Comment by lurking_swe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lurking_swe | Hacker News Reader

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This is sort of like asking “why do pilots still perform manual takeoffs and landing even though full autopilot is possible?” It’s because autopilot is intended to help pilots, not replace them. Too much could go wrong in the real world. Having some skills that you practice daily is crucial to remaining a good pilot. Similarly, it’s probably good to write some code daily to keep skills sharp.

1) when your cloud LLM has an outage, your manager probably still expects you to be able to do your work for the most part. Not to go home because openai is down lol. You being productive as an engineer should not depend on the cloud working.

2) You may want to manually write code for certain parts of the project. Important functions, classes, modules, etc. Having good auto-generated docs is still useful when using a traditional IDE like IntelliJ, WebStorm, etc.

3) Code review. I’m assuming your team does code review as part of your SDLC??? Documentation can be helpful when reviewing code.

> You being productive as an engineer should not depend on the cloud working.

lol where do you work? This obviously isn't true for the entire industry. If Github or AWS or your WiFi/ISP is down, productivity is greatly reduced. Many SaaS company don't have local dev, so rely on the cloud broadly being up. "Should" hasn't been the reality in industry for years.

My company deploys everything in the cloud, but we can still do some meaningful work locally for a few hours if needed in a pinch. Out gitlab is self hosted because that’s extra critical.

I continue writing code and unit tests while i wait for the cloud to work again. If the outage is a long time, I may even spin up “DynamoDB Local” via docker for some of our simpler services that only interact with DynamoDB. Our apache flink services that read from kafka are a lost cause obviously lol.

It’s also a good opportunity to tackle any minor refactoring that you’ve been hoping to do. Also possible without the cloud.

You can also work on _designing_ new features (whiteboarding, creating a design document, etc). Often when doing so you need to look at the source to see how the current implementation works. That’s much easier with code comments.

Well, the only thing i need to write code is to be alive. No Github or AWS? No problem, have local copies of everything. No Claude? ok, i have local llm to give some help. So, internet is not so needed to write code. No IDE's just a CLI? Sure all i need is a text editor and a compiler/linker working. No computer or electricity? Get a pen and paper and start writing code on paper, will get to the computer when possible. I do not depend on cloud working to be productive.

No pen a and paper? Compile it on fleshware.

It's not a question of what you can do, but where the comfort level reduction outweighs the project importance/pay.

You said productivity is greatly reduced. He said productivity should not stop.

You are making different points.

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