alt Hacker News“John Ousterhout [..] argues that good code is:
- Simple and easy to understand
- Easy to modify”
In my career at fast-moving startups (scaling seed to series C), I’ve come to the same conclusion:
> Simple is robust
I’m sure my former teams were sick of me saying it, but I’ve found myself repeating this mantra to the LLMs.
Agentic tools will happily build anything you want, the key is knowing what you want!
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mememememememo • today at 8:47 PM
Yes. Which is why "I generated X lines of code" "I used a billion tokens this month" sound stupid to me.
Like I used 100 gallons of petrol this month and 10 kilos of rabbit feed!
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My issue with this is that a simple design can set you up for failure if you don’t foresee and account for future requirements.
Every abstraction adds some complexity. So maybe the PoC skips all abstractions. Then we need to add a variant to something. Well, a single if/else is simpler than an abstract base class with two concrete implementations. Adding the 3rd as another if clause is simpler than refactoring all of them to an ABC structure. And so on.
“Simple” is relative. Investing in a little complexity now can save your ass later. Weighing this decision takes skill and experience