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gwerbintoday at 1:10 PM3 repliesview on HN

Was writing code ever the bottleneck for anyone other than raw juniors and non-programmers?


Replies

sanderjdtoday at 3:42 PM

There is some truth to this, but in practice I'm finding that yes, removing the writing code bottleneck has improved throughput quite a bit.

My day (excluding the huge amounts of communication overhead) used to progress as a serial operation of: 1. Write some code for one thing, 2. Self review of that thing, 3. Review other peoples' work, 4. Respond to review comments, 5. Get things merged, 6. Back to 1.

Now I have more of a tendency to queue up work on a few things at once, and then the serial steps are the self reviews and reviews of other peoples' work, and some of the review commentary back and forth (though I can automate some of this in parallel as well).

The upshot is that I'm more working in batches now than in serial, which I really do find to be more efficient.

It's not that it has removed all the bottlenecks at all, but no longer being required to focus all my attention for periods of time on physically typing code has removed one important bottleneck, and has changed, and I would say, improved, my workflow significantly.

jghntoday at 1:35 PM

One thing the AI tools have taught me is that it hasn't been my personal bottleneck for at least a very long time. It's made that part faster for me, and that allows me to take bigger bites at the apple each iteration, but it's not meaningfully speeding me up in the way people claim.

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orwintoday at 2:00 PM

Depends on your company. I'd say very rarely, and never for long.