toebert

I’ll also say 5 but I have my gripes with it. Mainly with the “review from any other engineer” aspect that usually comes with it… I have met so many engineers whose review seems to just depend on who created the MR, as opposed to what’s in it. When an MR with 500+ lines changed gets reviewed in about 10s after requesting it, it’s kinda obvious that the system is broken.

The people I’ve worked with who are good at their job and I’d probably be okay with them merging their changes without reviews would always ask for a review, even when it’s not mandatory or enforced. And their MR would already have comments by themselves around bits I might have a question around, and they’d even come with prompts of what they want input on. Whereas the people I wish wouldn’t even be allowed to approve anything would usually ask for an approval instead (even the wording seems telling). Sadly, often these 2 groups will have the same job title and HR will dictate that they should have the same permissions and say in things, which is what usually breaks the system IMO.

And lastly, the amount of people who seem to treat reviews as currency/favours and just rubber stamp each others MRs without looking…sigh.

Yes. I have tried various agents over the last ~1.5 years on multiple occasions on a bunch of different kinds of engineering type tasks. So far there has been a total of 1 time where the output was reasonable enough that I could build on it and not feel ashamed of the result (and that time probably saved me like half an hour). All other times, I wasted a bunch of time debugging crap and then just wrote the thing from scratch myself.

The closest I’ve come to somewhat consistent success with them is when I struggled to come up with a good search query for an issue I was having and after asking a longer prompt to an LLM it either gave me a close enough answer that I could figure it out from there, or the answer included some keywords that helped me come up with a query that got the results I needed.

By and large, I consider them crap for anything beyond the basics. On the other hand, I absolutely understand why they may look great in cases where the person using them doesn’t have an idea of what the output should look like. They’re a minimal productivity boost at best, at an insane cost.

I never pre-order, there is no benefit.

Early access is misleading, there are games which are “released” and would barely count as early access and vice-versa, so I just treat them equally.

The criteria for me is that based on reviews or some gameplay footage it seems like I can get £1/hour worth of enjoyment out of it. I tend to look for how many hours do people have when they leave reviews and how many have they played since, rather than just what they say. If I’m unsure if I’ll like it and there is not enough videos or reviews to give me certainty, i may take a risk on £10 and below games depending on how bored I am at the time.

This is true but there is a matter of being able to split up work into multiple pieces easily and prioritise between services. E.g. the piece of legacy service that nobody likes to touch, has no tests and is used for 2% of traffic can take its’ time getting sorted out without blocking all the other services moving on.

You still have to do it and it should be ASAP, but there are more options on how to manage it.