For decades, engineers understood that large code reviews are harder than small ones. Out of both politeness and a desire to receive better code reviews, we learned to break our large changes into smaller chunks. Some engineers took things even further and replaced code reviews with pair programming. But then LLMs showed up and everyone seems to have forgotten those lessons.
They can be still be applied now using coding agents, if you're willing to push back against the default setup and change your mode of thinking a little bit. Of course it doesn't help that an entire industry is dedicated to persuading us that maximizing token spend is the only way to get shit done.
I appreciate this probably seems like an extremist take, but I wrote some more about it here in case there's anybody out there who identifies with it:
> They can be still be applied now using coding agents, if you're willing to push back against the default setup and change your mode of thinking a little bit. Of course it doesn't help that an entire industry is dedicated to persuading us that maximizing token spend is the only way to get shit done.
Yeah the problem is the executives and managers around us are demanding we ship massive features as quickly as possible, and I like having a job and dread having to find a new one in this market...
I think that's reasonable. My only gripe is that making small sets of changes is often faster to do by hand than waiting on llm reasoning, so I've found it amounts to very little speedup.
They can be still be applied now using coding agents, if you're willing to push back against the default setup and change your mode of thinking a little bit. Of course it doesn't help that an entire industry is dedicated to persuading us that maximizing token spend is the only way to get shit done.
I appreciate this probably seems like an extremist take, but I wrote some more about it here in case there's anybody out there who identifies with it:
https://philbooth.me/blog/agentic-coding-and-mental-models