It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist
Yet most of the time of a developer was spent in writing code.
That’s what developers told the world. Now they’re exposed, it never really took that long to write the code. (Only partly joking.)
Actually, a whole lot of time went into reading other developers’ code, getting documentation in sync with the actual implementation. And if you didn’t do all that, you tended to have a lot more bugs / vulnerabilities, etc. The LLMs are wicked fast at reviewing code, they don’t find ALL the problems, a lot of problems they do find aren’t worth fixing, but they do find more actual actionable problems per minute than most developers can find per hour in a big code base.
That’s what developers told the world. Now they’re exposed, it never really took that long to write the code. (Only partly joking.)
Actually, a whole lot of time went into reading other developers’ code, getting documentation in sync with the actual implementation. And if you didn’t do all that, you tended to have a lot more bugs / vulnerabilities, etc. The LLMs are wicked fast at reviewing code, they don’t find ALL the problems, a lot of problems they do find aren’t worth fixing, but they do find more actual actionable problems per minute than most developers can find per hour in a big code base.