The best code is the one you shift+delete

Everyone talking about coding models fixates on the same number: how fast the thing generates code. This misses the point by a lot. The story isn't about how fast the model writes code I would have written anyway. It's that the model lets me do things that I might have done before but were expensive enough that I didn’t bother. I had three separate interactions this week that led to this blog post.We had a production problem on an instance and no clear idea what was going on. What we did have was the log: something like 25-30 MB of compressed text describing everything that happened. And the actual problem wasn't spotting an error: finding errors is easy. The problem was correlation. We needed to line up different events across the timeline and understand how they were related.In the past, I would have to trawl through the log and hope that something would pop up. These days, we can try handing the whole thing to the model and let it figure it out. If the log file wasn’t that big, it…