[robot-wrangler]

> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess.

Fortunately SWEs have the architect path, which frequently rewards having lots of deep intuition even as the details of calculation continue to change. So one question that's urgent but unknowable until we get there is.. are we going to get good architects if they don't come up through the trenches? I'm not sure. All I know is that everyone has a war story about the least qualified ones that got the role without that experience.

Since intuition is what LLMs do more than calculation, it's worth mentioning that this is true but different. They have the collective unconscious of the internet, which isn't taste that comes from good/bad experience. Besides intuition what comes to mind is "good taste".. the actual foundation of good review and really the main job of senior positions in any technical field.

[suzzer99]

A software architect who doesn't actually code is worse than useless imo, because they drag actual developers down, forcing them to implement their Powerpoint apps. I say that having worked in the architecture group at one of largest companies in the world.

"I don't care if the app is a synchronous multi-page form with zero no need for websockets. It must have them!" (because it says so on my slide)

[mplanchard]

I used to think this, and I’m sure there are plenty of bad architects who add net-negative value, but having worked on some extremely difficult systems as an IC, I would have given anything to have future me able to hand down a scalable architecture from on high, vetted by past experience and domain familiarity.

Not having that, I developed the knowledge myself through trial and error, but we would have saved a lot of time, money, and stress doing it right the first time.

In general, I think this kind of “architect bad” take underestimates the cost and the stress of being responsible for a system that ultimately isn’t a great fit for the domain, and needing to balance hacking another fix onto it vs migrating to what now know is the right thing.

[suzzer99]

Yeah I should caveat I'm talking about development where the ultimate outcome is the web or web-apps (iOS, Android, smart TVs). Everything is still changing so fast in that field, an architect who doesn't code gets out of touch very quickly IME. It's possible an architect makes more sense in other more mature fields.

[robot-wrangler]

> I don't care if the app is a synchronous multi-page form with zero no need for websockets. It must have them

Sounds exactly like the kind of intuition an LLM will have.. "best practice" that's really whatever fads/marketing hype that there is a lot of noise about, never been informed by experiments or pain.

There was a post complaining about AI preference for god objects earlier, but the thing about stuff like that is, you could mechanically disincentivize it purely from complexity metrics or ASTs, either in training, or at the agentic layer later. I'm really much more worried about when LLMs are flooding the internet with marketing, and LLMs are consuming the marketing to determine best practice