Comment by insin
21 days ago
I'd interpret the original statement as "tests which don't matter" and "documentation nobody will ever read", the ones which only exist because someone said they _have_ to, and nobody's ever going to check them as long as they exist (like a README.md in one my main work projects I came back to after temporarily being reassigned to another project - previously it only had setup instructions, now: filled with irrelevent slop, never to be read, like "here is a list of the dependencies we use and a summary of each of their descriptions!").
Doing either of them _well_ - the way you do when you actually care about them and they actually matter - is still so far beyond LLMs. Good documentation and good tests are such a differentiator.
If we're talking about low quality tests and documentation that exists only to check a box, the easier answer is to remove the box and acknowledge that the low quality stuff just isn't needed at all.
I’ve never seen a test that doesn’t matter that shouldn’t be slotted for removal (if it gets written at all) or documentation that is never read. If people can read code to understand systems, they will be grateful for good documentation.