long been ways to reduce writing boilerplate code with IDEs. AI code generation is just another tool and it will help enable competent people.
bluefirebrand 4 days ago|
Not unless it is deterministic

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

dmezzetti 4 days ago||
I'm not sure many seasoned developers are really using AI that much in their workflows.
bluefirebrand 4 days ago||
If they aren't I wish they would speak up more and push back against management more

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

dmezzetti 4 days ago||
Software managers have long pushed "productivity" tools on developers. Most don't stick and this is likely similar. It's best to hire smart people and let them use whatever stack works best for them.
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