Hi Simon, sorry to spam your comments but 7 months ago you asked me for a media report to back a claim I made and this week it finally arrived. perhaps a little late to be very useful to anyone who maintains that gating function, but here nonetheless:
If that's what you're training for, sure. If you just want to be strong, you can achieve that and avoid the highest injury risk by sticking with 5 reps or so.
one reason i can imagine for this choice is that human review distributes new knowledge among human maintainers. Automated review might discourage that valuable interaction.
The comment is an artefact of an inherently valuable process, not the sole objective. So I'd prefer code is reviewed by a human who maybe initiates a discussion with an agent. I'd hope this minor workflow detail encourages the human to take a more active lead, rather than risk mere ceremonial approval.
I think it's mistaken to think in terms of 'falling behind' or 'catching up'
I've seen that these tools have different uses for different devs. I know on my current team, each of us devs works very differently to one another, and we make significant allowances to accommodate for one another's different styles. Certain tasks always go to certain devs; one dev is like a steel trap, another is the chaos explorer, another's a beginner, another has great big-picture perspective, etc. (not sure why but there's even space for myself ;)
In the same way, different devs use these powerful tools in very different ways. So don't imagine you're falling behind, because the only useful benchmark is yourself. And don't imagine you can wait for consensus: you'll still need to identify your personal relationship to the tools.
Most of all, don't be discouraged. Even if you never embrace these tools, there will remain space for your skills and your style of approaching our shared work.
Give it another 10 years and I'm sure this will all become clearer...
I’ve become comfortable with using LLMs as “trusted advisors.”
I am not [yet] ready to just let an agent write a whole app or server for me, but I am increasingly letting them write a whole function for me.
They are also great “bug finders.” I can just feed some code, describe the symptoms, and ask for an observation. I often get great suggestions, including things like finding typos and copy/pasta problems.
I find that just this limited application has significantly increased my development velocity, and, I believe, the quality of my work.
