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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Before I started using advanced IDEs that could navigate project structures very quickly, it was …

Before I started using advanced IDEs that could navigate project structures very quickly, it was normal to have a relatively poor visibility -- call it "fog of war/code". In a 500,000 line C++ project (I have seen a few in my career), as a junior dev, I might only understand a few thousand lines from a few files I have studied. And, I had very little idea of the overall architecture. I see LLMs here as a big opportunity. I assume that most huge software projects developed by non-tech companies look pretty similar -- organic, and poorly documented and tested.

Original discussionAt Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work867 source comments · at import
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MA

> AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Reading "couldn't" as, you would technically not be able to do it because of the complexity or intricacy of the problem, how did you guarantee that the change offered by the AI made proper sense and didn't leave out critical patterns that were too complex for you to detect ? Your comment makes it sound like you're now dependent on AI to refactor again if dire consequences are detected way down the line (in a few months for instance), and the problem space is already just not graspable by a mere human. Which sounds really bad if that's the case.

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MA

What do you think about software such as source insight that gives developers an eagle eye of view of the project?

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GU

That's what documentation is for. If you don't have that, AI won't figure it out either.

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