Jason GormanMay 24, 2023
We spend roughly 10x as much time reading code as we do writing it. A tool or technique that makes you twice as "productive" at writing code *at best* makes you 5% more productive over all. Making your code easier to understand will have 10x the impact. But that doesn't sell tools or put developers out of work, so you won't be reading about it in Forbes.
Show threadLars Marowsky-Brée 😷
@jasongorman I hate to say it (because I very much dislike the LLM/AI hype), but ... they're surprisingly good at answering questions about code one shows them too. Not perfect, but they can provide inspiration and places to start looking.
(If one knows how to ask a question, obvs.)
May 24, 2023 at 11:26amWeb
Show threadJason GormanMay 24, 2023
@larsmb I'm not so sure about that ;-)
Show threadLars Marowsky-Brée 😷May 24, 2023
@jasongorman That's not what I meant. But you can feed, say, ChatGPT a code snippet and ask it to explain at an abstract level what the function does, or, say, why it fails if n == 0 or some such.
It is quite mind-blowing that this does often result in somewhat useful feedback.
I don't think it will replace programmers at all, but it is becoming a tool in the box.
(I dislike code generation via LLMs because I have severe ethical concerns.)