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Comment by XenophileJKO | Hacker News Reader

I've had a realization recently. I was also probably the top craftsman in the teams I worked in throughout my career.

I think what people are missing is that people often become craftsman because we want to be able to keep the code adaptive and performant so we can provide business value quickly and efficiently.

The change is with models, the benefit dynamics of immaculately structured code changes dramitically. Now the real area you need to focus on is correctness and performance. Structure doesn't really matter unless it serves those two purposes, at least from the business value side.

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This is exactly right. Architecture -- in fact, using any kind of abstractions at all -- is basically a crutch that humans use to make ourselves more effective in implementing and evolving code over time, usually by either compressing the problem domain so that we can pack more of it into our limited brains, or making our own mistakes visible early. It's extremely valuable for humans who need to work on complex systems -- but it might simply be unnecessary overhead for entities with significantly more working memory, just as humans won't plan out a class hierarchy for a 5-line script, much less write a PRD.

The let the agents work in assembly language then, or even better machine code. It's much more direct and avoids human weakness, right?

Yes, directly emitting binaries will likely become practical at some point if LLM context lengths continue to increase. We may be there already for small programs, I don't know.

As with eliminating other forms of abstraction, there's not much gain from doing so. Writing source code and then compiling it offers many useful checks, and greatly simplifies making changes. It's just something that may no longer be necessary at some point.

> I think what people are missing is that people often become craftsman because we want to be able to keep the code adaptive and performant so we can provide business value quickly and efficiently.

Nearly everyone I’ve worked with that would say this ended up being the in the bottom quartile of those shipping features and their code was often the most complex. At least in small, “fast”-moving companies.

A few people I have worked with have nailed it, but they were the ones to balance present and future weighted towards present.

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