logoalt Hacker News

gopalvyesterday at 8:40 PM1 replyview on HN

> We'll need to figure out the techniques and strategies that let us merge AI code sight unseen

Every strategy which worked with an off-shore team in India works well for AI.

Sometime in mid 2017, I found myself running out of hours in the day stopping code from being merged.

On one hand, I needed to stamp the PRs because I was an ASF PMC member and not a lot of the folks who were opening JIRAs were & this wasn't a tech debt friendly culture, because someone from LinkedIn or Netflix or EMR could say "Your PR is shit, why did you merge it?" and "Well, we had a release due in 6 days" is not an answer.

Claude has been a drop-in replacement for the same problem, where I have to exercise the exact same muscles, though a lot easier because I can tell the AI that "This is completely wrong, throw it away and start over" without involving Claude's manager in the conversation.

The manager conversations were warranted and I learned to be nicer two years into that experience [1], but it's a soft skill which I no longer use with AI.

Every single method which worked with a remote team in a different timezone works with AI for me & perhaps better, because they're all clones of the best available - specs, pre-commit verifiers, mandatory reviews by someone uncommitted on the deadline, ease of reproducing bugs outside production and less clever code over all.

[1] - https://notmysock.org/blog/2018/Nov/17/


Replies

mentalgearyesterday at 10:27 PM

> Every strategy which worked with an off-shore team in India works well for AI.

Why hasn't SWE then not been completely outsourced for 20 years. Corporations were certainly trying hard.