[4ndrewl]

> I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM

How long do you think it will be before you can't write any code because you're out of practice?

One of the dangers of engineering management is that it can turn you into a person that can no longer do the thing.

Does that even matter?

[swordsith]

How long will it be until you can't spin the thread and fabricate your clothes stitch by stitch because you're out of practice?

[4ndrewl]

Precisely my point.

[farhanhubble]

That's fair. In all honesty I'm already feeling challenged but given how much time I save I can set aside some time to keep myself sharp. I can learn more languages. Additionally, as pointed out by others, I'm trading coding effort for design and and strategy, which generally control business outcomes a lot more.

Having said that, I won't use AI for production system if I don't understand the programming constructs in enough detail.

[sevenseacat]

How many more languages have you learnt, and how much time have you spent keeping yourself sharp? 99% of your work time, right?

[wiseowise]

> In all honesty I'm already feeling challenged but given how much time I save

And how much is that?

[farhanhubble]

Easily 99 percent on most tasks. As an example, for a Python project with a dozen modules and ~50 files,a simple instruction like "Design a config file backed by Pydantic to store the project's settings. Keep the models modular" sets up nested Pydantic models, moves the settings to sensibly named JSON fields and updates the code to use Pydantic classes everywhere. Takes a few minutes maybe. Manually done the same task would take me half a few hours in the best case and a day in the worst case.

[Aeolun]

AI: I would urge you to reconsider, this is a multi week project.

Me: Do it anyway

10 minutes later

AI: Perfect!

[borski]

The ability to read code doesn’t decay at nearly the same rate. Neither does your experience.

[4ndrewl]

I read plenty of books, but I'd struggle to write one because that's a different skill that I don't have.

[borski]

I’m not entirely convinced that’s true. Is there evidence that someone well-read would also be a bad writer?

[LAC-Tech]

I review every diff the clanker makes.

After a few hours of this I still look at the codebase and think "wtf is this?".

I think writing the code is a very important part of understanding it. LLM driven development is like doing maintenance programming from day one.

[sevenseacat]

I've used that as well, it's like starting with a legacy app every time.