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slopinthebagtoday at 6:44 AM1 replyview on HN

When you talk about maintaining code, do you mean having the LLM do it and you maintain a write-only codebase? Because if you're reading the code yourself and you have a bloated tangled codebase it would make things much harder right?

Is the goal basically a codebase where your interactions are mediated through an LLM?


Replies

simonwtoday at 11:20 AM

The goal is "good code" based on my list of criteria, which includes both "simple and minimal" and "the design affords future changes".

A bloated table codebase isn't good code, because it's harder to understand and makers changes to than the equivalent non-bloated codebase.

But... bloat does look a little bit different when you no longer need to optimize code for saving humans typing time.

Much of the confusing code I've encountered during my career has been confusing because it had too many layers of indirection, which happened because someone was applying DRY too aggressively because they didn't want to duplicate even the smallest pieces of logic in more then one place.

Good coding agents will only DRY like that if you tell them to.