flâneur

Writing Code Is Easy. Reading It Isn’t.

idiallo.com · 1,015 words · saved by 1 readers

Writing code is easy. Once you have a solution in mind, and have mastered the syntax of your favorite programming language, writing code is easy. Having an LLM write entire functions for you? Even easier. But the hard part isn’t the writing. It’s the reading. It’s the time it takes to load the mental model of the system into your head. That’s where all the cost really is. A mental model is the thing you build when you read code. It’s your internal map of how the system works, where the tricky parts are, what depends on what. Without it, you’re just staring at lines of text. When I worked as a contractor, most of my jobs started the same way. I’d get a task to fix a bug or add a new feature in an application I’d never seen before. My mental model was clean and empty at first. To start filling it, I’d check the homepage to see what it looked like. I’d look at the page source: is this React? jQuery? A third-party plugin? I’d scan the codebase to see if the carousel they are requesting on

Writing code is easy. Once you have a solution in mind, and have mastered the syntax of your favorite programming language, writing code is easy. Having an LLM write entire functions for you? Even easier. But the hard part isn’t the writing. It’s the reading. It’s the time it takes to load the mental model of the system into your head. That’s where all the cost really is. A mental model is the thing you build when you read code. It’s your internal map of how the system works, where the tricky parts are, what depends on what. Without it, you’re just staring at lines of text. When I worked…

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