Comment by doanbactam

11 hours ago

It’s a stark contrast to today's mindset where we often just throw more resources at the problem. His obsession with elegance over features is something I try to keep in mind, even if it's harder in modern web dev. " Let's make it shorter and punchier. "Woz's floppy disk controller design is still the gold standard for doing in software what competitors needed a whole board of chips to do. That kind of obsession with elegance over brute force is exactly what's missing in modern engineering.

modern engineering is launching an electron to-do list app that uses 2gb of ram.

  • Which, at least works relibly across all platforms and devices unlike desktop frameworks?

    People wouldnt use electron is they had good alternative

  • What I'm seeing more and more of is junior folks blindly taking LLM-generated code and including it into their systems, without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break.

    Maybe I am living in the past, but it does make me think that they might be depriving themselves of an opportunity to develop key skills.

    • >without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break.

      You are living in a past, but one much farther back than you expect.

      People were copying code from SO since it became popular.

      People are including node modules blindly before AI.

      Most developers suck, terribly. Maybe being on HN is a type of filter that shows you're just a little bit better than the average, but the number of developers on HN is small versus the total number of developers.

      Edit: I was copying code out of magazines to get games running without understanding anything about it when I was young.

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