> complexity very bad Oh boy, this is so true
> complexity very bad Oh boy, this is so true. In all my years of software engineering this is one of those ideas that has proved consistently true in every single situation. Some problems are inherently complex, yes, but even then you'd be much, much better off spending time to think things through to arrive at the simplest way to solve it. Again and again my most effective work has been after I questioned my prior approaches and radically simplified things. You might lose some potential flexibility, but in most case you don't even need all that you think you need. Some examples: - Now that reasonably good (and agentic) LLMs are a thing, I started avoiding overly complex TypeScript types that are brittle and hard to debug, in favor of writing spec-like code and asking the LLM to statically generate other code based on it. - The ESLint dependency in my projects kept breaking after version updates, many rules were not sophisticated enough to avoid false positives, and keeping it working properly with TypeScript and VSCode was getting complicated. …
Original discussionThe Grug Brained Developer (2022)578 source comments · at import