> As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins".

This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other. Good doctors often refuse to give any drugs or any advice until they understand the whole situation properly.

If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back against behaviour you don't like. You have the authority. "Hm, interesting question. I'm going to need more context before I can give you my point of view. Can you give me a quick overview of the system architecture / explain what actual problems you're trying to solve with this approach?"

> If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back against behaviour you don't like. You have the authority. "Hm, interesting question. I'm going to need more context before I can give you my point of view. Can you give me a quick overview of the system architecture / explain what actual problems you're trying to solve with this approach?"

One of us misunderstood the GP; I understood him to mean that, because he did not write the code, he was not able to answer the questions based on that code.

You seem to think he meant that he could not answer questions on someone else's code.

> This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other.

Off topic, but this must be a USA-specific problem, where prescription drugs are actually marketed at Joe consumer. I think there is maybe one other country where this insane practice is allowed. Nowhere else are patients told to “Ask your doctor about Procrapin for your irritable bowl syndrome!!”

While prescription drug marketing to consumers is an issue in the US, I think the actual problem in this situation is people Googling their issue then coming to the doctor with the conclusion of their investigation instead of letting the doctor do the investigation themselves.

i think this is large part due to the horrific healthcare system we have here in the US. I have personally witnessed family struggle to get help from doctors because they don't interact with a patient's health outside of immediate action items like filling a prescription, writing a summary, charting, writing a referral, etc. They spend 0 time looking into what could actually be wrong with them outside of their immediate knowledge/guess. I would like to think this is due to the shortage of doctors we have here (self inflicted) and the high demands we place on them. It really just sucks to be told to take some med, wait 3 months, and then have to communicate for them between doctors while filling out the same form 3 times.

You stole what I was about to write out from under me. This is exactly it.

Yeah. Especially in the era of doctor ChatGPT.

Sometimes patients will also have an expired prescription from a different doctor, and they want a top-up. Good doctors check. Just because some other doctor prescribed some drug 3 months ago doesn't mean its actually the right choice, or the right choice now.

Its not just a US thing. I have a few GP friends here in Australia. They complain about it too.

While I'm sure the US has its quirks, this is not a US-only "problem" (not a health expert so I'm not sure if it's even a problem to begin with).

I live in Norway and have heard from lots of people (coworkers, friends, acquaintances) that doctors are very reluctant to prescribing anything at all - the running joke is that they'll advise you to "get some fresh air and go for a walk" even if you just broke your leg in half

In The Netherlands, the joke (mainly amongst expats), well actually frustration, is that they just send you home with some paracetamol and come back after two weeks if the complaints don’t stop.

As someone from The Netherlands myself, I’m fairly frustrated with our healthcare system being like this, optimizing for GPs being the gatekeeper to the specialist healthcare system, and as such being super reluctant to actually help us.

To be clear: one of my siblings is a GP and they themselves are frustrated by this as well but can’t change the system. It’s the half privatized / half socialized toxic combination that stings here.

I had to go to another country to get some of my symptoms taken seriously.

To be clear: no amount of “but I’ll pay myself for this study” helps. It’s just not possible. It’s super moronic.

Never mind the fact that specialist healthcare is super distributed, without any central oversight, and you have to behave like your own project manager when you’re being taken care of.

Healthcare is a mess in most of the developed world, probably because it’s incredibly expensive.

>the running joke is that they'll advise you to "get some fresh air and go for a walk" even if you just broke your leg in half

Same in the Netherlands. Except it's not a joke and I've met enough people who've suffered avoidable long-term effects by apathetic doctors, including yours truly.

I don't know in other countries, but in Spain you definitely don't go to the doctor asking for anything more complex than a paracetamol.

You tell the doctor your symptoms, he explores you and perform any tests considered appropriate, and the doctor decides the prescription.

I also come from a country where the doctor decides the prescription.

But you might have prior experience and preference.

A friend of mine always asks "Hey, can you bring antibiotics back?" when I go on vacation somewhere where access is easier.

Doctors here will give you a hard time if you want it.

I think that's how it should be. But sometimes you know you need antibiotics.

It's not exclusive to the USA. Happens every single day here in Brazil too. Prescriptions expire, but people still need their medications, so they come in for routine consults. Good opportunity to reevaluate the patient and make adjustments if necessary.

> Procrapin

Perfect

> Can you give me a quick overview of the system architecture

I think what the OP is saying is that it's the OP's job to know that, and didn't, because they over leverage the LLM.

Like if a doctor was brought in on a cardio consult on their patient because they had a maybe unrelated heart condition, and the only thing they could answer to "why did you prescribe cemidine instead of decimine" is "lemme get back to you on that."

> If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back against behaviour you don't like. You have the authority.

Not just that, but it seems like the grandparent had issues understanding what they were talking about. This is absolutely fine, and they should have just asked to continue explaining more until the problem was fully understood.

It’s obvious your opinion is important, but it’s not worth a lot if you don’t understand what the actual problem is.

Also, I personally don’t like to appeal to authority (not sure if that is what you meant), and instead just use the Socratic method to keep asking questions until they themselves understand the weaknesses. It’s a very friendly way of doing things.

What kind of place do you work where you get dragged into a meeting halfway through and then are peppered with technical questions without context, that you're expected to answer on the spot? Please let us know because I'm sure a lot of us want to avoid such a place.

"I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.

Not OP, but similar context (~20yr exp.). You absolutely can get away with "I'll need to dig more into this to give you a good answer" but you are _for sure_ expected to have at least some answer ready-to-go. Especially if it's under your purview.

I don’t think it was made clear: the questions were about the code op “wrote” but they used a llm so couldn’t remember any of it. Probably got there from a git blame. This happens.

The implication is that, in the past, such a meeting would be fine, because they're an expert in what they've authored. It's "hey can you join for 5 minutes" because, in the past, they'd have had deep knowledge off the top of their head of the things they'd committed under their name.

But now they're not an expert in the code they've recently committed.

Maybe that's OK and expectations need to change, but I'd bet there are a lot of cases where the organization really wants to produce a (code, expert-in-the-code) pair, and should be willing to pay a little time to do that over producing just (code, guy-who-prompted-it).

Startup life man. Happy to help, just rough sometimes.

This can happen more or less anywhere if you spend enough time at a company. At some point you'll get pulled into a meeting like this because others think you're in expert in a codebase/area you're not.

Like if your the manager of a group and you do little code writing.

> "I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.

By the time you said that, the AI could have given the 80% answer. So, no, this is no longer an adequate response. The right response would have been to take your tools and give an informed opinion on the AI answer, right there.

> So, no, this is no longer an adequate response. The right response would have been to take your tools and give an informed opinion on the AI answer, right there.

If the AI could answer the questions, why would they ask OP about it?

What are “your tools”? Many (most?) meaningful questions cannot be answered while you stall for time on a call. Or do you just mean ask an LLM the question and regurgitate its answer?

From the way it's written, looks like it's his code that he wrote recently.

It's quite common to search for the author of a piece of code to ask questions about that code.

I’d just say to this.. who cares, drop the ego. The tool was used and if you didn’t use it you’d be in worse trouble. I just say I dno I’ll ask the AI… easy :D

Thanks, that's an interesting take from all that I've read.

If you're happy for me to do the job in 1/10th of the time, be happy with me not being fully across it on a whim.

If the new way and speed of working makes you deploy things that you then become the bottleneck on the organizational knowledge of, and now the organization is running things in production that you have to go chase down details about and blocking other people, it seems like you just moved the problem from "needing time to do work properly" to "doing work then needing time to do it properly" which seems to me like a tremendous increase liability.

Dr. Chuck from python for everyone course said the same thing.

Back to 2014 with this 7min "The Expert" skit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

Not the kind of meetings I enjoy where basically expertise isn't seen as something to build on but rather just (creative) confirmation bias.

> To be continued... But from now on, the work isn't done if I don't get a little 5 mins flash-card type markdown list of "what is this" and "what is that", type glossary.

Easy, just have the agent write them for you at the end, then never read them...

(/joking)

I think that in an AI-native company, the people asking the question should be using their own set of the AI to query the codebase, before coming to ask you. The problem that you describe seems to be more relevant to an organization which has not fully embraced AI yet.