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Cognitive load is what matters

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1457 points nromiun | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 12:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.326s | 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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1. lukeschlather ◴[30 Aug 25 20:22 UTC] No.45077707[source]▶
For me, I think it makes it more likely I will pick simple abstractions that have good software verification. Right now the idea of a webservice that has been proven correct to a spec is ridiculous, no one has time to write that, but it seems more likely that sort of thing will become ordinary. Yes, I won't be able to hold the webservice in my head, but reviewing it and making correct and complete statements about how it functions will be easier.