You say “all that time” babysitting AIs but in my experience it isn’t that much time, if anything the back and forth at the planning stages is more productive than when I’m doing it by myself because I’m being asked questions and having to think things through from different angles.
Define 'aware'. The volume of code for a feature/system to make it worth using a more complex workflow such as this one, is definitely larger than what a human can even briefly review and build a mental model about the inner workings within a reasonable amount of time. Reasonable meaning not considerable delaying the process. When deadlines loom and management adds pressure, this 'awareness' is the first thing that goes out the window.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never understood how one understands from reading code. Yes you can understand what that code does, but not why it was done that way instead of a different way. In the end I only understand it deeply if I end up writing it. Chatting through it is helpful to me, but having AI crank out code loses all of that context pretty quickly.
I’m not disagreeing. Just curious how you think about this, and if there are key parts of your process that help you stay contexted in.
Even code you write yourself, given enough time, you will forget the why unless you wrote comments. In a way comments are as much for you as they are for others.
Even before AI, understanding code you didn't write is essential to working on a team of other developers. If you can't understand the code from reading it, then that's part of the feedback loop - too complex, needs comments, etc..
On large teams you'll spend as much time reading code as you do writing it. And long term when it comes to writing maintainable code - the ability for others to read and understand it, including the why of it, is paramount. Your code could literally be around for decades.
Code is never missing contexts. If what your code is doing is not obvious to the reader, it is bad code that needs to be fixed. Things like cryptic low-level expressions should be extracted to helper functions with descriptive names or even extracted into a class, and classes need to comply with the single responsibility principle.
No, not really. You get spaghetti code by being unable to refactor your code to follow inconsistent level of detail across calls. That's the textbook definition.
Once you start to follow basic code quality and software engineering principles, you'll notice right away that your code becomes both easier to understand and to test.
And if you already know the material explained by the book, yes i don't need to write it to understand it.
As a result there's a whole universe of code where the how of it, the elegance, is the main thing, and what it's doing is putting characters on the screen a bit slower than the next thing but there are some amazing concepts that are supposed to make it all an axiomatic synthesis of how to think about code forever, replacing all precious concepts of thinking about code.
Now AI can think about code forever while doing nothing.
I do wonder how much of how people approach coding is shaped by the games they played when younger.
Keeping that many tasks in parallel, running all the time will kill you.
Your LLM has forgotten whatever shit it wrote when you opened a new tab, and that responsibility is now on you. And it wrote absolute dog shit
Either you follow everything it does, revise the plans, do the code review, manual adjustments, etc, or you run sessions in parallel, not being that attentive and constantly context-switch (also resulting in less attention I guess).
I fail to see the benefits honestly.
A calm attentive alternative of vibe coding: restful coding.
It's much easier to read and review code after a refreshing cat nap, especially with a real cat.
Too bad that's not usually acceptable to do that in the office. It should be! Slacking off by sword fighting all day is too exhausting.
Multitasking does not mean burnout. It just means you are not wasting time while idling. Multitasking was not invented for AI coding assistants. What do you think feature branches are used for?
Your feature branch is to put things aside and send them to CI, or wait and think on them. Not to have four of them running in parallel in your head frying you.
After you put together a plan, today's models can take well over a minute to execute it. Also, your work shifts to code review and executing acceptance tests, followed by either tweaking your current change or moving on to the next change.
This is really not about context changes. This is about not having to switch contexts because your focus stays on architecture+review instead of having to do deep dives to type code around.
> Your feature branch is to put things aside and send them to CI, or wait and think on them.
No, not really. Feature branches, as well as most types of branches, is to set aside work fronts that are in progress and run in parallel.
A full, whole, entire _minute_ ?! Sixty seconds ! Oh no, they must be optimized away, we do not deserve our free time like so, we should toil until we fall over because... Growth?
It's still context switching. Either what you're doing is surface enough that you don't give a shit, it doesn't matter and you don't review it anyways (so the only context is basically the prompt you wrote or the nth SELECT * FROM table CRUD piece of crap), or you're context switching and it's fucking you over. The context isn't about remembering how you write if err != nil, it's the expected behaviour of what you're working on.
You're not getting a promotion from doing this, you're getting burnout.
> Feature branches, as well as most types of branches, is to set aside work fronts that are in progress and run in parallel
They're not running in parallel, unless you use work trees. They were put to the side, because you can't continue or finish the work they're about. Even just three branches in parallel in a modestly active repo that happen to be long lived drift enough that just keeping them up to date with develop makes it a waste of time.
Focus on one or two things, and do them well.
That, or get checked for ADHD.
The scientific study of multitasking over the past few decades has revealed important principles about the operations, and processing limitations, of our minds and brains. One critical finding to emerge is that we inflate our perceived ability to multitask: there is little correlation with our actual ability. In fact, multitasking is almost always a misnomer, as the human mind and brain lack the architecture to perform two or more tasks simultaneously. By architecture, we mean the cognitive and neural building blocks and systems that give rise to mental functioning. We have a hard time multitasking because of the ways that our building blocks of attention and executive control inherently work. To this end, when we attempt to multitask, we are usually switching between one task and another. The human brain has evolved to single task.
If you honestly had any concern about loosing focus and being forced to context switch, a 1 minute pause idling while waiting for something to happen would represent the root cause of your context switch problems.
Yak driven development.
The majority of jobs are still paid on a 40 hour per week basis. Disappearing for a day each week (20%) won't fly when you're full time.
Now if it’s my job then I can’t have a knowledge debt and if Claude is down I’ll continue working manually because I know and understand and can continue without having to understand a lot of logic before continuing
then demand some lack-of-uptime compensation for a lack of uptime
I pretty significant number of their engineers flat out refused to work. Like publicly said so. "Increase our plan or I'm taking the week off."