The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

One thing to appreciate is that this article comes from someone who can do the more sophisticated (complex) thing, but tries not to based on experience.

There is of course a time and place for sophistication, pushing for higher levels of abstraction and so on. But this grug philosophy is saying that there isn't any inherent value in doing this sort of thing and I think that is very sound advice.

Also I noticed AI assistance is more effective with consistent, mundane and data driven code. YMMV

> Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler

The time and place for sophistication and abstraction is when and where they make the code easier to understand without first needing a special course to explain why it's easier to understand. (It varies by situation which courses can be taken for granted.)

I feel like this would fit the bell curve meme -

Novice dev writes simple code

Intermediate dev writes complex code

Expert dev writes simple code

I gave this advice to an intermediate dev at my company a couple of years ago

Something along the lines of "Hey, you're a great developer, really smart, you really know your stuff. But you have to stop reaching for the most complicated answer to everything"

He took it to heart and got promoted at the start of this year. Was nice to see. :)