3vidence

(current Googler)

For what it's worth we still use Android Studio as well internally, it is better and faster for doing specific UI stuff because of the tooling and visualization.

On the flip side the Google monorepo is a pretty cool thing and you get used to switching between projects and languages within the same commit chain pretty often. This is part of the reason the cloud IDE is so popular because it's one common editor across many languages compared to language specialized IDEs like Android Studio.

Regarding networking, it's not a big issue day to day. The infra team does a really great job building tools that do efficient caching and integrate well over the network.

It seems to forget about what I do and don't have access to (in terms of apps). I've had to remind it that I have Spotify and YT music more than once.

Other than that agreed going okay so far.

In general I don't disagree that it is a multiplier in the hands of good engineers but it also seems to be a multiplier in the hands of bad engineers (multiples of bad). The question is in larger organizations is having 5x the good commits and 5x the bad commits stable? The answer seems TBD from my perspective.

Honest question what were you doing that could be 100xd

That did the companys revenue / profit significantly change in some way?

Even at a large company if a person 100xd their productivity that would meaningfully move the needle.

This seems like a big HN / VC bubble thing thinking that average people are interested in software at all... they really aren't.

People want to open Netflix / YT / TikTok, open instagram, scroll reddit, take pictures, order stuff online, etc. Then professionals in fields want to read / write emails, open drawings, CADs, do tax returns, etc.

If anything overall interest in software seems to be going down for the average person compared to 2010s. I feel like most of the above normal people are going to stop using in favor of LLMs. LLMs certainly do compete with Googling for regular people though and writing emails.

My manager at work still does this in work chats and it drives me a bit crazy. If I want to k own what an LLMs take on the subject is I can just go ask it.

The chat is for people to discuss people stuff.

I can say at Google we usually just had engineering tip posters in the washrooms they were usually very insightful and just written by other engineers at the company.

Stuff like how to reduce nesting logic, how to restructure APIs for better testing, etc.

People usually like them. I can't say I've seen what the parent post described so I imagine it's "the other" FAANG mentioned here.

The thesis of the article is that software other people have built is bad (frameworks) but software my LLM agent is good (for undisclosed reasons).

I think it just adds to the noise of our industry that reusable patterns and standards don't matter

Yeah honestly I've been racking my brain about the same question (where can I move on to).

HN has been my home for learning about all sorts of things for 10+ years but blockchain + AI has just killed all interesting discussion that can be had.

It's hard to define a community around "not being obsessed" with something. Maybe instead it's worth thinking about what the goal of such a community / forum is. Might be easier to find / define.

If you come up with something I'm happy to check it out.

Every day I feel closer to leaving this industry when I see articles like this.

Is software even a real industry with patterns, safety, design, performance, review, etc.

Or are we just a hype generating machine that's happy to ship the most broken stuff possible the fastest.

Why do we have to constantly relearn the same lessons.

In my experience the lack of joy or difficulty with tests is almost always that the test environment is usually different enough from the real environment that you end up needing to kind of stretch your code to fit into the test env instead of actually testing what you are interested in.

This doesn't apply to very simple functions but tests on simple functions are the least interesting/ valuable.

Most likely the headline was written by an LLM so the irony was lost on it.

Ironically I feel like our QA team is busier than ever since most e2e user-ish tests require coordinating tools that is just beyond current LLM capabilities. We are pumping out features faster that require more QA to verify.

I wonder if that's only really true for "pre-LLM" engineers though. If all you know is prompting maybe there's not a higher quality with more focused that can really be achieved.

It might just all meld into a mediocre soup of features.

To be clear not against AI assisted coding, think it can work pretty great but thinking about the implications for future engineers.

Thank you for putting this so succinctly, this is what I'm observing as well.

Feels like this combination (usually) creates a race to the bottom instead of expansion of new ideas.

LLMs kind of feel somewhere in the middle