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Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by saghm on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:02AM (#50469584)
No, the reason not to learn your tools is if they're not your tools anymore, and something else is. I don't spend time trying to manually invoke filesystem APIs to create files in my work projects and instead will often just have my LSP do it when I declare a module and the file isn't found. I could memorize the exact sequence of system calls needed, but my employer would prefer I spend time on things that are more worthwhile to them.

I don't disagree that having a deterministic CLI is useful, but I'd argue that's not the question here, because the CLI is what the statistical machine will be using. The question is whether the time spend doing it manually is worthwhile compared to the tokens spend on it. I'd argue that if you instead learn how to pick the right model for the right job so that you don't use something way more expensive than needed for the task at hand, the token overhead will be extremely minimal for stuff like git operations; knowing that you can use something cheaper than like, Astra or Opus if all you want to do is a quick git cleanup and push is going to save your employer a lot more money in the long run than if you insist on doing every messy rebase by hand.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by nightdeployboy on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:27AM (#50469966)
While using LLMs is a great idea, it has become crucial to put safeguards in place to ensure that their use doesn't deviate from team practices or compromise security.
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by saghm on Thursday November 12, 2026 @12:08PM (#50470611)
I'd argue that these are not really specific to git (or even LLMs honestly); in terms of security, don't put company data into anything that your company hasn't given you explicit permission to put it into.

In terms of team practices, that basically seems like a code review thing. If my team has conventions around git, and a PR doesn't fit them, that's something I would point out regardless of how the PR was generated. If a team member is repeatedly not meeting the expectations we've all agreed upon, I would deal with it in the same way I always have; reach out and offer guidance for how to do things the way they're supposed to, notify my manager if they continue having trouble with it, and eventually just not bother looking at their PRs if they absolutely refuse to do things the way everyone else on the team has agreed they should be done.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by StrangeWill on Thursday November 12, 2026 @05:13PM (#50475094)
The point of knowing your tools is to stop escalating to other people every time something doesn't work with them.

Even if an LLM can hold your hand through everything, the disruption I've had because people don't understand what the LLM tool is doing, and ultimately does damage (we've had repos corrupted, systems taken offline, systems brought their knees, numerous data security incidents... it's been a fucking nightmare) is immense.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by saghm on Thursday November 12, 2026 @09:21PM (#50477263)
Repos corrupted? From arbitrary usage of a git client? I feel like it's been generally a bad idea to allow arbitrary force pushes for anything shared for a while before LLMs entered the picture.
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by StrangeWill on Thursday November 12, 2026 @10:40PM (#50477931)
Automation bias!

Even worse, it gave a developer a command to run that basically crushed all history across all branches, it was a mess to clean up and lost a significant amount of work. It wasn't Claude running it on its own, but was entirely driven by a mix of a developer's lack of understanding their tools, and trusting Claude's output too much.

This was also the dev trying to "remove a key he had accidentally committed" again, just letting Claude take the wheel.

Of course, the new team _also_ really loved leaning on AI so they were all behind his plan to "clean up the repo" and not just reset the key and move on.

It was a nightmare.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by zahlman on Thursday November 12, 2026 @10:25PM (#50477807)
The idea of saying the LLM is "my tool" as opposed to all the actual tools it calls, is about as appealing to me as saying the same about, say, Remote Desktop. "The statistical machine" is there to generate candidate actions, not to implement them.