i was gonna quip that thinking that if you have ~some tests~ passing, you’ve got shippable software is the most junior take ever but then i realized that it’s actually big corp code quality manifest. in fact those shitty mock-riddled tests might even be an upgrade to the meat grinder slop from before
of course those people don’t have the skills and taste to see the design problems! (1/4)
i find it somewhat frustrating to see the widely circulated dichotomy between “builders” and “programming craftspeople”. i’m ok with delegating tedious tasks to a clanker. i don’t need to craft every line of code. i’ve always been open about not being a particularly good programmer. but I care a lot about design that is understandable, expandable, and verifiable. because i’m on call for my tower of shit! (2/4)
it’s delusional to think that you can just ship anything as long as tests pass and ai will fix it in the future. concepts like coupling are MATHEMATICAL. no matter how big your context window, your chat bot WILL get slow over time & once the complexity goes over a threshold hit a wall. this allows you to kick the complexity can down the road a bit longer than if humans had to comprehend it, but the day of reckoning WILL come. essentially people with no taste got more leeway. (3/4)
but maybe it’s just the maddening short-term thinking in our line of work where the average tenure is like 2 years so nobody has their skin in the game and nobody ever faces consequences for anything. “ai” is just leveraging the worst about our industry; blaming it for what’s going on is too simplistic with a hint of rose-tinted nostalgia. (4/4)
@hynek True, but I'm thinking basically having good taste buys us a few extra years, not decades, so it's not *that* self serving 😉
@hynek Good time to have built a whole brand around being good at seeing the whole picture, crafting strong and sustainable processes and thinking deeply about design as you have (and to a lesser extent I have).
@pganssle it would've been an even better time to not have missed out on ZIRP and not still needing a career for another 25 years or so 😬
@pganssle I suspect that too but also that's a very self-serving suspicion so I'm not sure I should trust ourselves on that one