Difficulty in proving understanding and capability in coding, especially in large codebases and collaborative environments

Signals over time

2 observed signals across 1 sources, tracked for 5 days. Confidence: low.

What people are saying Observed

• “Thank you for the kind words, I'm the author. Yes, this was a huge labour of love that took 100s of hours. "i'm assuming if you know what the code is doing you don't need to audit them..." I frankly disagree. Really depends on how you define "what the code does". If you need to know what a particular function will result in when you put an input into it, sure, yeah, you need to know how that code works. But if a function is one in a hundred thousand of other functions that all work together to do "something", it matters less how that function is implemented. What the code "does" here is provide a platform to run whatever applications you could want. A music player. A web browser. A game. An OS is an incredibly complicated system. I don't think anyone who is part of writing one these days knows what every line of code does, nor do they really need to be able to pick a random line and understand it. So what is the use of good code style and good documentation if nobody will read will ever be expected to pick a random line, read the documentation about what it does, and understand it? Made sense when code bases were relativel”

  Hacker News · complaint

• “> You know it's possible to READ too, right? yes, and how do you prove that you both read and understand the code? saying you understand it does nothing especially when you no longer write the code. > I have hundreds of repos at my job, some are in the 10s of thousands of lines of code, many are in the hundreds of thousands, and we still have a couple monoliths in the millions of lines of code range. Personal projects completely built with the LLM range in the 10s to 100s of thousands of lines. Who cares because how would you be able to prove that? I can say the same thing. > It's sustainable. LLMs have no problem working on all these projects and working on them across repos. You have no proof of that especiall at scale. If anything all you're telling me, especially with your hard to believe anecdotes, is that you're not very experienced and you're very imaginative. It's also hard to believe anything that you've written because it makes no sense unless everyone above you isn't technical because what you're doing wouldn't fly anywhere that wasn't just a really small shop in the middle of nowhere with one or two apps. &”

  Hacker News · frustration