Comment by 59nadir

This is in line with "Programming As Theory Building"[0] (Peter Naur, 1985) that puts forward the idea that when one is building a system one builds a "theory" (in a sense a mapping of what, where and why) of that system that is essential for continued work on it. Once I internalized this idea it helped me make sense of why rewrites are not "never a good idea" and simultaneously why they are so fraught with peril, as well as what kind of onboarding actually makes sense for work on a system. It's also why I can never get on board with the passive "review code an LLM spits out" type of development; it just does not build theory as reliably, effectively and efficiently.

It's a good, very digestible paper, in my opinion; well worth the read.

[0] - https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf