beder · HackerTrans

5 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Yes, this is absolutely right (for some sufficiently complicated prompt). Borges wrote a great short story that explores this idea, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", where Menard, a fictional 20th century author, "wrote" Don Quixote as an original work.

beder

9 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

This is how I read it too. What's more, it looks like they're interested in going senior -> staff; at all Large Tech Companies, senior is a perfectly reasonable "terminal" role for a SWE, and many SWEs don't want to get promoted to staff. (Staff SWE is a different job from senior SWE; you might not want want to do that job, and that's typically fine.)

So I think the lesson here is wrong too - when the manager said

> These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams

that didn't mean they were worthless tasks - just that they weren't business priorities and had no impact on customers or other teams. Which is probably true(ish - I would have phrased it very differently if I were their manager).

Improving the release process is great, and helps the team a ton - and indirectly helps customers by enabling the team to ship faster. This is incredibly valuable! And at the right scale, it can be a staff job: at my Large Tech Company, I know several people that have been promoted to staff SWE for this kind of work, but it's for systems that hundreds of SWEs work on. I also know people that have been promoted to senior SWE for this kind of work - these are systems that tens of SWEs work on. It sounds like this example was more like that - this person was doing a good senior SWE job, and the manager didn't see any reason to course correct given that they had given no signal they wanted to get promoted.

beder

10 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I agree, and even moreso, it's easy to see the (low!) cost of throwing away an implementation. I've had the AI coder produce something that works and technically meets the spec, but I don't like it for some reason and it's not really workable for me to massage it into a better style.

So I look up at the token usage, see that it cost 47 cents, and just `git reset --hard`, and try again with an improved prompt. If I had hand-written that code, it would have been much harder to do.

beder

10 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

A very pedantic point, but merge keys are not part of the YAML spec [1]! Merge keys are a custom type [2], which may optionally be applied during the construction phase of loading. I definitely wouldn't say that merge keys are integral to anchors.

(Also, as a personal bias, merge keys are really bad because they are ambiguous, and I haven't implemented them in my C++ yaml library (yaml-cpp) because of that.)

[1]: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

[2]: https://yaml.org/type/merge.html

beder

ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

At one point at Google, there was a huge chunk of code that was hard to understand, probably at the wrong place in the network stack, and stubbornly hard to change. And it kept growing, despite our efforts. We renamed it "[Foo]Sorcery" (this was about 10 years ago); people stopped trying to add to it, and periodically someone would come in and remove parts of it, all thanks (I think) to the goofy (and somewhat scary) name.

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