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Cognitive load is what matters

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1455 points nromiun | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 12:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.286s | 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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pessimizer ◴[30 Aug 25 17:52 UTC] No.45076642[source]▶
Thus far, and granted I don't have as much experience as others, I just demand that AI simplify the code until I understand everything that it is doing. If I see it doing something in a convoluted way, I demand that it does it in the obvious way. If it's adding too many dependencies, I tell it to remove the goofy ones and write it the long way with the less capable stdlib function or helped by something that I already have a dependency on.

It's writing something for me, not for itself.

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1. balder1991 ◴[30 Aug 25 19:16 UTC] No.45077218[source]▶
Yeah, as much as I don’t like to use AI to write large portions of code, I’m using it to help me learn web development and it can feel like a following a tutorial, but tailored to the exact project I want.

My current approach is creating something like a Gem on Gemini with custom instructions and the updated source code of the project as context.

I just discuss what I want, and it gives me the code to do it, then I write by hand, ask for clarifications and suggest changes until I feel like the current approach is actually a good one. So not really “vibe-coding”, though I guess a large number of software developers who care about keeping the project sane must be doing this.