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   Jason Gorman (jasongorman@mastodon.cloud)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 20:19:07 JST Jason Gorman

   "LLMs are helpful with boring, repetitive work"

   I can't help wondering if, in the long run, the better strategy is to address the repetition?

   • Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Jason Gorman (jasongorman@mastodon.cloud)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 20:19:17 JST Jason Gorman

     in reply to

     Repetition can be a signpost to a better design or a better process. Teams who say "Oh, we'll just get the intern to do that" (or, the 2024 version, "We'll just get Copilot to do that") often end up baking in the repetition, creating serious downstream headaches.

     Mass production has introduced a lot of boring, repetitive work. But it could be argued that software development is the opposite: we *remove* duplicated effort from information processes

     Why stop at our customer's?

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     Jeff Grigg (jeffgrigg@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 20:20:41 JST Jeff Grigg

     in reply to

     @jasongorman

     For decades, I've said that if you're doing long, boring, repetitive work in software development, then you're doing it wrong: You should extract reusable code, or automate it.

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     Florent Bécart (fbecart@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 20:21:46 JST Florent Bécart

     in reply to

     @jasongorman Thanks for these insights, I absolutely agree.

     2 examples come to my mind.

     1. boilerplate caused by the creation of interfaces:
     - maybe these interfaces are here for the wrong reasons? (e.g. they are creating abstraction at the wrong level)
     - maybe we should spend more time designing and documenting these interfaces?

     2. we should delegate testing to a QA person:
     - you should be able to test your own code. Are you really testing in the right way?

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Jason Gorman (jasongorman@mastodon.cloud)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 20:21:47 JST Jason Gorman

     in reply to

     "There’s repetition in code and there’s mind numbing amounts of redundancy. But it has to be there, to cross the Ts and dot the Is."

     Hmm.

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Jason Gorman (jasongorman@mastodon.cloud)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 20:21:58 JST Jason Gorman

     in reply to

     • Florent Bécart

     @fbecart I always encourage teams to pay attention to repetition. It's a hint as to what the design or the process really needs to be.

     When I illustrate this, I actually do use testing as the example. I get them to REPL test some code as they're writing it, and keep a count of the number of times they perform the same test. When it reaches 3 (The Rule of Three), I ask them to automate that test in a main() function.