The week was all about trimming and pruning. Sunnyday went through an AI code review and came out with roughly a thousand lines less. Most of the savings came from the deletion of duplicated logic, and many of that from AI code written across different sessions.
I prefer a well refactored codebase because it simplifies the mental model that I have to hold in my head. AI doesn’t have to do that, it is tireless in how it reads and spits out code. That said, none of us are immune from the effects of a sprawling codebase—losing track of what things are supposed to be and subtle differences across branches.
I think a lot about the speed-knowledge tradeoff these days. If I go fast, which I can go much faster than I am today, I truly lose sight of what goes into my codebase. I maintain some oversight on code input, at least in codebases that I care about, and even then I’m surprised by some of the decisions when I do code review. Do we end up in a world where the discipline reorganizes itself into an outside looking in motion? Attention is truly the scarce resource of our age.