[bsenftner]

This is such a surface level take, it's embarrassing. Unless he's talking about the impression in society, but he is not.

Writing code is a social act even though few actually read it the code, they experience the result of that code.

Maybe, just maybe Simon means "code is disposable now", because some shortcut taker can spin up an apparent duplicate by coaxing and pleading with AI.

That is not a future worth participating in, that's intellectual begging death, because that will create an environment of worthless nonsense.

[simonw]

Did you read the whole thing or just the headline?

What did you think of my list of characteristics of "good code"?

[bsenftner]

I re-read to make sure I was not reacting off the cuff. Your list of good code practices is obvious what we want, but that is not going to happen with the way you describe working with AIs.

You don't seem to be aware of cognitive load; when you say:

"any time our instinct says "don't build that, it's not worth the time" fire off a prompt anyway, in an asynchronous agent session where the worst that can happen is you check ten minutes later and find that it wasn't worth the tokens."

That is going to fracture a person's understanding, leading to mentally fatigue them. People, and I see this coming from you too Simon, seem to be treating software development like it's a sprint, when it is absolutely a marathon. One that requires consideration before acting, and now with LLMs the common act of figuring it out along the way is now dangerous because they will happily guide one to create a CMS when all they want is a one off function.

[htrp]

What are you thinking about for the new best practices for software engineering?