At a previous job, my coworkers coined the term "Thomasing" [1], referring to me, as "the act of having a question explained so thoroughly, detailed, and long-winded that the asker has lost interest in the question that they were asking".
I thought it was pretty funny, because that does basically describe me in a nutshel.
[1] Lovingly, it was a good, fairly-tight-knit group, they weren't being jerks. We all did lighthearted ribbing.
zby 3 minutes ago [-]
The fact that programmers can be nerd sniped into yak shaving some random libraries is the only thing that keeps Open Source running.
dan_sbl 53 minutes ago [-]
This feels like what is really splitting the programming community right now- those that have typically enjoyed the journey, and those that just want to be at the destination as soon as possible.
_def 11 minutes ago [-]
In my experience it's not as simple and depends on a whole lot of circumstances: generally I am interested to learn and to build. Give me pressure through dysfunctional processes, understaffed teams, unrealistic standards, too strong peer opinions- etc - and I'll happily reach for the shortest path.
vidarh 31 minutes ago [-]
They are different things. There are projects where I deeply care about the code, and projects where I deeply care about the end result. And a whole lot in between, or that are entirely throwaway.
But I use AI also for some of the ones where I deeply care about the code, now. E.g. my terminal is in Ruby, and it worked well enough, but over the last couple of days I had Claude put together a test harness and burn down a number of sharp corners and refactor the code. It's not perfect still, but it's cleaner than it was because I didn't have time to do enough yak shaving myself. I do care about that codebase, because I have other things I want to use it for, and not having to do it all manually gave me enough time to get it to a far better state.
I feel like a lot of the split comes from people who are a whole lot less overcommitted. If you have way too many projects, you pick and choose which projects you want to lovingly care for and which ones you just want to advance the functionality of as fast as possible. Sometimes those are one and the same at different times.
add-sub-mul-div 37 minutes ago [-]
It makes me of the difference between the indie developer who labored over Stardew Valley vs. (for example) Square Enix putting out a farming sim because their committee of suits decided they wanted revenue from that genre.
pydry 33 minutes ago [-]
i think what's really splitting it might actually be differing levels of slop tolerance.
At a previous job, my coworkers coined the term "Thomasing" [1], referring to me, as "the act of having a question explained so thoroughly, detailed, and long-winded that the asker has lost interest in the question that they were asking".
I thought it was pretty funny, because that does basically describe me in a nutshel.
[1] Lovingly, it was a good, fairly-tight-knit group, they weren't being jerks. We all did lighthearted ribbing.
But I use AI also for some of the ones where I deeply care about the code, now. E.g. my terminal is in Ruby, and it worked well enough, but over the last couple of days I had Claude put together a test harness and burn down a number of sharp corners and refactor the code. It's not perfect still, but it's cleaner than it was because I didn't have time to do enough yak shaving myself. I do care about that codebase, because I have other things I want to use it for, and not having to do it all manually gave me enough time to get it to a far better state.
I feel like a lot of the split comes from people who are a whole lot less overcommitted. If you have way too many projects, you pick and choose which projects you want to lovingly care for and which ones you just want to advance the functionality of as fast as possible. Sometimes those are one and the same at different times.
https://youtube.com/shorts/kSJgLA1frS4?is=2RA7C0EDEe7Mg8Fp
https://www.ulaandlia.com/collections/mongolian-baby-yak-woo...
Oh wait, you meant figuratively!