Comment by continuational
1 year ago
Good riddance?
Why spend your life doing something a computer could do for you?
The goal of programming is not to write code (however much I enjoy that part), it is to solve problems.
I don't think copilot et al is anywhere close yet though. They are occasionally useful when working with popular APIs you use very rarely, or when you need to write some very repetitive code. Other than that, I feel like it's mostly a monkey typing plausible but incorrect code on my screen everywhere I go.
Why spend your life doing something a computer could do for you?
Why spend your life doing _anything_ a computer could do for you? Why even live, if you're going in that philosophical direction?
I don't think copilot et al is anywhere close yet though.
Unfortunately, many of those in management already think it is.
The less people use their brains, the more easily they will be replaced, and the worse the product they'll produce. Unless you want to lose your job and let society drown in mediocre software (which you will no doubt need to use), do not hand over your agency to the machine.
I don't want to write any code. I want to think about the design of the program and have it pop out of my head fully formed.
The latter gives me dopamine. The former gives me carpal tunnel.
For myself, the code is the journey. There are times though when I'm not fully invested in the problem, that I really just want to skip that part.
Sure code can be cool for the same reason hip-hop is more than just the meaning of the words.
The typing is the rhyme scheme. The algorithm is the rhythm.
> The goal of programming is not to write code (however much I enjoy that part), it is to solve problems.
Right, which is exactly why autocomplete is not a huge help.
That makes no sense whatsoever. Autocomplete helps you speed up the writing of the code so you can focus on solving the problems more often.
I switch back and forth between using autocomplete/LSP in an IDE and plain-jane vim. Autocomplete isn't the end-all-be-all of productivity you're making it out to be.
I've only found it truly useful in a codebase, language, or library I'm unfamiliar with or haven't touched in a long time.
It doesn't do much for me most of the time as I'm usually thinking or walking around the code, but the codebases I'm in usually are extremely easy to jump around in with fzf.
Properly naming functions/classes/modules goes a long way.
Writing the code doesn't generally take a great deal of time once I know what code needs to be written, so there's little value to be gained in optimizing that part of the process. I can think while I type, after all.