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by zeta0134 183 days ago
I am absolutely paid by the hour to learn stuff. The things I'm learning are mostly messy business domain bits: how does our internal API work, who wrote it, what were the constraints, which customer requested this feature, how much SLA will we lose if we break it to hotfix this CVE...

Yes the end result is at some small moment in time a thing that was built. But the value prop of the company isn't the software, it's the ability to solve business problems. The software is a means to that end. Understanding the problems is almost the entire job.
2 comments
davidbau 174 days ago
Agreed. The question, for me:

Is it possible to vibe code (the second way, without looking at 90% of the code) and still learn the important things?

I think the keys to the castle will come from figuring out how to do this.

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orjfi2hsbfith 183 days ago
> But the value prop of the company isn't the software, it's the ability to solve business problems.

Clearly it's critical to the job, but to take your point to its limits: imagine the business has a problem to solve and you say "I have learned how to solve it but I won't solve it nor help anyone with it." Your employer would not celebrate this, because they don't pay you for the private inner workings of your own mind, they pay you for the effects your mind has on their product. Learning is a means to an end here, not the end itself.

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zeta0134 183 days ago
Helpfully, neither is "I won't solve it nor help anyone with it" actually normal. That's what documentation, mentorship, peer review and coaching is for. Someone has to actually write all that stuff. If I solved it initially, that someone is me. Now it's got my name on it (right there in the docs, as the author) and anyone else can tap on my shoulder. I'm happy to clarify (and improve that documentation) if something is unclear.

Here, of course, is finally where AI can plausibly enter the picture. It's pretty good at search! So if someone has learned, and understood, and written it down, that documentation can be consumed, surfaced, and learned by a new hire. But if the new hire doesn't actually learn from that, then they can't improve it with their own understanding. That's the danger.

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ModernMech 183 days ago
> "I have learned how to solve it but I won't solve it nor help anyone with it."

Intrinsic in learning is teaching. You haven't learned something until you've successfully taught it to someone else.

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