• Nate Cox@programming.dev
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    5 days ago

    It’s funny to me that this is even up for discussion. It’s been a truism for as long as I can remember that reading code is much, much more difficult than writing it.

    • Senal@programming.dev
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      5 days ago

      Perhaps for the the style or complexity of the code you (and i) are seeing on a regular basis this is true.

      I find, for low logical complexity code, it’s less about the difficulty of reading it and more about the speed.

      I can read significantly quicker than i can type and if the code isn’t something i need additional time to reason about then spotting issue with existing code can be quicker than me writing the same code out.

      Boilerplate code is a good example of this.

      Though, as i said, I’ve found the point at which that loses it’s reliable usefulness is relatively low in the complexity scale.

      The specific issue i have with people pushing LLM’s as a panacea for boilerplate code is that it’s not declarative and is prone to reasonable looking hallucinations , given enough space.

      Even boilerplate in large enough amount can be subject to eccentricities of LLM imagination.