Some of the statistics in the article included audiobooks as reading. It seems like they must trigger at least a subset of the qualities of reading (like maintaining an imagined environment, parsing sentences and paragraphs into meaning, etc)
Thought experiment: if you can solve a problem with 100 lines of dependency free code, or with 10,000 lines of code that depends on hundreds of things - which is better?
There's an obvious answer of course. And that is the direction that these effective senior engineers move towards.
I'm sure this is gated by where you work (especially by how technically savvy your manager is), but the most effective contributors at my job tend to be the ones with near-zero (or sub-zero!) net LoC.
LLMs are prolific and they love to add shit. Truly capable engineers are able to achieve more business outcomes with less code / fewer moving parts.
Exactly this. Just this week an engineer who seems to purely vibe everything submitted a +700ish LoC fix for what seemed like a pretty simple issue. Moreover it was a perf issue, which in my experience is not usually best fixed by adding more stuff.
Today, I merged my fix, net -381 LoC.
I'm using them too of course, they read and type and hunt for bugs and test faster than I can. But I'm using them as my tool, not being a tool using them.
I've noticed and felt this trend, but I haven't ever seen it put so well or really connected the dots with figma & pretty rectangles.
I remember discussions over relative easy of use of gray box wireframes... and that led to better products.
Now I've got designers vibing monstrosities that would have fit right in in the Flash era, I guess in order to draw even nicer rectangles now that execs than wave at AI and get a design.