I don’t know if the last part “What do these software developers actually do all day? ;->” is ironique or not.
Anyway, from my experience, industrial software developpers generate around 10 to 100 loc/day. For mobile game or shitty web stuff, it can go up to a few hundreds. For DO178A certified aeronautic code, this is closer to several days per loc 🤪. To know what’s going on when manager try to increase this metric, just have a look to Boeing.
Here is my “Tuesday evening 15min before leaving work analysis”.
Before COVID, IT market was stable. After COVID, there was WAY too many IT offers. Then, market collapse supposedly because of AI:
(Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE)
In blue line, actual curve. In green line, what should have been IT market without COVID and AI.
For IT market to get back to equilibrium, red area should be equal to blue area. If I do some patchwork, I ended up with this:
So my conclusion is that it indeed slowly starting to recover and should be back to normal ~mid 2027.
Time to go home, bye 😁
I use AI for small, atomic, stuff that don’t bring any intellectual value to spend time for.
Like “Typescrit. Find smallest element in an array”. “Python. Simulate keboard event to avoid computer going to sleep mode”. Or copy/past error message because I missed an import and I just want to know which one.
I also use it sometime for well identified algorithm that could be interesting but are not the core of the problem. Like “C#. Clustering algorithm to group points together in a point cloud”.
The generated code is catastrophic in term of performances/memory, but it’s good enough 80% of the time.
But eveytime I tried to use AI for higher level stuff, or that require several interdependant concepts, it ended up into hallucination pit.
“Bad abstraction is worse than duplication”
Oh shit, thank you so much for this part ! I don’t even count number of time I had to face enthusiasts developers saying "These lines of code are very similar, let’s factorize them ! "
And that’s how MathManagerHelper class is born…
I gave a try to jj. It’s fine for personal projects or small team and make the workflow a bit easier. No more “git add; git commit; git push” each time you do a modification. You just “jj git push” and everything will be automatically pushed.
However, the biggest criticism I have is that he doesn’t encourage to push every time. It really encourages you to keep your modif locally and push only to create a PR, and that’s not a good approach.
Even if you code is WIP, even if everything crash, you really should push your code to backup it. Who cares ? As long as it is not on master branch, it’s your own mess.
Interesting point of view. You got my upvote 😉 I think many people took it 1st degree, so the many downvote you have.
I’m personnaly not a big fan of natural language programing. Natural language is too ambiguous and subject of interpretation. So you have to give very long description of what you want to achieve. I often do the parallel with Mathematics. If you read Euclid’s_Elements’s definition for point, line, etc…, wording is extremly wordy and indigestible. But moderne formalism is much more concise and precise. Now with LLM and vibe coding, I have the impression that programming is evolving backward 😟
The role of a developper has never been about writing code. The role of a developper is to formalize a problem. In a certain way, job of developper didn’t changed a lot since the last 50 years. My grandpa use to be developper on punch cards, and he had the sames problems than us today. How to translate accounting department request into series of instruction, how to define boundaries, etc…