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Cognitive load is what matters

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1457 points nromiun | 2 comments | 30 Aug 25 12:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.524s | source
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xmprt ◴[30 Aug 25 17:46 UTC] No.45076575[source]▶
This is one of the reasons I fear AI will harm the software engineering industry. AI doesn't have any of these limitation so it can write extremely complex and unreadable code that works... until it doesn't. And then no one can fix it.

It's also why I urge junior engineers to not rely on AI so much because even though it makes writing code so much faster, it prevents them from learning the quirks of the codebase and eventually they'll lose the ability to write code on their own.

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mupuff1234 ◴[30 Aug 25 17:51 UTC] No.45076630[source]▶
Or maybe it will actually increase the quality of software engineering because it will free up the cognitive load from thinking of the low level design to higher level architecture.
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dsego ◴[30 Aug 25 17:55 UTC] No.45076675[source]▶
That's my fear, it will become a sort of a compiler. Prompts will be the code and code will be assembly, and nobody will even try to understand the details of the generated code unless there is something to debug. This will cause the codebases to be less refined with less abstraction and more duplication and bloat, but we will accept it as progress.
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mupuff1234 ◴[30 Aug 25 17:59 UTC] No.45076722[source]▶
Funny, I'd say that codebases nowadays usually have too many abstractions.
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1. dsego ◴[30 Aug 25 19:08 UTC] No.45077177[source]▶
Some certainly do. I have also noticed that the format of the code and structure used depend more on tools and hardware the developer uses rather than some philosophical ideal. A programmer with a big monitor could prefer big blocks of uninterrupted code with long variable names. Because of the big screen area, they can see the whole outline and understand the flow of this long chunk of code. Someone on a small 13" laptop might tend to split big pieces of code into smaller chunks so they won't have to scroll so much because things would get hidden. The other thing is the IDE or editor that's used. A coder who relies on the builtin goto symbol feature might not care as much about organizing folder and file structure, since they can just click on the method name, or use the command palette that will direct them to that piece of code. Their colleague might need the code to be in well organized file structure because they click through folders to reach the method.
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2. mupuff1234 ◴[30 Aug 25 19:32 UTC] No.45077344[source]▶
Those are all examples for why having a single source for code generation would most likely simply things - basically we will have a universal code style and logic, instead of every developer reinventing the wheel.

And let's face it, 95% of software isn't exactly novel.