> And be warned: some will resist this and surrender to the convenience of their current mental context, betting they’ll “remember” how they did it. Time will make that bet age badly. It’s 2026 — other AI agents are already in execution loops, disciplined to code better than that.”
Hard disagree: separating code from its context is exactly how you end up in the situation of needing to “remember”. Yes, helper functions and such can be useful for readability, but it's easy to overdo it and end up with incomprehensible ravioli code that does nothing terribly complicated in a terribly complicated manner.
Also, it's pointer indirection in data structures that kills you, because uncached memory is brutally slow. Function calls to functions in the cache are normally a much smaller concern except for tiny functions in very hot loops.