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I hear what you’re saying, I’ve wondered this myself. My suspicion is that if we let duplicate or very similar code accumulate, eventually we’ll have enough that it will start to slow down or impact the success rate of the AI tooling. It might update two chunks of relevant code but miss the third, leading to a bug. Or it might grow confused over which of three similar chunks of code are providing the “correct” behavior.

Meanwhile most of the software I use seems to become less reliable every month.

Too much code means more complexity for humans and LLMs to comprehend. More complexity means harder to change and more prone to bugs.

This is not just right, no matter on which side of the argument you are.