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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

If you were working as a manager on a large project, how would you build a model? Something where your position requires you to have an overview of the project but not necessarily to actually write or review much code.

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I am not able to find it now, but there was an amazing story recently from the 60s or 70s where an engineer was in exactly this position. His team was building a new, complex, ambitious operating system, but it was late and over budget and didn’t work. It nearly wrecked the company. He talks about hitting rock bottom and asking himself what went wrong, and one of the fathers of computing (can’t remember which) shouts from the hallway in passing, “that’s easy, you didn’t understand what your people were doing.” So the guy turned it around by implementing a new rule: he had to understand every line of code his team wrote. They started over with the company’s existing OS in use by customers and implementing a few of the most requested features. Much less ambitious, but it actually shipped. Gradually they achieved all their goals by upgrading the existing system.

The “I must understand every line” constraint didn’t sound like a power trip that succeeded because the guy was such a brilliant code reviewer. I think it was a blunt instrument that enforced simplicity.

I guess what I’m saying is, I reject the premise of having technical oversight without writing or reading much code.

As with anything. Either you can go full-speed without much understanding and hit a wall when you need to understand stuff or you can go a manageable speed and actually understand the codebase.

I don't think we can do both. The difference is that it's optional now depending on the project and the audience.

I never said you wouldn't have to read code. I was asking a question to get answers about how people would achieve having an oversight if it was humans writing code that they were managing rather than agents.

As for your suggestion, understanding every line might have worked in the 70s but even pre-agentic modern coding it's not possible for any large project with dependencies even if you are directly contributing code yourself, so I'm not sure how useful your idea is.

There's definitely cases where you should have that aim - writing a low level maths or graphics library, for example. But most people are not doing that.

Perhaps my "reject the premise" comment was a bit too provocative. I didn't intend to start an argument. I wanted to share a story of a person who was put in the position you described (working as a manager on a large project, required to have an overview of the project but not necessarily to actually write or review much code), failed miserably, changed the rules of engagement (partly by reviewing code), and subsequently succeeded. So my _personal_ answer to your question of how to build a mental model in that scenario would be to do something in the same vein as that story. Not necessarily _exactly_ what that guy did, but I think the principles still apply today. Nothing really changes.

I've been experimenting with the Feynman technique on codebases. However the issue I run into is that, you need hard feedback to verify your hypotheses.

I was satisfied with my own explanation of how something worked but it turned out to be wrong.

LLMs help here (the transformer is good at seeing the big picture, at least on smallish codebases), but the best thing I found so far is just modding.

Actually making a change to the code is the best way to get hard feedback about your model.

As a manager you try to hire people who can build that model so you don't need to, sadly you can't do that with an LLM yet.

My understanding is that this is still an unsolved problem. At some point you lose touch with the code and you start working with a mental model that’s subtly inaccurate. You just sort of hope that the people below have are competent and are building stuff that matches your mental model (that you’re communicating well!).

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