alt Hacker News> As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins".
This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other. Good doctors often refuse to give any drugs or any advice until they understand the whole situation properly.
If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back against behaviour you don't like. You have the authority. "Hm, interesting question. I'm going to need more context before I can give you my point of view. Can you give me a quick overview of the system architecture / explain what actual problems you're trying to solve with this approach?"
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> This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other.
Off topic, but this must be a USA-specific problem, where prescription drugs are actually marketed at Joe consumer. I think there is maybe one other country where this insane practice is allowed. Nowhere else are patients told to “Ask your doctor about Procrapin for your irritable bowl syndrome!!”
> If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back against behaviour you don't like. You have the authority.
Not just that, but it seems like the grandparent had issues understanding what they were talking about. This is absolutely fine, and they should have just asked to continue explaining more until the problem was fully understood.
It’s obvious your opinion is important, but it’s not worth a lot if you don’t understand what the actual problem is.
Also, I personally don’t like to appeal to authority (not sure if that is what you meant), and instead just use the Socratic method to keep asking questions until they themselves understand the weaknesses. It’s a very friendly way of doing things.
> Can you give me a quick overview of the system architecture
I think what the OP is saying is that it's the OP's job to know that, and didn't, because they over leverage the LLM.
Like if a doctor was brought in on a cardio consult on their patient because they had a maybe unrelated heart condition, and the only thing they could answer to "why did you prescribe cemidine instead of decimine" is "lemme get back to you on that."
> If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back against behaviour you don't like. You have the authority. "Hm, interesting question. I'm going to need more context before I can give you my point of view. Can you give me a quick overview of the system architecture / explain what actual problems you're trying to solve with this approach?"
One of us misunderstood the GP; I understood him to mean that, because he did not write the code, he was not able to answer the questions based on that code.
You seem to think he meant that he could not answer questions on someone else's code.