How much time is actually spent writing code?
How much time is actually spent writing code?
Posted Feb 16, 2026 22:24 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)In reply to: How much time is actually spent writing code? by marcH
Parent article: Poisoning scraperbots with iocaine
Granted, there is a lot of Visual Basic etc. that has never been written by more than one person, read by less than one and that person's main job is not software engineering. Maybe not engineering at all. I think _this_ is where AI-generated code might have value.
I fall squarely into the category of people who program for work only occasionally, and I'm skeptical that AI would help that much. The hard part for me has always been understanding the problem I'm trying to solve in enough detail to figure out what a solution looks like. Actually implementing whatever solution I come up with is usually pretty easy in comparison. In practice, understanding the problem in enough detail is an iterative process, where I think I've solved it only to discover there was an unexpected corner case I hadn't known enough to consider when I started out. I think that gets back to something Fred Brooks said in TMMM: a lot of debugging is actually debugging the specification. An AI coding assistant might be nice, but it isn't going to debug the specification for me.