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joewilstoday at 3:42 PM5 repliesview on HN

I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...


Replies

smugglerFlynntoday at 7:21 PM

Can't help but notice that this line is not true anymore in 2026:

   > It’s harder to read code than to write it.
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Ariaruletoday at 4:13 PM

Joel Spolsky wrote that about "large scale commercial applications", which Monica definitely is not.

mgkimsaltoday at 5:50 PM

IIRC the monica team already did this between v1 and v2, so v2 to v3 as another rewrite would be the same move.

bitwizetoday at 4:06 PM

Written before LLMs made Big Rewrites an absolute doddle.

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petcattoday at 4:14 PM

that made sense when people painstakingly typed out code by hand. Nowadays the code doesn't really matter and can be trivially thrown away and regenerated as needed.