Looks like a solid post with solid learnings. Apologies for hijacking the thread but I’d really love to have a discussion on how these heuristics of software development change with the likes of Cursor/LLM cyborg coding in the mix.

I’ve done an extensive amount of LLM assisted coding and our heuristics need to change. Synthesis of a design still needs to be low cognitive load - e.g. how data flows between multiple modules - because you need to be able to verify the actual system or that the LLM suggestion matches the intended mental model. However, striving for simplicity inside a method/function matters way less. It’s relatively easy to verify that an LLM generated unit test is working as intended and the complexity of the code within the function doesn’t matter if its scope is sufficiently narrow.

IMO identifying the line between locations where “low cognitive load required” vs “low cognitive load is unnecessary” changes the game of software development and is not often discussed.