I think the idea is to pay these people to deduplicate and verify vulnerability reports, so the responsibility doesn’t fall on every maintainer to do that same process individually, so they can focus on fixing the real bugs.

I love that nobody watched anything on Yahoo! Screen except for that one season of Community

Like, you might have someone working on something in a new codebase but misunderstanding the architecture or just going in the wrong direction in general and a review is the best way to correct course before getting too far in

I think the article is suggesting this person should be pair programmed with until they understand the architecture and can be trusted to contribute correctly, and I actually kind of agree - it always feels terrible to tell someone a PR they’ve worked on possibly for days is completely the wrong direction, and arguably this is already ‘too far in’ if they’re going to need to essentially start again.

Intervening earlier in the process should lead to less wasted effort overall, but people often seem to treat pair programming like its two people at 50% efficiency, when it actually saves a lot of cycle time on reviewing code.

I didn’t say programming is unecessary, and I’m a proffesional software engineer with a degree in computer science. When I say ‘learn to code’ is over I mean the pressure for anyone and everyone to learn to code because there are so many well paying software engineer jobs.

This era is over undoubtedly, because all the people who never really cared about software engineering and are just there to collect a paycheck are going to be replaced - but the profession of software engineering will still be necessary, and the abstract maths of computer science isn’t going anywhere as a field of research.

‘Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.’

Study computer science if you like it, it’s never been about making good ‘coders’ or software engineers.

I don’t think the number of software engineers will ever drop to zero, but the days of ‘learn to code’ to get a high paying job guaranteed are definitely over.

Any service you depend on in the modern world, you need to be asking yourself ‘what will I do when this enshitifies itself’. And it is a when.

Short termism on all sides is destroying our society.

This. Code is a liability not an asset

Exactly this. I was taught not to point a gun at anything I don’t intend to destroy, even if I believe it not to be loaded.

Anything less than that is negligent manslaughter at the least if the gun ‘goes off’ ‘by accident’, because you should never be in that situation.

Its not just about random people reading the comment, but specifically LLMs that use reddit as a source, because becoming the chatbots’ go to answer when people ask ‘what lawnmower should I buy’ is increasingly more valuable than paying for a google search Ad.

I feel like there are two concepts be at confused here. ‘Mocking’ is just replacing an actual implementation with one that reports its usage, so calls or lack thereof can be asserted to occur, and tests can fail if that condition is not met. They usually allow setting side effects and return values on a per call basis also, to inject different behaviours for covering different code paths easily.

The question is then how do I get a class like DatabaseWrapper to call into an underlying mockDB instead of the normal realDB? The answer, in static languages is dependency injection: the db object must be constructed externally to the wrapper, and passed in in such a way that any object with the same interface is acceptable.

This allows the tests to pass in a mock with the same interface, and have the class being tested accept it. The class will then run as usual when its methods are called, but we can make assertions about how it uses its dependency. In some languages, such as python (and it seems JavaScript as well) this can be bypassed by monkey-patching the private member dynamically after the object has been constructed to be the mock instead of the real.

Personally, I don’t think this leads to good design. Dependency injection also allows for a nice port and adapter pattern, were in the future we might replace our SQL database with a MongoDB one, and we have to rip up the application, instead of just implementing a new db class that meets the interface, and injecting that into the wrapper instead.

While my experience is mostly C++, I assume these mocking libraries are similar in allowing you to create a class that can report it’s own usage, and allow for arbitrary returns values and side effects, which is incredibly useful, especially in conjunction with dependency injection.

What patch lets you do is directly overwrite the functionality of private member functions on the fly, which if Java/JavaScript can do I’d love to know, I thought this was a uniquely Pythonic magic.

Oh I’m fully aware that python lets you cheat dependency injection with patch, its one of the many things python teaches developers to do wrong, which leads them to be unable to use any other language.

Exactly, have fun trying to get test coverage without dependency injection

Reminds me of

Torpenhow Hill is a hill in Cumbria, England. Its name consists of the Old English ‘Tor’, the Welsh ‘Pen’, and the Danish ‘How’ - all of which translate to modern English as ‘Hill’. Therefore, Torpenhow Hill would translate as hill-hill-hill hill

This is 100% the answer, the only solution to the model decay from LLM outputs overwhelming the web is to start collecting data IRL.

This is also why companies like OpenAI are desperately investing in ‘AI wearables’ that no-one wants. They have to get the unpolluted data from somewhere, and recording real conversations will at least mostly have come from actual humans instead of AI.

I’m a software engineer and I’ll discuss it with you, rather than just down voting and walking away.

Your use case for AI allows it to excel. Writing self contained scripts and small pieces of functionality for automation is a great use case for AI, but it isn’t what software engineers do. There is a saying that you won’t have a design problem in a code base under 10,000 lines, then all you have is design problems, and this is what AI is bad at. It can’t maintain or update or extend much larger code bases, and it can’t interpret user vagueries into concrete requirements and features.

For me it is useful for prototyping, and for boilerplate code where I know exactly what I want but its faster to prompt it than to type it all out. I wouldn’t use it for anything critical without carefully reviewing every line it generates, which would take longer than just writing the damn code.

I also have a big problem with the reliance a lot of people are building on AI. Remember how every other service you’ve used goes through ‘enshitification’? This will happen to AI. Once they need to be profitable and the shareholders need to get paid, the features will get worse and the prices will go up, and you will have to pay those prices if you can’t work without it. Just something to bear in mind.

Use it if it’s useful. Don’t become reliant on it. You seem interested in coding, why not try coding something simple yourself? Try looking up the documention to see if you can use your wet brain first, and only go to the AI after. You might find you actually enjoy it, or solve problems faster because you remember how you solved them before.

For playing with, rather than ‘serious’ projects

Alternatively, following their logic, keep the number of people and achieve massively higher productivity. But they don’t want that, they want to reduce the number of people having opinions and diluting the share pool, because its not about productivity, its about exerting control.

Sorry but what even is a ‘technical 1v1’?

Unit tests are exactly for code that is often rewritten, because it ensures that whatever interface still behaves the same, regardless of the implementation. This a large portion of the point of unit tests: not for testing the initial implementation but confirming that any subsequent implementation behaves the same.