Hacker News Reader

I think it's deeper than that, once you know software is never done you have to design for constant change.

When clients ask why something takes so long, I explain that I'm not building what you asked for today, I'm building something that will be easy to turn into what you asked for today and possible to turn into whatever you ask for tomorrow.

View on HN

AI has vastly changed the shape of what that looks like though. There are whole classes of refactoring work that are much cheaper and quicker to do with agents. Integrating a protocol client library say, or swapping one library for another are now potentially hour-long instead of days-long tasks, especially when you have test coverage to back you up (which AI also immensely helps you with).

That’s merely code churn, which is not a good property. What you want in a codebase is something rigid enough to satisfy today’s constraints (including optimizing them) and flexible enough to be modified for some likely future prospects.

So for any current features, cost of fixing bugs and do trivial adjustments should be very low. But working on new things should have a great ROI, especially because what’s existing can be reused as a foundation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com