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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: 0s | source
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exclipy ◴[30 Aug 25 20:51 UTC] No.45077894[source]▶
This was my main takeaway from A Philosophy Of Software Design by John Ousterhout. It is the best book on this subject and I recommend it to every software developer.

Basically, you should aim to minimise complexity in software design, but importantly, complexity is defined as "how difficult is it to make changes to it". "How difficult" is largely determined by the amount of cognitive load necessary to understand it.

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1. Shorn ◴[31 Aug 25 03:06 UTC] No.45080019[source]▶
Unsurprisingly, minimising the amount of cognitive complexity is how you get the most out of LLM coding agents. So now have a theoretically repeatable way to measure cognitive load as contextualised to software engineering.