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by FiberBundle 477 days ago
In my experience you just don't keep as good a map of the codebase in your head when you have LLMs write a large part of your codebase as when you write everything yourself. Having a really good map of the codebase in your head is what brings you large productivity boosts when maintaining the code. So while LLMs do give me a 20-30% productivity boost for the initial implementation, they bring huge disadvantages after that, and that's why I still mostly write code myself and use LLMs only as a stackoverflow alternative.
2 comments
simonw 477 days ago
I have enough projects that I'm responsible for now (over 200 packages on PyPI, over 800 GitHub repositories) that I gave up on keeping a map of my codebases in my head a long time ago - occasionally I'll stumble across projects I released that I don't even remember existing!

My solution for this is documentation, automated tests and sticking to the same conventions and libraries (like using Click for command line argument parsing) across as many projects as possible. It's essential that I can revisit a project and ramp up my mental model of how it works as quickly as possible.

I talked a bit more about this approach here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/26/productivity/

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FiberBundle 477 days ago
You're an extreme outlier. Most programmers work with 1-3 codebases probably. Obviously you can't keep 800 codebases in your head, and you have to settle for your approach out of necessity. I find it hard to believe you get anywhere close to the productivity benefits of having a good mental map of a codebase with just good documentation and extensive test coverage. I don't have any data on this, but from experience I'd say that people who really know a codebase can be 10-50x as fast at fixing bugs than those with only a mediocre familiarity.
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MrMcCall 477 days ago
The evolution of a codebase is an essential missing piece of our development processes. Barring detailed design docs that no one has time to write and then update, understanding that evolution is the key to understanding the design intent (the "why") of the codebase. Without that why, there will be no consistency, and less chance of success.

"Short cuts make long delays." --Tolkien

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