yeah that helps - smaller chunks means less surface area to audit and easier to spot when it goes wrong. trade-off is you spend more time on the prompting/task breakdown but at least you're not debugging a 500-line diff
Yea, I just get anxious when I am responsible for something I don't really "know".
I haven't been a full-time professional software developer for a while, but I was one for years and when someone noticed a problem with one of my apps, I could mentally walk through the code and and pretty much know where to look before I even got to my desk.
I can't imagine letting Gen-AI (that is flat out wrong ~30% of the time) write huge swathes of code that I am now responsible for.
But maybe that's just a "me" thing. In this new economy words and activity have replaced value and productivity.
that mental walk-through is honestly underrated - you didn't just know the code, you had a model in your head of why each piece was there. with AI output you know the spec, maybe reviewed it quickly, but there's no real internalization. usually fine until something breaks and then you're debugging code that's kind of foreign to you. I've started reading the diffs more carefully exactly because of that - takes more time but at least you have something to fall back on when it goes wrong
yeah that helps - smaller chunks means less surface area to audit and easier to spot when it goes wrong. trade-off is you spend more time on the prompting/task breakdown but at least you're not debugging a 500-line diff
Yea, I just get anxious when I am responsible for something I don't really "know".
I haven't been a full-time professional software developer for a while, but I was one for years and when someone noticed a problem with one of my apps, I could mentally walk through the code and and pretty much know where to look before I even got to my desk.
I can't imagine letting Gen-AI (that is flat out wrong ~30% of the time) write huge swathes of code that I am now responsible for.
But maybe that's just a "me" thing. In this new economy words and activity have replaced value and productivity.
that mental walk-through is honestly underrated - you didn't just know the code, you had a model in your head of why each piece was there. with AI output you know the spec, maybe reviewed it quickly, but there's no real internalization. usually fine until something breaks and then you're debugging code that's kind of foreign to you. I've started reading the diffs more carefully exactly because of that - takes more time but at least you have something to fall back on when it goes wrong