lintfordpickle

yes, that and I've noticed many scrollbars have very little contrast with the background color, making them ever more difficult for me to see.

Thanks for the reply. I didn't mean to be dismissive or discredit the article.

The problem you described is real, and one I face daily at work. Anecdotally, every time we've tried to curate the comments and organize them (especially when referencing external documentation, as you also mentioned), it invariably ends up becoming stale and just another point of contention down the road.

I'm now more of a proponent of either not commenting, or putting the context and rationale in the commit message instead.

I disagree with the overall sentiment of this article. I wouldn't say comments are never useful, because they certainly can be. But once verbose commenting becomes the norm, people (and now especially LLMs) will overuse them, making the code unnecessarily obtuse and difficult to read. And the point about maintenance is real.

There are also a couple of 'pointless' statements in the article itself:

> "Use a combination of in-line and standalone comments, depending on the situation"

isn't that just every kind of comment?

I think the point is, if you click the '2.0s' button, you cannot re-focus on the input field for those 2 seconds.

What an incredibly obnoxious comment.

> How would you call decades of ...

I'd call it a whataboutism

only to be followed by a bout of targeted advertisements for Ozempic and diarrhea tablets :(

It sounds like you are massively overthinking it. When you pre-order anything, you need to enter a shipping address. Why would you need to consider anything beyond that or require 'dedicated' logistics?

that's not to say I don't like Valve's solution - I agree, it is very nice

although, somewhat ironic to your argument, I bet the intro that fornite plays when starting the game uses ffmpeg

>> and still largely understand the code [...] ,that, I feel has made me a better engineer

the cynic in me would say that a good engineer should fully understand the code you write.

I'm not suggesting that AI is the problem here - you could vibe code with the AI have have it explain the reasoning and patterns - or else tell it to use 'simpler' patterns from the outset. For any one problem in software engineering, there are always multiple solutions; some slower, some faster, some more flexible etc. The code you produce should, imo, but at the level that you can understand it.

How can you reason about code you don't fully understand? How can you judge the future impact (technical debt and the cost of maintenance) of your projects?

A.I makes it easier to get yourself into problems early on.

>> "We've been working through some significant changes inside GitLab over the past few days"

I can't seem to get past this - all these decisions (and a work-force reduction :() are the result of a few days of pondering? I've had stomach aches that have lasted longer ..

I found the article interesting, but I don't think I understand what is meant by 'Write Last, Read first' rule - even after reading it a few times. It seems to be too ambiguous a statement to be helpful.

Under the section 'Order of Operations':

> "Since the system of reference doesn’t determine existence, we can safely write to it first without committing anything. [...]"

Then the next paragraph

> "This principle—Write Last, Read First—ensures that we maintain application level consistency."

What I think it means is, 'writing-last to the system-of-record' and 'a read-first from the system of record' yields authoritative results, but I don't get that just from the title. Is my understanding correct?