- Simple beats clever
- Duplication beats the wrong abstraction
- Code is read far more than it is written
A lot of software truisms have been breaking down in the face of AI codegen. I feel like these ones are more true than ever.
Old software engineering truisms that feel more true than ever after AI codegen:
Simple beats clever
Given the cost of writing code is cheaper, and you are not putting thought into every line of code that is written, it is much better to have code that is easy to reason about than code that saves you time but is not immediately obvious in how it works.
Duplication beats the wrong abstraction
Similar theme to the first point - the wrong abstraction is still extremely expensive. But writing 500 lines of straightforward code is much less painful than it used to be. There is also a subtle compounding effect here: AI can make it harder to feel when an abstraction is wrong. When handwriting code you can feel the tug of a bad abstraction. You can also feel the pull of when a good one is needed. When an agent pukes out 1000 lines of code in 5 minutes you don't feel any of that. So better to push out formalizing on an abstraction until it is clear what the right one is.
Code is read far more than it is written
The old idea was that every line of code is read 10 times more than it is written. With coding agents that ratio might be closer to 100:1. Though it is not always humans reading the code, it still needs to be able to be reasoned about just as well.