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davidkunz | 4 months ago

I have huge respect for Mitchell, it's impressive what he achieved.

I agree with all the points of this article and would like to add one: Have a quick feedback loop. For me, it's really motivating to be able to make a change and quickly see the results. Many problems just vanish or become tangible to solve when you playfully modify your source code and observe the effect.

discuss

mhaberl|4 months ago

This perfectly aligns with my experience. Every large project I have worked on showed a clear correlation between the ease of setup and running and the number of problems on the project, like bugs and missed deadlines.

jebarker|4 months ago

Totally agree. I work in LLM training software and I believe progress in the field is actually much slower than it should be because of the excruciatingly long feedback loops involved in development. The software stacks are deep and abstract and much of the testing involves full integration tests that take a long time to spin up.

amenghra|4 months ago

If you have the time, what Bret Victor’s talk Inventing on Principal. The talk covers feedback loops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII

chrisweekly|4 months ago

YES that is one of the all-time most inspiring talks I've ever seen. DX is so important. I got a taste for this kind of thing when I first encountered LiveReload (circa 2012?) and radically upgraded my and my team's webdev workflows.

ramon156|4 months ago

Would you say that testcases help here? I've been thinking about applying e2e tests on any bugs I find so I know they're fixed

zingar|4 months ago

E2E tests in a high ratio to other tests will cause problems. They’re slow and brittle and become a job all on their own. It’s possible that they might help at the start of debugging, but try to isolate the bugs to smaller units of code (or interactions between small pieces of code).

niels_bom|4 months ago

MitchellH also talks about this in some interviews he gave about Ghostty.

reddit_clone|4 months ago

Couldn't agree more. Quick feedback is so important, it requires its own post.

When I want to try/fix something, if the setup itself takes hours, I lose heart and move on.

Thats why I love lisp (or anything with a decent Repl). Instant gratification.

ericmcer|4 months ago

seriously, especially for personal projects.

The second you lose motivation the whole thing poofs into non-existence, so making it enjoyable is almost the most important facet.