Oct 29, 2026, 9:00 PMWhenever I read about speeding up software development by speeding up the "typing in" side of the task, I'm mostly just confused.
My own experience of writing software is that I'm spending 90% of the time clarifying the problem to myself. I suppose the experience will vary substantially based on the type of software one writes, and presumably other factors as well.
Either way, clearly some people have a very different experience than I do.
@hko 90% of my time is conversing with others to figure out the few lines of code they want me to write!
Oct 29, 2026, 10:14 PM
Oct 29, 2026, 9:16 PM@hko For people who had previously needed to talk to programmers to get their ideas turned into code they could look at, yes, that was "the" noticeable bottleneck.
Or even just the intimidating one. (I suspect more people could have written code but were scared of it.)
The other stuff, clarifications while typing, and iterating back and forth haven't gone away (and now more people get exposed to this), but were previously hidden, and required more levels of indirection.
Oct 29, 2026, 9:17 PM@larsmb I was very specifically thinking about experienced code typers, with a CS-type background
Oct 29, 2026, 9:24 PM@hko Ah. I'd still guess people can, in fact, benefit in terms of both quantity and quality, if they so chose to play the devil's keyboard.
But probably not 100x or even 10x.
And yes, I very much wish this wasn't true.
Oct 29, 2026, 9:29 PM@larsmb Today's FSFE presentation made me once again wonder about the extremely wide gap between some people clearly being very excited to engage with code generation, and my own sense that I'm a) extremely disinterested in getting mixed up with the ethics of these things, but also b) wondering which parts of my own code-typing experience could possibly be sped up at all (without losing the core product, which to me is gaining some understanding of what I actually wanted to ask the computer for)
Oct 29, 2026, 9:53 PM@hko Ah, I missed you were on it (I joined remotely and was hiking while listening 🙂)!
I didn't really want to engage either. But when I had to, I found them useful.
I think this aspect may be the almost proverbial "build vs understand", "scientist vs engineer" etc split?
I'd never casually use it for something I want/need to fully understand. But that doesn't describe all my problems. For some, understanding (even a subset of) the constraints can be sufficient for them to be "solved".
Oct 29, 2026, 9:21 PM@hko I'm not going to believe that it speeds up things 100x as some fools claim, but if someone claims 0 improvement I'd also look very closely at their use case.
I'd guess that it's a modest improvement individually in the two digit percentages when all is accounted for; incredible, but not hypeable enough.
And it greatly broadens the pool. (With all the good and bad implications of removing skill barriers.)
The ethics still are fucked.
Oct 29, 2026, 9:31 PM@hko also I find that most insights come where just typing the code, the readme, etc. not sure how to get that staring at a prompt box...