Dead Code seeks to extract the good ideas from the chaos of modern software development. Hosted by @jardonamron.
Joined August 2023
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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.
apologies: we sent out some posts with the wrong clips attached. if you caught them before I deleted them, I hope you enjoyed the spoilers for the next episode
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.