alt Hacker NewsYES. I don't know how many multi WEEK sessions of debugging I've been through in my career. Frustrating, but so many valuable lessons learned in the process. LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important.
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Geez you guys need to spend some time in orgs where your paycheck is depends on getting the bugs fixed and deployed. If your direct deposit happens whether you deliver or not then you’re missing the most valuable career lesson of all.
But oh my god, do you remember how good it felt to finally fix it?
The euphoria I felt after fixing bugs that I stayed up late working on is like nothing else.
If I told someone I spent a week debugging a problem these days I think I would get laughed out of the call. Even a day might hit somw chuckles.
If you cant fix the bug just slop some code over it so its more hidden.
This is all gonna be fascinating in 5-10 years.
> LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important
The time wasted thinking our craft matters more than solving real world problems?
The amount of ceremony we're giving bugs here is insane.
Paraphrasing some of y'all,
> "I don't have to spend a day stepping through with a debugger hoping to repro"
THAT IS NOT A PROBLEM!
We're turning sand into magic, making the universe come alive. It's as if we just got electricity and the internet and some of us are still reminiscing about whale blubber smells and chemical extraction of kerosene.
The job is to deliver value. Not miss how hard it used to be and how much time we wasted finding obscure cache invalidation bugs.
Only algorithms and data structures are pure. Your business logic does not deserve the same reverence. It will not live forever - it's ephemeral, to solve a problem for now. In a hundred years, we'll have all new code. So stop worrying and embrace the tools and the speed up.
And if I were your boss you would immediately be fired if you spent weeks trying to debug an issue a junior developer solved just by launching Claude and telling it the symptoms of the issue because you refused to use an LLM.
I don’t miss multi week debugging sessions.
Having a tool that instantly searches through the first 50 pages of google and comes up with a reasonable solution is just speeding up what I would have done manually anyways.
Would I have learned more about (and around) the system I‘m building? Absolutely. I just prefer making my system work over anything else, so I don’t mind losing that.