Comment by fellowniusmonk
6 days ago
I think the hardest part is not spending the next 3 months of my life in a cave finishing all the hobby/side projects I didn't quite get across the line.
It really does feel like I've gone from being 1 senior engineer to a team that has a 0.8 Sr. Eng, 5 Jrs. and one dude that spends all his time on digging through poorly documented open source projects and documenting them for the team.
Sure I can't spend quite as much time working on hard problems as I used to, but no one knows that I haven't talked to a PM in months, no one knows I haven't written a commit summary in months, it's just been my AI doppelgangers. Compared to myself a year ago I think I now PERSONALLY write 150% more HARD code than I did before. So maybe, my first statement about being 0.8 is false.
I think of it like electric bikes, there seems to be indication that people with electric assist bikes actually burn more calories/spend more time/go farther on an electric bike than those who have manual bikes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22141....
> I haven't written a commit summary in months
I don't know what you're posting, but if it's anything like what I see being done by GitHub copilot, your commit messages are junk. They're equivalent to this and you're wasting everyone's time:
Yeah I tried Copilot's automatic commit messages and they're trash, but the agent-based ones are much better.
Try Cubic, which is a Github add-on. Really good at writing GH commit messages and also surfaces bugs fairly reliably (adds PR comments). Not affiliated, just a user.
this behaviour is literally removable with proper prompting.
this is a strawmans argument... of whatever your are arguing
One of the most interesting things in all of this is it is clear some people are struggling with the feeling of a loss in status.
I see it myself, go to a tech/startup meetup as a programmer today vs in 2022 before ZIRP ended.
It's like back to my youth where people didn't want to hear my opinion and didn't view me as "special" or "in demand" because I was "a nerd who talked to computers", that's gotta be tough for a lot of people who grew up in the post "The Social Network" era.
But anyone paying attention knew where the end of ZIRP was going to take us, the fact that it dovetailed with the rise of LLMs is a double blow for sure.
You can't "remove" how LLMs describe changes. I'm not talking about useless comments, I was just saying that they describe changes the same way as they comment code.
If you've ever run or been part of a team that does thorough, multi-party, pull request reviews you know what I am talking about.
The only part I don't automate is the pull request review (or patch review, pre-commit review, etc. before git.), thats always been the line to hold for protecting codebases with many contributors of varying capability, this is explicitly addressed in the article as well.
You can fight whatever straw man you want. Shadowbox the hypotheticals in your head, etc. I don't get all these recent and brand new accounts just straight up insulting and insinuating all this crap all over HN today.
I told you how it is. Copilot writes crap descriptions that just distract from the actual code and the intention of the change. If your commit messages are in any way better than that, then please enlighten us rather than calling me a bot.
For me, the electric bike analogy works differently: it enables people to ride, regularly, who would not be able to do that with traditional bikes. That's totally fine. But electric bikes don't threaten to take away our normal bikes.