i2km

Madness. Makes me think back to a coding horror article from 2006 (I think) where it was accepted that even 500k loc codebases were generally incomprehensible by a single engineer. Now we’re at the stage of almost 500k FILES changing on a single commit…

And people still seem to believe they know what’s going on…

Hmm wasn't Sam Altman one of the early proponents of single-person unicorns? He certainly believes it can be done

A field guide to PKCS#11 issues in practice, covering some of the complexities and gotchas of HSM applications in practice

What I don't understand is that for most SE jobs on mature codebases, writing code is maybe 5-10% of the work. And it's that 5-10% coding that keeps you 'grounded' in the code and keeps your tacit understanding up to date.

Get rid of that and you get a basically invisible productivity increase (call it 10% to be generous) but you've now lost tacit understanding. No amount of half-assed code review (or getting the LLM to generate "code quizzes" etc for you) is ever going to substitute for the tacit understanding you get from doing the 10% of coding yourself.

I really just don't get it. I mean, I can believe that using coding agents gives people a rush of power and fleeting illusions of increased productivity, but it's a mirage.

A lot of the comments here are trying to find some middle ground, i.e. trying to find some way to preserve tacit knowledge. But it seems to me that it's a waste of time. You either need to write the code yourself or completely give up on even reading or attempting to understand it. I just don't think there's any middle ground. Any well-intentioned attempt to preserve understanding of the code will fall afoul of human laziness and understanding drift

I agree in that code is a byproduct of the tacit understanding which arises circularly when you write the code.

But if you're trying to gain the same level of tacit understanding by writing quizzes and simulations, are you actually gaining anything from using a LLM? Isn't it just better, faster and quicker to write the code yourself? Not to mention more enjoyable?

Curiously fitting that the Pope is also a Mathematician by training. I'd imagine he agrees with Tao on the fundamental aims of mathematical research and how these proof dumps largely miss the point

Around a year ago, the org I was working for ditched jetbrains (including teamcity) due to alleged Russian links of some of the founders/owners of jetbrains.

Never looked into it further, but might be a factor...

It’s just surprising how few people understand this. It’s not like it’s new either. Polyani’s theory of tacit knowledge captured this back in 1958

But we can’t do away with the quasi-religious lip service to the canons of the AI creed now can we? /s

And in general, especially with something like C, the correspondence between the compiled code and source code isn’t very “lossy”. You don’t get one-to-one correspondence but it’s not too bad and you’re not introducing massive uncertainty by running it through a compiler. With LLMs though all bets are off… you’re not gonna know what you end up with

Along with putting estimated reading times (21 minutes in this case) can authors please start putting estimated writing times?

Did it take 10 seconds of prompting? Or hours of thought, trial error and revision? Especially when asking people to read for 20+ minutes...