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Comment by flutas | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, in every team I've been in (only 3 tbf) we almost all followed the "nit" approach for PRs.

    nit: this could be changed to XYZ

    we should use XYZ here

where it was understood nits could be ignored if you didn't feel it was an urgent thing vs a preference.

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It's worth noting that this is a kind of different "nit" than something that might be attached to a line of code. Like, someone might "nit" using a bunch of if statements where a switch statement might work, or if someone uses a `for each` where a `thing.map` would do.

What I am describing would be something higher level, more like a comment on approach, or an observation that there is some high-level redundancy or opportunity for refactor. Something like "in an ideal world we would offload some of this to an external cache server instead of an in-memory store but this is better than hitting the DB on every request".

That kind of observation may come up in top-level comment on a code review, but it might also come up in a tech review long before a line of code has been written. It is about extending that attitude to all aspects of dev.

I had someone reject my code that improved/regularized half a dozen instances of a domain object we had, where they were showing up in code paths I cared about. He said there’s dozens of these, don’t submit this unless you fix them all.

I had something similar but convinced the other person the rest of the work can be done later. Then the person went ahead and did it despite the other instances having no use/value. Go figure. I guess having consistency has some value to argue the other side. I tend to be extremely flexible in terms of allowing different ways of doing things but some seem to confuse form with function insisting on some "perfection" in the details. I think this is partly why we get these very mixed reactions to AI where LLMs aren't quite "right" (despite often producing code that functions as well as human written code).

Consistency reduces the mental cost of acquiring and maintaining an understanding of a system. In a real sense, moving from one approach to two different approaches, even if one of them is slightly better than the original one, can be a downgrade.

Like many other things it's a judgement call. The break down occurs when people replace judgement with rules or "religion". This tends to happen when they don't have the experience of seeing the long term impact of decisions in various contexts.

In a way, simplifying the judgement call to the black-and-white approach “either you change all instances or none” without considering nuance is also a way of managing the mental overhead. Making a simple call lets you spend all your nuance energy in areas where it might matter more.

I agree that it’s also a way of accumulating technical debt, it’s all a bit of a tradeoff.

But then you end up with nit inflation, people feel like they need to fix the nits, and do, and there's no meaning to nit any more. I try to just not comment unless I feel there is some learning from the nit.

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