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> Code is a liability

I say that sometimes to people and they look at me weird. When you work in bigger projects with a lot of people it is harder to argue why you shouldn't write the code than to just do it.

Like, for example, I had to code some build-step that updated some assets that took about 5 seconds to run. That operation was done maybe once a month by other developers, during review another person asked why I didn't parallelize the process and cache already processed files and I was just like: it would add 200+ lines of extra code and error handling and it is not like I mind doing it, I just don't think it is worth the overhead of understanding this code and troubleshooting any possible bugs of this extra optimization code.

And it is harder to argue this kind of thing back and forth than it is to just do it. And now there are 200 extra lines of code that would take anyone else besides me at least an hour to grasp before they can make changes.

Same applies on discussing why you shouldn't add a dependency. If anything that is harder because you need to justify the extra time of not using the dependency.



Which is one of the most unappealing thing about the marketing material for LLMs services like Copilot. The issue was never the speed of writing code, more often than not, you're contemplating if you should write it. And if you need to, how much of it should you write and how to make the eventual rewrite easy.

If you're experienced enough, you either knew the rough way to code a task or realize that you need to take time to investigate the problem space. I don't think I ever ask myself what should I do to write more code with less effort. All the improvements I've made was to target precisely the thing I wanted to edit.




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