Comment by gspencley

> Never refactor. This is literally why everyone loves objected orientated and paint themselves in a corner that blows up in their face.

I try to get people to think about "write once" code as much as possible. Keep things small, single-purpose and composable. You maximize reuse potential, make testing a lot easier and greatly ease debugging.

But you're right about one thing: we do live in very different worlds. In the product world, the business never knows what they are making until something is in front of them and they decide they want something else. Therefore the majority of developer time is spent "maintaining" existing code (read: making code changes) vs building new code.

In that world, the "never refactor" mentality is suicide. Refactoring is improving the design of existing code in order to make it simpler and easier to change as requirements change.

And that is the one universal truth of software: it changes.

If you don't need the code to change, ever, then you might as well stick with a fixed circuit.

> I dont code anything so complicated. I come from linux, but they call it the 'unix philosophy'. Do one thing and do it well. Kind of akin to KISS principle.

So do I. I use Linux on all of my devices and came up as a *nix developer. Unit tests favour the unix philosophy. I often think of a "unit" of code as a single logical operation. But logic is a function of the human mind and humans make errors. Even in simple, one-liner, single-responsibility functions logic errors creep up. Then consider how your programming language helps you or aids you. I see type casting induced errors all the time that a simple unit test would have caught and avoided.

> Write clean simple code that self-documents itself that legit cant really go wrong.

Then why did you even bring up writing documentation lol. We're aligned here. I never document code because I consider that to be a failure of the code. Documentation and code need to be kept in sync... which never happens, not to mention people don't read it. So favour code that is self-explanatory.

> I do like the idea that you feel like im making the world worse by having AI do the chores.

You're deliberately straw-manning me there. If writing a unit test is a chore, your approach to testing is flawed. That was my point and you know it. My comment was also specific to using AI to write unit tests. Not to do anything else.