When code can be regenerated faster than it can be understood, preserving it for sentimental or historical reasons no longer makes sense. What matters instead is stewardship: maintaining the system’s behavior, boundaries, and intent over time, regardless of how many times its internals are replaced.
leaflet.pub: The Death and Rebirth of Programming
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@avdi I have great respect for you and for Chad. I have books from you that taught me a lot about ruby and unix processes. I have learned ruby originally with his "Programming Ruby".
It pains me to see someone I respected so much turn from "this is a craft" to "lol computer go brrrrt". If LLMs were deterministic like compilers, I could *maybe* agree. They are not. And therefore each regenerated iteration of a codebase can be vastly different from the last, including bugs and problems.
@avdi thanks for posting this! The transition to agentic engineering has been a wild ride. I’m glad I honed my systems/code review skills on a larger team before I hit the n=1 phase myself, I can treat the generated code with the same level of scrutiny I would expect from a more junior dev and get decent results.