Comment by blanched
8 hours ago
Interesting - I’ve been thinking that when people say “writing code” they mean figuring out abstractions, logic, reasoning.
Without that, what’s left? The syntax?
Realizing we might not all have the same thing in mind when someone says “writing code was never hard/easy” is making a lot of other comments I’ve read here make more sense!
> Without that, what’s left? The syntax?
I ran a small experiment on co-workers around a decade ago and learned that often enough they don't read code, more like they decipher it. Which all of a sudden the obsession with code linters and formatters suddenly made sense (though I still don't like them). And being unable to read code, I have to guess writing it was difficult too.
Afterwards one of them said it never even crossed his mind it was possible to read code like that.
Writing code, IMO, is mostly the typing. AKA the syntax and whatever libraries/platforms you’re using. They are incidental to creating a software solution to whatever problems. It requires rigor, but it’s not particularly difficult.
Abstractions, logic, and reasoning is not helped by AI tools. Yes they can give you a ready-made solution, but you’ll need to exercise judgement to see if it really fits the problem. And doing the latter can be as hard as just doing it yourself.
I would agree with that. Whenever I’ve delegated more than what feels like ~80% to the agent (“vibe coding”, I suppose) is when it starts feeling bloated, messy, and bug-prone.
On the flip side, having a design written ahead of time, ideally with reviews by peers and AI and as little as possible AI “content”, seems to almost always go well.
Obviously very subjective!
I don’t disagree with you, when building with Xcode or Android studio, kinda like 90 percent of the code is generated or copied from examples in the doc. Same with HTML when using a CSS framework. I learned vim, just to be efficient with copypasting :) So far for me to throw shades to anyone using tools.
My arguments is more about throwing slop at fellow collaborators, not ensuring correctness of the code, and various claims that try to justify those behaviors. “The agent wrote it” is no more of an excuse than “It was the accepted answer on Stack Oveflow”.
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