Comment by ulrikrasmussen
Comment by ulrikrasmussen a day ago
I know this is not an argument against LLM's being useful to increase productivity, but of all tasks in my job as software developer, hunting for and fixing obscure bugs is actually one of the most intellectually rewarding. I would miss that if it were to be taken over by a machine.
Also, hunting for bugs is often a very good way to get intimately familiar with the architecture of a system which you don't know well, and furthermore it improves your mental model of the cause of bugs, making you a better programmer in the future. I can spot a possible race condition or unsafe alien call at a glance. I can quickly identify a leaky abstraction, and spot mutable state that could be made immutable. All of this because I have spent time fixing bugs that were due to these mistakes. If you don't fix other people's bugs yourself, I fear you will also end up relying on an LLM to make judgements about your own code to make sure that it is bug-free.
> hunting for and fixing obscure bugs is actually one of the most intellectually rewarding. I would miss that if it were to be taken over by a machine.
That's fascinating to me. It's the thing I literally hate the most.
When I'm writing new code, I feel like I'm delivering value. When I'm fixing bugs, I feel like it's a frustrating waste of time caused by badly written code in the first place, making it a necessary evil. (Even when I was the one who wrote the original code.)