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[–] 25 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

Its hilarious to me that before AI, I would suggest we refactor our code base to make it more readable and easier to understand and would get all the excuses. "Oh we don't have the time". " we could introduce bugs". "We would need to test that"

Now when I mention to make the code easier for an LLM to understand, they're chomping at the bit for it.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

    Before AI, refactoring was expensive, high risk, unclear payoff.

    With AI, it’s cheap, higher risk, obvious payoff.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    The obvious payoff being that engineers with an actual work ethic get to fix the mess.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    I also got to refractor a major headache away, it was finally cheap enough to do all in one go instead of putting in a new pattern and incrementally change. The "Do one, do one, now repeat" prompt pattern works really well for these.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago

    Yeah... when the only documentation is CLAUDE.md...

    Still you can see why right? Improving docs/understandability for AI is good for them - they get more capable AI. Improving it for humans only helps other people, which is less of a priority.

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