This morning in my feed I got to see:

• software developers complaining that AI^Wan LLM wrote a bunch of code that was low-level ok, but impossible to understand at a higher level, and trying to coin new terminology for it despite it being very much not a new problem.

• software developers complaining that they don't like agile because breaking down what you're doing into smaller pieces and communicating it is Far Too Much.

• at least two other software developers talking about how they wrote weird code in the past that wasn't up to scratch and/or did dumb things, what was I thinking, etc.

And, uh, not to inflict my least favourite thing to read on other people, which is a Belligerent Rant, but:

There is Power and Value in Being Deliberate about what you're doing, making sure that There Is A Plan, Communicating That Plan So That Everyone Knows What's Going On Yes Even The Suits, and then Following The Plan Unless There's A Good Reason Not To In Which Case You Change The Plan And Communicate That Too. And sure, it seems Too Slow And Cumbersome, but in the longer term it is so much faster and less hassle than the usual Bunch Of Nerds In A Room** methodology it's not funny. (** - yes, yes, these days it's a Slack Channel, you're very clever)

Think Bandwidth vs. Latency. You got that minor feature done super fast, but Bob needed the same thing three months ago and wrote his version, and Dave M is currently writing something that also needs that feature and he doesn't know or care about either of those implementations, and they're all Mutually Incompatible, Overblown, Special Cased and even Functionally Different, and odds are very good that you could've found a library for whatever it was with about five minutes of web searching and just done `import <thing>` and used that and Been Done With It.

That's *at least* three times the effort of Doing It Properly, and when some ex-System Administrator, ex-Software Manager someone like me comes along in five years time, when you lot are a distant memory, to Work Out What The Hell This System Is Supposed To Do, I will be most displeased. And then I will almost certainly Delete Large Chunks Of Your Precious Code.

#MinusTwoThousandLinesOfCode #WhyDoITProjectsFailItIsAMystery