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Comment by hexaga | Hacker News Reader

You're a user of jq in the sense of the comment you're replying to, not a developer. The developer is the developer _of jq_, not developers in general.

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Yes, that's exactly how I meant it. I might _rarely_ peruse some code if I'm really curious about it, but by and large I just trust the developers of the software I use and don't really care how it works. I care about what it does.

As a developer of software I often have to care because it matters and so I read the code.

Source code is often written for other humans first and foremost.

I've had to dig into node modules to try to debug code from a closed source library that we depended on.

I'd much rather wade through AI slop than minified code, which may have previously been AI slop.

Minified code is not for humans, it may as well been bytecode.

Agreed! That's why I told my llm to help me.

But I think larger point being, it's not always feasible for humans to understand every line of code that runs in their software.

That’s where accountability comes in. It should be possible to have a non empty set of people that understand all the code. If I choose a dep to do unicode string parsing, that means I trust the author have good knowledge about unicode string parsing. And they should have the skills to maintain their code even if what I got is bytecoded or compiled.

What do you mean, you can't quote the Linux kernel by heart? I thought it was gospel for all nerds:

Loongarch kernel, first paragraph, the lord Linus said, in all his wisdom: /* Hardware capabilities */ unsigned int elf_hwcap __read_mostly EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(elf_hwcap)

Both can be equally bad. Especially if you could get the source of the minified dependency and find that it is also slop.

What a world when we’re playing Would you rather with people’s property and information.

We're talking about Show HN here.

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