Days 4 and 5
I’ve failed at completing Advent of Code in the past, I think mostly cause I get stuck in my head or generally hit a tiny wall. Then I go outside and forget about it. Day 5 was almost that, I was trying to solve a harder problem than the actual one.
The Bottleneck
A former colleague of mine shared a blog post (Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck) regrading LLM’s in software development. The crux of it is a reaction to, I think, how people are expecting LLM’s to completely transform software development velocities:
The actual bottlenecks were, and still are, code reviews, knowledge transfer through mentoring and pairing, testing, debugging, and the human overhead of coordination and communication. All of this wrapped inside the labyrinth of tickets, planning meetings, and agile rituals.
…
Now, with LLMs making it easy to generate working code faster than ever, a new narrative has emerged: that writing code was the bottleneck, and we’ve finally cracked it.
I mostly agree. LLM’s are definitely going to transform are definitely
transforming the industry, that’s undeniable. At the very least, they make
getting started, prototyping, or doing anything that can be summed up in a few
sentences completely trivial to output.
There’s a certain class of task that I find LLM’s (well I’ve only really used Claude) really helpful for. There’s some ratio of mental load to value of the task where I might decide to just skip or push it back. If the difficulty of reviewing the generated output is less than whatever the other friction was, it seems like an obvious benefit. (Writing better test coverage :grimacing:)
It does seem like my position is going to be more and more reviewing the output of generated code. And I don’t like that for a couple reasons. One, the coding part is the fun part. I have my little vim setup, my fancy keyboard, it’s nice.
But the part that’s really threatening is that I’ve built a habit, a workflow, where writing the code is part of my process. Diving into code and playing around with it is how I think about it. I do believe I should get better at designing and architecting more before I start writing code. I guess I’m just struggling to find the right place for an LLM in my flow.