How so? For any mature project (aka anything past launch), most PRs are very small and you spend more time analyzing the tradeoffs of the solution than writing it.
Yeah, any of these AI accelerationist threads make me feel like I'm working in some parallel universe.
Writing code has never been a bottleneck for me. Planning out a change across multiple components, adhering to both my own individual vision and the project direction and style, fixing things along the way (but only when it makes sense), comparing approaches and understanding tradeoffs, knowing how to interpret loose specs... that's where my time goes. I could use LLM assistance, but given all of the above, it's faster for me to write it myself than to try to distill all of this into a prompt.
And for most things, you already have a basic idea on how to implement it (or where to go to find information). But then you have to check your assumptions about the codebase and that's a time sink, especially in a collaborative environment. Like what is the condition for this modals to appear? And without realizing it, you're deep into the backend code deciphering the logic for a particular state with three design documents open and a slack chat going with 4 teammates.
If you have a good codebase, a good team, and strong product direction behind you a lot of the more abstract work you're describing goes away because most of those decisions were made weeks, months, or years ago by the time you're ready to put pen to paper on the actual code. Maybe that's part of why your experience is so different?
Sometimes, one of those decisions was right in the past, but is wrong in the current context (eg. the company is now trying to get governments contracts). Changing one of these have rippling effects on all the decisions, so you're trying to reconcile the two sets in a way that minimizes the need to rewrite code. It's more like a research lab than a factory assembly line.
Yes, it is because your job is to think
Those AI accelerationists are not thinking and, as such, are indeed boosted by a non-thinking machine
In the end, code is nothing but a way to map your intelligence into the physical world (using an interface called "computer")
One of the best tools for that task is rubber duck debugging. AI's are better than rubber ducks. Often not very much better, but sometimes an inane comment they make in reply triggers a eureka.
Exactly. One of my favorite things to do is to dump a code path into the context window and ask it to generate a mermaid sequence diagram or a class diagram explaining how everything is connected together.