Item — HN Reader

Fair! I agree that we want as little code as we can get away with. We love pull requests with a lot of red (deleted lines).

Like you say about libraries, it is possible to have code that isn't your problem. It's all about how leaky the abstraction is. Right now LLMs write terrible abstractions, and it's unclear how long it'll take for them to get good at writing good code.

I am excited to invest more in tools to make the understanding of code easier, cheaper, and more fun. My friend Glen pointed one way in this direction: https://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/

As Geoffrey Litt likes to say, LLMs can help with this by building us throwaway visualizers and debuggers to help us understand our code.

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But we have plenty of tools that helps us understanding code. Things like inspectors (UI,network,..), tracing (including the old printf), debuggers (stack frame for function calls and variable values), grep (for context and overview) and static analysers.

I see people going all in with LLMs and forgetting that those even exists. It's hard to take such people seriously.

Strong agree! For example, we at Val Town just invested very heavily in getting a good ol' fashioned language server to work in our product to power hover-overs and type information in our web editor. That'll likely be our next company blog post...

I like LLM as a technology (just got trough a couple of courses on Machine learning this year). But when we have all these tools available, the next step is making a better UI for them (Kinda like IDEs do), not reinvent everything from scratch.