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Comment by brailsafe | Hacker News Reader

> I really don't agree with the idea that expert time would just be spent typing, and I'd be really surprised if that's the common sentiment around here.

They didn't suggest that at all, they merely suggested that the component of the expert's work that would otherwise be spent typing can be saved, while the rest of their utility comes from intense scrutiny, problem solving, decision making about what to build and why, and everything else that comes from experience and domain understanding.

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It's not just time spent typing. Figuring out what needs to be typed can be both draining and time consuming. It's often (but not always) much easier to review someone else's solution to the problem than it is to solve it from scratch on your own.

Oddly enough security critical flows are likely to be one of the few exceptions because catching subtle reasoning errors that won't trip any unit tests when reviewing code that you didn't write is extremely difficult.

The problem is, building something IS the destination. At least the first 5-10 times. Building and fixing along the way is what builds lasting knowledge for most people.

> It's not just time spent typing. Figuring out what needs to be typed can be both draining and time consuming. It's often (but not always) much easier to review someone else's solution to the problem than it is to solve it from scratch on your own.

This is EXTREMELY false. When you write the code you [remember] it, it's fresh in your head, you [know] what it is doing and exactly what it's supposed to do. This is why debugging a codebase you didn't wrote is harder than one you wrote, if a bug happens you know exactly the spots it could be happening at and you can easily go and check them.

Time spent typing is statistically 0% of overall time spent in developing/implementing/shipping a feature or product or whatever. There's literally no reason to try to optimize that irrelevant detail.

No it's not. It's close to 50%.

If that's the case for you, then let me tell you, you're doing something wrong. It might not be you, it might be your team, or organization, but this is definitely not a normal experience.

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