In the context of many other measures I think speed is an important measure. Maybe even the key measure. I’ve even written a blog post entitled “reading code is an anti-pattern.”
But if the metric is, slowing us down from having more lines in production then the answer is unequivocally yes.
If the answer is providing customer value, or having a sustainable engineering culture. Then I’m not so sure. I’m not saying I believe the opposite, but it feels like excessively optimizing on the wrong thing.
Ultimately I think this asks the wrong question, I think most other surrounding questions is the right one which is - how do you safely and quickly deploy the right code to production that delivers customer value.
I think that will continue going forward involve doing so in an automated fashion, but then the right question isn’t, “should we stop reading code”. But something like “what is the right way to ship intent to production”
Yes I meant delivering value ofc, and I love the framing you propose, so my question is: are we already at the point where we could go safely faster, if we didn’t look at the code?
I see significant decline in product quality this year among those companies most pilled (Ant, Goog, Msft, etc...). I had been commenting that Atlassian turned a page and Jira was running quite well, but this year... their internal push on Rovo has shown in their product, and their new `twg` CLI is some real slop where help text doesn't match the code.
> I know we might have more bugs in the short term, but is not looking at the code the right direction we should go for the long term?
Would you drive without looking at the road (or blindfolded) because we now have autonomous vehicles?
Not looking at where you are driving and also never looking or understanding what the code does, makes no sense in the long term. Especially in the event of a disaster.
Both have something called "liability" and it gets expensive when it goes wrong.
> Several important developers switched to this new idea, the ones who work in production grade stuff (one example is Antirez, who just wrote some tweets that inspired this post)
Does that mean we should blindly follow them? Just because someone else is doing it does not mean you should too.
A better questions is...have we lost the ability to think for ourselves because we have LLMs doing all the thinking instead?
The issue is long-term code quality. These things are not good at it. They locally optimize, reimplement (inconsistently), and are overly defensive. You can only observe this by looking at the code they produce.
Slowing us down from what?
In the context of many other measures I think speed is an important measure. Maybe even the key measure. I’ve even written a blog post entitled “reading code is an anti-pattern.”
But if the metric is, slowing us down from having more lines in production then the answer is unequivocally yes.
If the answer is providing customer value, or having a sustainable engineering culture. Then I’m not so sure. I’m not saying I believe the opposite, but it feels like excessively optimizing on the wrong thing.
Ultimately I think this asks the wrong question, I think most other surrounding questions is the right one which is - how do you safely and quickly deploy the right code to production that delivers customer value.
I think that will continue going forward involve doing so in an automated fashion, but then the right question isn’t, “should we stop reading code”. But something like “what is the right way to ship intent to production”
Because if you do the first without the second…
Yes I meant delivering value ofc, and I love the framing you propose, so my question is: are we already at the point where we could go safely faster, if we didn’t look at the code?
I see significant decline in product quality this year among those companies most pilled (Ant, Goog, Msft, etc...). I had been commenting that Atlassian turned a page and Jira was running quite well, but this year... their internal push on Rovo has shown in their product, and their new `twg` CLI is some real slop where help text doesn't match the code.
Speed has never been my number one goal. I’m not sure why I’d start to optimize for that now.
Speeding up delivering value to the users seem a pretty good goal to me tbh
Looking both ways before crossing the street slows you down too, but it's done for good reasons. Ignore reading code at your own peril.
Great example! You usually don’t look both ways if you have a semaphor though, so maybe all we need is good semaphors. I hope the metaphor holds :)
> I know we might have more bugs in the short term, but is not looking at the code the right direction we should go for the long term?
Would you drive without looking at the road (or blindfolded) because we now have autonomous vehicles?
Not looking at where you are driving and also never looking or understanding what the code does, makes no sense in the long term. Especially in the event of a disaster.
Both have something called "liability" and it gets expensive when it goes wrong.
> Several important developers switched to this new idea, the ones who work in production grade stuff (one example is Antirez, who just wrote some tweets that inspired this post)
Does that mean we should blindly follow them? Just because someone else is doing it does not mean you should too.
A better questions is...have we lost the ability to think for ourselves because we have LLMs doing all the thinking instead?
The issue is long-term code quality. These things are not good at it. They locally optimize, reimplement (inconsistently), and are overly defensive. You can only observe this by looking at the code they produce.