neverthe_less

Isn't it possible with more efficiency, we still want them for advanced AI capabilities we could unlock in the future?

Using boxes is great! The beauty of coding is that those boxes don't need to be discarded, we have the virtual power to transmute them into real chairs and tables via the power of refactoring. It's like Photoshop vs. watercolor. I'm going to sketch either way, it's just a matter of what the bar is for throwing it all out, and I think it's very often sufficient to decide in the moment in a virtual environment. That's all to say, going back to my first point, I don't need to decide ahead of time whether the code will be kept, I'm going to keep it loose either way.

And there are situations I'd go in assuming I'll probably rewrite the work, but I wouldn't set the criteria so broadly as to cover literally whatever the next large project I embark on will be, as the article suggests.

I agree that it depends on factors like what you describe which is why I am asking those giving the advice like this to consider the context at all. I also happen believe that the contextual bar should be placed high. I have to say, what comes to mind when I read your comment was "What about this does refactoring not accomplish?" In the metaphor of building a house, refactoring is what keeps it tidy and organized, and rewriting would only appear necessary in the case of your trash chute leading into a bathtub or some other critical design flaw that could only be addressed timely by redesigning the entire house.

If you are in a context where you are in danger of making critical design flaws often, or where circumstances make it hard to make changes after committing, then I absolutely agree that rewriting is effective. That's just what I mean by a high bar, one that I personally don't encounter very often in my work.

I've never respected this advice, even though I hear it often enough. The reasoning appears to come down to this:

> If you know that you're possibly keeping the code, you do things in a "proper" way, which means moving slower

combined with the idea that it's faster to redo work than it is to refactor.

I don't buy either of these propositions as a universal rule. For the first, it seems that a mindset of avoiding premature optimization, which you should be cultivating anyway, is enough to ward it off.

For the second, I see it as very context dependent, with my bias going towards refactoring instead of rewriting. I most often get things right enough the first time that it really only needs to be refactored going forward. Only when I end up with serious flaws do I decide to start over, often before I finish my implementation because the flaws are already apparent enough. Add to this that even very large changes can be refactored effectively and timely in my experience, and I feel like the bar for rewriting is really high to be cost-effective.

Unfortunately this essay and many others seem to take objections like mine for granted, and I should just believe the author that rewriting is faster with zero supporting evidence.

I think you're really picking that quote out of context. I also did not use the two words you scare quoted, not sure where those are coming from.

Since this article goes through the timeline I thought I'd give my thoughts on how I see it. I feel like it's hard to emphasize, or even remember how subversive the tracks felt in the early days. Listening to easy-listening tracks poorly chopped was just not cool, it was weird, even other online people thought you were weird and that the music you were listening to was bad, and that was a lot of fun.

I think the bad chopping is one of the most sorely missing things from the newer songs. When the tracks were more actively alienating or punishing to listen to, it made them more interesting, and helped justify the liberal sampling. There was an effort to make the easy listening become harder to listen to.

I wouldn't say it lost its "political" roots because I'd like to think it was more than mere political music, but it definitely did lose something where tracks often felt like ideas, like each was saying "what about this? Isn't this weird and interesting? Does this make you feel something about the modern world, consumer culture, the job you have or the one you will be applying for, etc.?" That has seemed to turn into mostly pure nostalgia, rather than anything challenging or interesting.

I think those characteristics are why people sensed its impending doom early. A genre about ideas can't survive the race-to-the-bottom effect of popularity, especially if a core component is engaging with feelings of alienation by actually being alienating. That's why future funk quickly sprouted alongside, and eventually cannibalized vaporwave, because we wanted the non-alienating version. But all that was was straightforward sampling of great pop music we hadn't heard of with no attribution, which eventually lead people to listen to the original Plastic Love 10 years later because it turns out to be better than the remix.

Despite everything I wrote, a recent album by desert sands feel warm at night did really blow me away.