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by bccdee
56 days ago
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Simpler tools are a forcing function for simplicity. If you don't have code search, you'll need to write code that is legible without searching. If you don't have auto-refactoring utils, you'll have to be stricter about information-hiding. And if you don't have AI, you might hesitate to commit to the first thing you think of. You might go back to the drawing board in search of a deeper, simpler abstraction and end up reducing the size of your codebase instead of increasing it. Conveniences sometimes make things more complicated in the long run, and I worry that code agents (the ultimate convenience) will lead to a sort of ultimate carelessness that makes our jobs harder. |
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i was working in a place that had a real tech debt laden system. it was an absolute horror show. an offshore dev, the “manager” guy and i were sitting in a zoom call and i was ranting about how over complicated and horrific the codebase was, using one component as a specific example.
the offshore dev proceeded to use the JetBrains Ctrl + B keybind (jump to usages/definitions) to try and walk through how it all worked — “it’s really simple!” he said.
after a while i got frustrated, and interrupted him to point out that he’d had to navigate across something like 4 different files, multiple different levels of class inheritance and i don’t know how many different methods on those classes just to explain one component of a system used by maybe 5 people.
i used nano for a lot of that job. it forced me to be smarter by doing things simpler.