I understand the provocation, but please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
Your GP comment was great, and probably the thing to do with a supercilious reply is just not bother responding (easier said than done of course). You can usually trust other users to assess the thread fairly (e.g.https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> What makes you think I'm not "a developer who strongly values brevity and clarity"
Some pieces of evidence that make me think that:
1. The base rate of developers who write massively overly verbose code is about 99%, and there's not a ton of signal to deviate from that base rate other than the fact that you post on HN (probably a mild positive signal).
2. An LLM writes 80% of your code now, and my prior on LLM code output is that it's on par with a forgetful junior dev who writes very verbose code.
3. 200K lines of code is a lot. It just is. Again, without more signal, it's hard to deviate from the base rate of what 200K-line codebases look like in the wild. 99.5% of them are spaghettified messes with tons of copy-pasting and redundancy and code-by-numbers scaffolded code (and now, LLM output).
This is the state of software today. Keep in mind the bad programmers who make verbose spaghettified messes are completely convinced they're code-ninja geniuses; perhaps even more so than those who write clean and elegant code. You're allowed to write me off as an internet rando who doesn't know you, of course. To me, you're not you, you're every programmer who writes a 200k LOC B2B SaaS application and uses an LLM for 80% of their code, and the vast, vast majority of those people are -- well, not people who share my values. Not people who can code cleanly, concisely, and elegantly. You're a unicorn; cool beans.
Before you used LLMs, how often were you copy/pasting blocks of code (more than 1 line)? How often were you using "scaffolds" to create baseline codefiles that you then modified? How often were you copy/pasting code from Stack Overflow and other sources?
I understand the provocation, but please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
Your GP comment was great, and probably the thing to do with a supercilious reply is just not bother responding (easier said than done of course). You can usually trust other users to assess the thread fairly (e.g.https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> What makes you think I'm not "a developer who strongly values brevity and clarity"
Some pieces of evidence that make me think that:
1. The base rate of developers who write massively overly verbose code is about 99%, and there's not a ton of signal to deviate from that base rate other than the fact that you post on HN (probably a mild positive signal).
2. An LLM writes 80% of your code now, and my prior on LLM code output is that it's on par with a forgetful junior dev who writes very verbose code.
3. 200K lines of code is a lot. It just is. Again, without more signal, it's hard to deviate from the base rate of what 200K-line codebases look like in the wild. 99.5% of them are spaghettified messes with tons of copy-pasting and redundancy and code-by-numbers scaffolded code (and now, LLM output).
This is the state of software today. Keep in mind the bad programmers who make verbose spaghettified messes are completely convinced they're code-ninja geniuses; perhaps even more so than those who write clean and elegant code. You're allowed to write me off as an internet rando who doesn't know you, of course. To me, you're not you, you're every programmer who writes a 200k LOC B2B SaaS application and uses an LLM for 80% of their code, and the vast, vast majority of those people are -- well, not people who share my values. Not people who can code cleanly, concisely, and elegantly. You're a unicorn; cool beans.
Before you used LLMs, how often were you copy/pasting blocks of code (more than 1 line)? How often were you using "scaffolds" to create baseline codefiles that you then modified? How often were you copy/pasting code from Stack Overflow and other sources?
At least to me what you said sounded like 200k is just with LLMs but before agents. But it's a very reasonable amount of code for 9 years of work.