Since we all, stupidly, are leaning into LoC as a metric, because we can't handle subjectivity, at the very least, we could just do orders of magnitude for LoC. Was it a 10/100/1,000/10,000 LoC hour/week/day/month? 1,2,3,4 or 5. Dtrace's 60kLo, would then be a 5, Linux kernel is an8 (40M), Firefox is also an 8. Notepad++ is a 6,
The peril of laziness lost
51–60 of 148 posts
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#52I‘m so happy about this article. I was forming a thought in my head the last couple of days, which is how to describe what it is that makes AI code practically unusable in good systems.
And one of the reasons is the one described in this article and the other is, that you skip training your mental model when you don’t grind these laziness patterns. If you are not in the code grinding to your codebase, you don’t see the fundamental issues that block the next level nor you have the itch to name and abstract it properly so you wont have to worry about in the future, when somebody or you have to extend it.
Knowing your shit is so powerful.
I believe now that my competive advantage is grinding code, whilst others are accumulating slop.
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is a person clearly grieving that his hard earned knowledge in his field is now not that valuable. He's co-founder and CTO of his own company, so I think he's doing fine in his field.
It doesn't change the fact that much of what (I think) he prides in himself in is getting commoditised.
What he prides himself in (in this context) is craft, which LLM use probably can enable, but definitely isn't commoditized by the kind of vibe coding that Garry Tan is doing.
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#54> Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less. Maybe this was true when Programming Perl was written, but I see the opposite much more often now. I'm a big fan of WET - Write Everything Twice (stolen from comments here), then the third time think about maybe creating a new abstraction.
Writing twice makes sense if time permits, or the opportunity presents itself. First time may be somewhat exploratory (maybe a thow-away prototype), then second time you better understand the problem and can do a better job.
A third time, with a new abstraction, is where you need to be careful. Fred Brooks ("Mythical Man Month") refers to it as the "second-system effect" where the confidence of having done something once (for real, not just prototype) may lead to an over-engineered and unnecessarily complex "version 2" as you are tempted to "make it better" by adding layers of abstractions and bells and whistles.
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#55> Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less. Maybe this was true when Programming Perl was written, but I see the opposite much more often now. I'm a big fan of WET - Write Everything Twice (stolen from comments here), then the third time think about maybe creating a new abstraction.
That will still result in more abstraction than the average programmer.
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#56I've had this exact sentiment in the past couple months after seeing a few PRs that were definitely the wrong solution to a problem. One was implementing it's own parsing functions to which well established solutions like JSON or others likely existed. I think any non-llm programmer could have thought this up but then immediately decide to look elsewhere, their human emotions would have hit and said "that's way too m…
It also doesn't bother checking what's already in your project. Grep around a bit and you'll find three `formatTimestamp` functions all doing almost the same thing.
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#57Time to teach the LLMs and the vibe coders one of the timeless lessons of software development:
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#58> Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less. Maybe this was true when Programming Perl was written, but I see the opposite much more often now. I'm a big fan of WET - Write Everything Twice (stolen from comments here), then the third time think about maybe creating a new abstraction.
Writing twice makes sense if time permits, or the opportunity presents itself. First time may be somewhat exploratory (maybe a thow-away prototype), then second time you better understand the problem and can do a better job. A third time, with a new abstraction, is where you need to be careful. Fred Brooks ("Mythical Man Month") refers to it as the "second-system effect" where the confidence of having done something…
I agree with what you're saying about writing something twice or even three times to really understand it but I think you might have misunderstood the WET idea: as I understand it, it's meant in opposition to DRY, in the sense of "allow a second copy of the same code", and then when you need a third copy, start to consider introducing an abstraction, rather than religiously avoiding repeated code.
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#59Hard disagree with the initial assumption: Abstractions do not make a system simpler.
Note: I would have added usually but I really do mean always.
Re: The peril of laziness lost
#60As dumb as it is to loudly proclaim you wrote 200k loc last week with an LLM, I don’t think it’s much better to look at the code someone else wrote with an LLM and go “hah! Look at how stupid it is!” You’re making exactly the same error as the other guy, just in the opposite direction: you’re judging the profession of software engineering based on code output rather than value generation. Now, did Garry Tan actually…
Yeah! It's not like code quality matters in terms of negative value or lives lost, right?! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_IT_scandal Furthermore, > As for the artifact that Tan was building with such frenetic energy, I was broadly ignoring it. Polish software engineer Gregorein, however, took it apart, and the results are at once predictable, hilarious and instructive: A single load of Tan’s "newsletter-blog-t…
> a stowaway text editor
?!
Was it hiding in one of the lifeboats?