Re:Devin, the First AI Software Engineer
by dukeyukey on Tuesday March 12, 2024 @08:04PM
(#39686419)
I wish this were the case. The amount of time I spend trying to talk principal engineers out of massive refractors because we want to get this out soon is near criminal.
Re:Devin, the First AI Software Engineer
by HarHarVeryFunny on Wednesday March 13, 2024 @10:03AM
(#39691319)
Sure, there's a tendency, even among relatively senior developers, to want to rewrite things to make them better, and it's certainly faster to put a band aid on it if you need to ship something fast.
The thing is though that technical debt and feature creep (away from flexibility anticipated by original design) are real, and sometimes a rewrite or refactor is the right thing to do - necessary so that simple things remain simple to add, and to able to continue shipping fast. It just takes quite a bit of experience to know when to NOT rewrite/refactor and when to do it.
Re:Devin, the First AI Software Engineer
by catchnear4321 on Tuesday March 12, 2024 @10:56PM
(#39687635)
sounds like you could use to shave a yak.
This is an important lesson that all SWEs should take to heart. Nobody cares about your novel algorithm. Nobody cares about your high availability architecture. Nobody cares about your millisecond network latency optimizations. The only thing that anyone actually using your software cares about is "Does the screen with lights and colors make the right lights and colors that solve my problem when I click on it?". Anything short of that is yak shaving if your role is not pure academic R&D.