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416 points floverfelt | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.234s | source
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skhameneh ◴[] No.45056427[source]
There are many I've worked with that idolize Martin Fowler and have treated his words as gospel. That is not me and I've found it to be a nuisance, sometimes leading me to be overly critical of the actual content. As for now, I'm not working with such people and can appreciate the article shared without clouded bias.

I like this article, I generally agree with it. I think the take is good. However, after spending ridiculous amounts of time with LLMs (prompt engineering, writing tokenizers/samplers, context engineering, and... Yes... Vibe coding) for some periods 10 hour days into weekends, I have come to believe that many are a bit off the mark. This article is refreshing, but I disagree that people talking about the future are talking "from another orifice".

I won't dare say I know what the future looks like, but the present very much appears to be an overall upskilling and rework of collaboration. Just like every attempt before, some things are right and some are simply misguided. e.g. Agile for the sake of agile isn't any more efficient than any other process.

We are headed in a direction where written code is no longer a time sink. Juniors can onboard faster and more independently with LLMs, while seniors can shift their focus to a higher level in application stacks. LLMs have the ability to lighten cognitive loads and increase productivity, but just like any other productivity enhancing tool doing more isn't necessarily always better. LLMs make it very easy to create and if all you do is create [code], you'll create your own personal mess.

When I was using LLMs effectively, I found myself focusing more on higher level goals with code being less of a time sink. In the process I found myself spending more time laying out documentation and context than I did on the actual code itself. I spent some days purely on documentation and health systems to keep all content in check.

I know my comment is a bit sparse on specifics, I'm happy to engage and share details for those with questions.

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1. osullivj ◴[] No.45060603[source]
Written code is an auditable entity in regulated businesses, like banks. Fowler suggests we get more comfortable with uncertainty because other eng domains have developed good risk mgmt. Cart before horse. Other engineering domains strive to mitigate the irreducible uncertainty of the physical world. AI adds uncertainty to any system. And there are many applications where increased uncertainty will lead to an increase in human suffering.