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Comment by executesorder66

6 days ago

Tell that to Linus Torvalds.

His whole job is just doing code review, and I'd argue he's better at coding now than he ever was before.

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executesorder66

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benterix  6 days ago

I'd be careful with extrapolating based on the creator of Linux and Git. His life and activities are not in line with those of more typical programmers.

  • executesorder66  6 days ago

    > His life and activities are not in line with those of more typical programmers.

    Okay sure.

    I'll use myself as another example then. When I was a dev I used to write a lot of code. Now I'm a tech team lead, and I write less code, but review significantly more code than I used to previously.

    I feel more confident, comfortable, and competent in my coding abilities now than ever before even though I'm coding less.

    I feel like this is because I am exposed to a lot more code, and not in a passive way (reading legacy code) but an active way (making sure a patch set will correctly implement feature X, without breaking anything existing)

    I feel like this principal applies to any programmer. Same thing with e.g. writers. Good writers read _a lot_ and it makes them better writers.

    This is my opinion and not based on any kind of research. So if you disagree, that's fine with me. But so far I haven't seen anything to convince me of the opposite.

walleeee  6 days ago

It's not only that Linus is atypical, it's also that he is reviewing other people's code, and those people are also highly competent, or they would not be kernel committers. And they all share large amounts of high-quality and hard-earned implicit context.

Reviewing well executed changesets by skilled developers on complicated and deliberate projects is not comparable to "fleet of agents" vibe engineering. One of these tasks will sharpen you regardless how lazily you approach it. The other requires extreme discipline to avoid atrophy.