Comment by blauditore
20 days ago
I can't help but keep finding it ridiculous how everyone now discovers basic best practices (linting, documentation, small incremental changes) that have been known for ages. It's not needed because of AI, you should have been doing it like this before as well.
Anyone who’s been a developer for more than 10 minutes knows that best practices are hard to always follow through on when there’s pressure to ship.
But there’s more time to do some of these other things if the actual coding time is trending toward zero.
And the importance of it can go up with AI systems because they do actually use the documentation you write as part of their context! Direct visible value can lead people to finally take more seriously things that previously felt like luxuries they didn’t have time for.
Again if you’ve been a developer for more than 10 minutes, you’ve had the discouraging experience of pain-stakingly writing very good documentation only for it to be ignored by the next guy. This isn’t how LLMs work. They read your docs.
> Anyone who’s been a developer for more than 10 minutes knows that best practices are hard to always follow through on when there’s pressure to ship. > But there’s more time to do some of these other things if the actual coding time is trending toward zero.
I think you'll find even less time - as "AI" drives the target time to ship toward zero.
I agree that this will be the end result over time, maybe even faster than we expect. And as those speed pressures increase, AI will take over more and more of the development process.
These best practice protections become essential only when you give the work to really bad programmers - such as parrots.
Completely disagree. That's like saying that user manuals and driving assistances (e.g. alerts about approaching an object) in cars are only for bad drivers.