Small programming tricks
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Small bits of programming knowledge can yield disproportionate productivity gains.
The author argues that engineering productivity often comes from small, high-leverage tricks like using `python3 -m http.server`, `git log -S pattern` ("git pickaxe"), or `explain analyze` in Postgres/MySQL. These nuggets require little supporting knowledge but can save significant time. They extend to company-specific knowledge-debugging sources, key people, useful utilities-and suggest sharing one trick daily with a team to compound these gains without overwhelming anyone.
What commenters are saying
Commenters split on how much hand-coding remains in an LLM era. Several academic commenters report rarely coding manually, using LLMs for discovery and orchestration instead. Others, particularly in niche or performance-critical domains (e.g., network security, functional-programming frameworks for C#), still hand-code because LLM output requires as much review time as writing from scratch, or because their work falls outside LLM training data. A few note they still use shell tricks daily even when relying on LLMs for code generation.