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Comment by workbox | Hacker News Reader

I did not enjoy reading this article. The writing was fine, and each individual paragraph was fine, but the whole thing together was meandering and dare I say pointless. It was so many words and yet so little seems to have been said.

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I'm not sure this article had enough thought put into it. For example:

    What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight.

It's not so much as "the economics [...] were turned upside down", but that a manufacturing process that used to be strictly additive (akin to 3D printing) is now complemented by a subtractive process (akin to CNC milling). The "shape" that is demanded hasn't really changed, and nor has the human effort (as long as you care about achieving certain tolerances). You still have to "treasure, reuse, care for, and curate" your product to whatever degree the market demands.

Also I disagree with:

    Lines of code are not the ideal artifact to review

What does "ideal" mean here? When I was growing up "show your work" was the rule for all examinations. Why? Because we're working to improve mental models and thought processes for the next generation, not just products we will release tomorrow.

I think the point is that there are better engineering artifacts to review instead of lines of code. Encoding the decisions, structure, requirements, testing, monitoring, then reviewing those and having AI generate and regenerate code based on them. The code itself doesn't matter if enough thought and rigor has gone into the structure that produces the code.

> What does "ideal" mean here? When I was growing up "show your work" was the rule for all examinations. Why? Because we're working to improve mental models and thought processes for the next generation, not just products we will release tomorrow.

They're saying that the mental models and thought processes are incredibly important but that code is not the place for that work to live.

> They're saying that the mental models and thought processes are incredibly important but that code is not the place for that work to live.

What I meant is that, insofar as some work has been produced with a human mind involved and where imperfect abstractions are used, one should not for whatever idealistic reasons push for reviewing the work at some coarser granularity than the details which are readily available. That's a way to foster and encourage mistakes, in both the work and in the mental model.

So when you say that code is not the place for that work to live (or more closely to the line I disagree with, that code is not an 'ideal' artifact to review), you are essentially purporting that there is a perfect abstraction that can generally be trusted, which I disagree is currently the case for an LLM spec versus produced code.

> They're saying that the mental models and thought processes are incredibly important but that code is not the place for that work to live.

They’re important for discussion and brainstorming. They’re also important for sharing context before reviewing. But code is the only perfect representation in terms of semantics of what the computer will do.

You can have all the diagram and all the proses you want, but they’re still ambiguous.

As soon as I read the quoted paragraph, I rapidly scrolled to see how much more was written, then closed the tab. Generating a lot of code might be 'free' now but the generated code is very costly. I don't have the time to read an article written upon such a premise.

My vibe sense tells me AI slop. It's just too much vacuous text in general and "not x, but y."

I enjoyed it, people post on blogs as a way to entertain themselves, not necessarily the reader.

The intro lobbed up a clear cut point of contention for the article to address. I found the following writing to loose steam on that point. I turned to skimming, and did not manage to find a conclusion.

I suspect the stance they described as one readers mistakenly took away from their previous article to in fact be their stance. Otherwise why dance around it so hard?

Same, I like the general idea of that post. But the structure and verbosity made it such that I wouldn't want to share it with others.

> The writing was fine, and each individual paragraph was fine, but the whole thing together was meandering and dare I say pointless. It was so many words and yet so little seems to have been said.

I bet that I know why!

meta, but: I gave up. I found the language really hard to follow and the point of the piece didn’t stand out to me. shrug

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