[dimal]

There’s always been this draw in software engineering to find the silver bullet that will allow you to turn off your brain and just vibe your way to a solution. It might be OOP or TDD or pair programming or BDD or any number of other “best practices”. This is just an unusual situation where someone really can turn off their brain and get a solution that compiles and solves the problem, and so for the type of person that doesn’t want to think, it feels like they found what they’re looking for. But there’s still no silver bullet for complexity. I guess there’s nothing to do but reject the PR and say “Explain this code to me, then I’ll review it.”

[MoreQARespect]

Most juniors I watch program very quickly get overwhelmed by complexity because they dont know how to follow strategies like BDD or TDD which isolate parcels of complexity (e.g. how the program is supposed to behave) from other parcels (e.g. how the code actually works).

Even worse though, they all seem to think that the solution to becoming overwhelmed with complexity isnt to parcel it up with strategies like BDD and TDD but to just get better at stuffing more complexity into their brains.

To be honest, I see a similar attitude with LLMs where loads of people think you just need to stuff more into the context window and tweak the prompt and then it'll be reliable.