alt Hacker NewsI am not surprised but this one sticks out...
> Models favor monolithic, single-file implementations that diverge sharply from human-written code.
Well, all of our code is monolithic with some files close 20K lines of code and we do use coding agents - not for the original code but as of late. I've always had that hunch that splitting everything into tiny files does not improve AI coding agent performance although it feels counterintuitive due to model context constraints.
To me the important parts of a program should be clustered together so the implementation is obvious. Scattering the implementation in various files all over the source tree does not help much building the mental model.
That also closely match how software used to be written in the past too.
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this is a big frustration for web code what with HTML, CSS, JS, PHP all spread about
https://htmx.org/essays/locality-of-behaviour/ is a good fight back as exemplified in many stacks, eg https://harcstack.org
Kinda surprising to me, since i had some trouble with Cursor & Co. once the file went over ~800 lines. It repeatedly failed to edit it, until i split it up into multiple logical components. As it should have been from the beginning...
Though, it was some time ago, so things might have improved?
> Models favor monolithic, single-file implementations that diverge sharply from human-written code.
This isn't the case if models are prompted to actually plan the file architecture beforehand, it's only the case if they're given a dumb monolithic "code this thing" prompt.
> Scattering the implementation in various files all over the source tree does not help much building the mental model.
Yeah, that happens where I work and I hate it. A combination of lint rules and AI reviewer prompts complain about long files and long functions. This means something that could be a 300 line self contained function that could be read linearly, gets split up into 6 functions across 6 files.
It's the illusion of "clean code". If you're casually skimming the code, you feel good. But as soon as you go beyond the surface level it becomes annoying.
> Scattering the implementation in various files all over the source tree
If you treat the source tree seriously, you can communicate a lot with how it is structured