Ask HN: Is looking at the code slowing us down?

Several important developers switched to this new idea, the ones who work in production grade stuff (one example is Antirez, who just wrote some tweets that inspired this post)

In the context of many other measures I think speed is an important measure. Maybe even the key measure. I’ve even written a blog post entitled “reading code is an anti-pattern.”

But if the metric is, slowing us down from having more lines in production then the answer is unequivocally yes.

If the answer is providing customer value, or having a sustainable engineering culture. Then I’m not so sure. I’m not saying I believe the opposite, but it feels like excessively optimizing on the wrong thing.

Ultimately I think this asks the wrong question, I think most other surrounding questions is the right one which is - how do you safely and quickly deploy the right code to production that delivers customer value.

I think that will continue going forward involve doing so in an automated fashion, but then the right question isn’t, “should we stop reading code”. But something like “what is the right way to ship intent to production”

Because if you do the first without the second…

Would you drive without looking at the road (or blindfolded) because we now have autonomous vehicles?

Not looking at where you are driving and also never looking or understanding what the code does, makes no sense in the long term. Especially in the event of a disaster.

Both have something called "liability" and it gets expensive when it goes wrong.

> Several important developers switched to this new idea, the ones who work in production grade stuff (one example is Antirez, who just wrote some tweets that inspired this post)

Does that mean we should blindly follow them? Just because someone else is doing it does not mean you should too.

A better questions is...have we lost the ability to think for ourselves because we have LLMs doing all the thinking instead?