Steps to test: “Idk try some shit”
Steps to test: “Idk try some shit”
Yep. This is the way. Also, you’d be surprised how many devs don’t run through their own QA steps before asking other people to verify.
Yuck.
At some point, they’re gonna have to debug it.
If you’re trying to pull your weight, and it sounds like you are, the problem is either with the tasks, the codebase, or the teammates:
Potential problems with the tasks:
A ticket needs: clear repro documents (if necessary), screenshots, and clear steps to reproduce. It needs more than “Title: Add X to Y. Description: We need Y in X. Implement it.” unless you’re intimately familiar with the codebase. And even if you are, you still need a paper trail to back up what you’re doing. If you’re not closing tickets, be very chatty in the comments. Share where you are, problems you’re running into, and who you’re waiting on for help. If there’s a consistent theme to the things you’re fighting, keep a list of them and bring them to your manager. Be your own advocate and be very transparent about all the research you’re doing because other people didn’t.
Potential problems with the codebase:
Hey, it works. But it’s not documented, someone decided to be clever instead of elegant, the local story sucks, or it’s optimized to such a degree that you have to refactor just to add a simple option ("lol why would we ever need that data here? It’s inefficient!)
Potential problems with teammates:
Everyone pulls their weight. Everyone communicates in clear, declarative sentences and provides examples if necessary. “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer. Evasiveness, vagueness, specialized jargon, or acronyms point to the dev being insecure about their knowledge in that area. Be very suspicious of the word “should”: “that should work”, “that shouldn’t be hard”, “you should be able to…”
And, as an aside, I’ve seen this happen a lot. A new dev or contractor comes on, blows through tickets, gets good marks, and an existing dev or two get called out for not contributing with the same frequency. One of two things are happening here: the new devs are getting softballs, or they’re creating a lot of subtle tech debt that someone else will have to fix because they don’t have a full picture of the codebase. Eventually, those devs will be where everyone else is, but it’s still frustrating.
Hang in there.
It’s funny how soon they realize they want a good one.
I use a car analogy for these situations: You need a mechanic (IT professional.) I’m an engineer (coder.) They’re both technically demanding jobs, but they use very different skillsets: IT pros, like mechanics, have to think laterally across a wide array of technology to pinpoint and solve vague problems, and they are very good at it because they do it often.
Software engineers are more like the guy that designed one part of the transmission on one very specific make of car. Can they solve the same problems as IT pros? Sure! But it’ll take them longer and the solution might be a little weird.
Sometimes, very rarely, I tell my squad that today’s our unlucky day and we’re actually going to have to do math to the problem.
Oh hey, it’s a list of everything I’ve been ranting about for the past three years.
releasing a new kernel, re-written entirely in Golang using Copilot
I just got so mad.
“I should make sure my software architecture mirrors our org’s communication structure.”
Conway’s law exists
“Holy shit I am already so good at this.”
I do most things on the command-line and for me, the trick is not having a lot of scripts laying around. If it’s a common action I do a lot (like running the local test bed), I rely on shell history. Beyond that I just start chaining stuff together on the fly. It forces me to keep knowledge of the utilities fresh, and also keeps me from having a ~/bin folder full of outdated crap that almost does what I want.
As someone whose employer is strongly pushing them to use AI assistants in coding: no. At best, it’s like being tied to a shitty intern that copies code off stack overflow and then blows me up on slack when it magically doesn’t work. I still don’t understand why everyone is so excited about them. The only tasks they can handle competently are tasks I can easily do on my own (and with a lot less re-typing.)
Sure, they’ll grow over the years, but Altman et al are complaining that they’re running out of training data. And even with an unlimited body of training data for future models, we’ll still end up with something about as intelligent as a kid that’s been locked in a windowless room with books their whole life and can either parrot opinions they’ve read or make shit up and hope you believe it. I’ll think we’ll get a series of incompetent products with increasing ability to make wrong shit up on the fly until C-suite moves on to the next shiny bullshit.
That’s not to say we’re not capable of creating a generally-intelligent system on par with or exceeding human intelligence, but I really don’t think LLMs will allow for that.
tl;dr: a lot of woo in the tech community that the linux community isn’t as on board with