Dead Code

Race conditions used to scare engineers into getting concurrent code right the first time. Varun Gandhi worries that LLMs change that math. If a model can debug a race condition later, teams may get comfortable shipping more bugs now.

LLMs have left software with fewer excuses to be slow, and Varun Gandhi agrees. He still expects to run into a lot more slow software for a while. Shipping suboptimal code has never been easier, and he thinks the pendulum will take time to swing back.

Scrolling memes about a topic can feel like learning. Alistair Norman says vibe coding gives you the same quick hits of progress. The deep understanding comes from school and academic research, even when that feels like a grind.

DHH's Rails World keynote measured AI-assisted coding in lines of code. Alistair Norman thinks he chose that number because he didn't have a better one. Work that actually helped people would have come with a metric to show for it.

Agents can spin up an app fast, and that speed is fun at first. Sofia Besenski says design principles still apply once the shine wears off. She compares it to Martin Fowler's idea that skipping design works only until a project plateaus.

DHH compared lines of code at Rails World as if more meant better. Sofia Besenski calls that tokenmaxxing. An agent running in a loop could write a million lines of Rust in a month, and it wouldn't make her a better developer.

HEY is trading one Rails app for six native apps and a Rust backend. Sofia Besenski sees six new sets of failure points. She also points to research on cognitive debt, where engineers stop understanding the systems they're building.

"I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've been glad that I didn't delete a piece of code." Kerri Miller used to think an uncalled method did no damage and more tests were always better. About 30 years in, she's stopped keeping code around in case she needs it.

One harmless-looking test was creating more than 80 records every time it ran. Kerri Miller says it didn't test anything interesting, so she deleted it. Years of using code analysis tools have made her think about the cost of every decision in the code she writes.

Code that sits between two teams tends to rot because neither feels responsible for it. Kerri Miller points to Rails partials, which are written in Ruby but get more attention from front-end engineers. That's where she wants to take Keela next. She'll be happy with 80% accuracy.