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Comment by sanex | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe how many people are in favor of it. Like it's so positive in the comments I'd think it's astroturfing. The code is the result of my work however it got done, and if I don't document or explain it well enough then that's a separate issue. Did you want to see my slack messages to my mentor too? Or how about all the stack overflows I read? Maybe I should voice record all the times I swore about Gary the junior dev not documenting something? It's plenty obvious when the code is AI written it's probably just safe to assume 95% of things have been at least AI assisted. Just look at the drop in SO volume, we're not writing less code we're writing more (rip GitHub uptime).

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100% agree with this. Want my browser search history too so you can see my thought process?

This is terrible. I have no desire to read your Claude conversation. I don’t even want to read mine if I do use Claude.

The code is the artifact. There’s no value in trying to make the noisy, verbose conversation one. It’ll likely be dead in future years anyway.

I disagree with this. The code alone is not the artifact. How you came to the decision to write the code in a certain way is certainly an important artifact of the development process. Otherwise how would your coworkers know whether or not a particular piece of logic is still relevant?

By commenting your code?

Ok, but folks aren't even writing their own code, you think they'll go back and comment generated code? They often don't even look at the implementation that closely.

Also, while commenting is good, commit messages can stick around longer.

> How you came to the decision to write the code in a certain way is certainly an important artifact of the development process. Otherwise how would your coworkers know whether or not a particular piece of logic is still relevant

Not really. Why is always more important than how. Even what is more important. Relevancy of a particular block of code is in the specs and some technical aspecs of computing/library/platform, not in the thought process of the developer.

How did you before LLMs 3 years ago?

Same way I do now, I write what prompted the change in the commit message.

Fwiw i don't like a session link in the commit message, because of link rot reasons.

I agree and disagree. It all comes down to how much a human was involved with the code.

If the code is artisan to any degree (authored, edited, reviewed, etc.), it's a bit ridiculous.

It does makes sense to me if the human driver was hands-off the code because the conversation becomes the artifact.

I'm older, and have very mixed feelings about the latter case but it seems inevitable that engineers will be working at a higher level where conversational governance becomes important. We'll stop this charade of hiding AI contributions behind human identities. (Note: I don't think conversation IDs are what we need but it's a step down this path.)

> Did you want to see my slack messages to my mentor too?

Are they relevant questions? I've often commented on lines of code in a PR that "so and so gave me the idea".

> Or how about all the stack overflows I read?

Would be nice to link to them either in a code comment (if they're not changed very much) or again somewhere in the PR discussion

> Maybe I should voice record all the times I swore about Gary the junior dev not documenting something?

If you noticed something severely lacking that would help other people out if that wasn't the case then yes I hope you would bring it up?

On the potential astroturfing, check the account age. I double-check in forums with decade-old accounts before buying stuff right now. Workable line of defense against pollution.

A list of relevant SO posts is very much useful and something I occasionally include in a comment or commit message as a reference for some weird looking code.

Sure it is but there's nothing so helpful here. The prompt is usually here's the ticket and then telling it not to use so many silly comments and calling so and so an asshole for doing something a stupid way.

What's your opinion on bibliographies?

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