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The Best Engineers Write Less Code

59 points by funnyenough

by Frannky

1 subcomments

One big difference I see in how minds work is their ability to model. A few people I know focus on end-to-end model thinking — trying to maximize against some functions.
The rest of them seem to avoid thinking outside a small info bubble/closed system, not sure why, but it looks like it creates anxiety when they start feeding too much info. Instead of trying to extract abstractions that make it possible to model the complexity and fuzz the non-important parts.
The same people, when they come up with a product implementation idea, avoid thinking about all the things required to be in place for the product to actually satisfy some real need/want. The product ends up detached from user need. The tech doesn't work.
And it doesn't matter if they can code or if Claude can work, because the directions required to define what needs to be there are not present.
I realized I need to take the thinking of these people as their ideas and advice — as inputs that need to be sanitized. The easy way I found is to remodel why they think the way they think — it's like having a safe VM running their code (thinking) through my computer (my brain).
These same people, usually years later, realize you were telling them things they were not able to comprehend at the time, but they realized those things were so important and would have saved them from suffering so much. They start to treat your voice with reverence instead of thinking through with their own minds and stress-testing against reality.
I would love to read some research about this and how to take advantage of it, or at least avoid the toxic influence such minds can have against one's own well-being and success.

by xingped

2 subcomments

Unfortunately you're indexed on and promoted based on how much code you write, not how little. There's a very real reason the meme of "promotion driven development" exists. You'll never get favorable review making sound choices that minimize the amount of new code that is needed. Believe me, I tried.

by faangguyindia

1 subcomments

Many people try to design a perfect system on the first attempt. And for the original requirements, it often works beautifully.
But as new requirements appear, the clean design slowly turns into layers of patches and exceptions.
you discover a deeper pattern that absorbs the complexity back into the core, and you do a rewrite.
Then the cycle repeats.
I don't worry about writing a perfect system anymore, i realize there is more to a system i do not currently know about, many things will surface once the foundation is laid.

by carefulfungi

0 subcomment

I prefer an alternate measure - great developers write code with a long half life relative to the rest of the product. (An idea I learned from a hiring reference check ... of all places.)

by tommica

1 subcomments

The "go delete some code" link goes to a 404 page, which is quite fitting :D
wonder if it was on purpose...

by funnyenough

0 subcomment

"We are living in an age of mass denial. Some very smart people are telling us that we no longer need to write good software because LLMs can generate code now. But terrible software is still terrible software, whether it was written by Claude Code or by a human who did not know what they were doing."

by onesingleblast

0 subcomment

"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code" - Ken Thompson

by kspetkov79

0 subcomment

Less code helps, but fewer unclear decisions probably helps more.

by saltyoldman

0 subcomment

I actually think we have it pretty backwards in terms of what we need now. We as humans no longer need complex front-ends. We need data. I would rather have data access to all my spending and say things like, did I go over my restaurant budget last month? And the LLM can figure out how to do it.
It makes no sense for me to use the limited UIs that companies present anymore. Let alone signup processes - it should all be LLM friendly. Simple APIs that are called by your agent.
My company uses Teams and it's ecosystem. And for email I get a lot of crappy system updates, etc.... And around the UI there are little "AI" buttons or "Ask a question" boxes. No. This. Is. Wrong. Instead I need to be able to ask my OWN agent to check my email and archive anything dumb and inform me of anything important. In fact, don't even make it a one-off prompt- make it a permanently running long-haul agent that interacts with my "personal assistant" agent that is in charge of getting my attention if it's absolutely necessary, which knows if I'm watching a movie.

by bfkwlfkjf

0 subcomment

Weird that "engineer" came to mean "software engineer". Can't until AI is good enough that we never have to deal with code again.

by paul_knox

3 subcomments

Coding used to be bottlenecked by typing speed; now, it’s bottlenecked by our ability to comprehend and maintain.