Comment by eknkc
3 hours ago
I honestly don't think that these people will need to think in this level. `message in the queue` is an implementation detail..
I do not know or care what my if statement turned into in x86 assembly unless it becomes a performance problem and even then, I'm not profiling or debugging in machine language. Neither do most developers these days. A message in a queue becomes something akin to that in this era.
I see that I got downvoted there. This is not something I advocate or look forward to but I feel this is where it is going.
It may not be necessary to think in those terms exactly, but if you are not even able to think in those terms, you probably will be no good at prompting the LLM either. It's quite plausible that someone can be a productive dev with claude if they don't know exactly how the message queue is processed. But if they don't know there is a message queue at all, that is much less likely.
Likewise, you don't care exactly how an if statement gets converted into machine code, but you do know precisely what an if statement is and how it should behave, and could identify if it was buggy, and that that part of the codebase contains a bug. If you can't do that, then there is an impossible-to-estimate probability that at some point you get stuck and no progress will ever be possible. I don't see that as a winning strategy, in the long run (but it may work very well in the short term).
> I honestly don't think that these people will need to think in this level. `message in the queue` is an implementation detail..
No it isn't lol. Have you worked on any real systems with customers? Good luck telling your boss at AWS that a poison pill message stopped the payment queue from processing so they lost $100 million in sales but hey, it's an implementation detail, no big deal.
> No it isn't lol. Have you worked on any real systems with customers?
I have. Those systems already fail in spectacular ways and people tell their bosses that some worker process stopped working because its transaction IDs overflowed.
I bet that sounds like `the flux capacitor stopped reticulating splines` which is already an implementation detail for the boss anyway. Nothing changes.
Right, so who's going to ask Claude to investigate the worker processes and fix the transaction ID overflow? The CEO? Someone in marketing? The sales team?
Or maaaaaybe.... an engineer?