Comment by ajstorm
1 day ago
Thanks for the thoughtful response. We too were surprised by how deeply we could take the model of the teaching hospital to software engineering. Whenever we think to expand the system in one dimension or another, the teaching hospital model seems to have a nearby analogy.
I will confess however that some people internally find the model confusing. For example, one user couldn't remember that to get an issue actioned, they needed to put it into the "waiting room". They wanted to be able to action their issues without learning how complex medical systems operate. There seems to be more work on our plates to make this resonate with all users.
Now imagine what it is like to run an actual hospital with real people whose lives (or the lives of their loved ones) are often at stake, with underpaid and overworked staff and with messy biological creatures as the subjects instead of bits and bytes. If anything this whole exercise should also give you a much deeper appreciation of the people that feel themselves called to help others.
I'll be very interested to read any followups about the part you described at the end about getting it to do more "teaching," both from the perspective of how we can use this to help newer devs out but also from the perspective of helping ourselves understand the software being built.
One thing I've been worrying about recently is the notion of comprehension debt and making sure the humans can still understand the system (so as to be able to do incident response or something if the LLMs are down). The slower, more methodical workflow described here should definitely help by allowing checks like proper docs whenever a piece of the architecture changes for instance, but I'm curious what else could be done to help the humans understand as much of the implications of what the AI is doing as possible.
Edit: having the code author and reviewer be completely separate like you described below is also probably pretty helpful for making sure changes are comprehensible from the outside.
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I had a similarly useful analogy of the legal system emerge, in a similar way. I think there's a great analogy between policy in the legal system and policy in software engineering, and they have some awfully good (and very, very historical) ways to think about e.g. amending, repealing, and adjudicating things based on those policies.