ThePrimeagen

@theprimeagen · 31 positions · On ppll ↗

Michael Paulson, known online as ThePrimeagen, a programmer who spent ten years at Netflix and now streams and teaches programming full time on Twitch and YouTube.

ThePrimeagen did not write this page.

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What ThePrimeagen says most about

developer tools 4

The editor does not make the programmer, but never learning your editor well says something about your character as one.
For an experienced programmer the bottleneck is usually not thinking but typing, getting what is already in your head into the editor fast enough.

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LLMs 4

The next attack on open source is denial of attention: LLM-generated fake bug reports that exhaust and demoralise maintainers.
AI helps exactly as far as the work is predictable and well documented, and stops helping on anything cutting edge.

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AI and jobs 3

Leaning on AI trades knowledge for speed, and the price may be a generation of programmers in which juniors stay juniors forever.
Every improvement in computing so far has produced more jobs, not fewer.

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design 2

Tech's self-image as the smart people designing for dummies includes nobody, and it deserves to be destroyed.
A project only shows you whether your design decisions were any good at around five to ten thousand lines, and that is where the most learning happens.

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software quality 2

Coding with an AI assistant slides from copiloting into autopiloting, and the bugs that follow are hard to trace.
Most of software is not the new stuff; it is old, crappy code somebody has to maintain, and it is full of genuinely hard problems.

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