If you get feedback like that, it’s time for your team to get automated linting/formatting

Call for a style guide meeting every time you see feedback like this, and write down what everybody agrees on. You’ll never have to do it again after 3-4 of those. Problem solved.

Still not solved? Guess it was really about the commas and not the value delivered anyway, so do whatever you feel like.

I’ve had several occasions where I would build a feature “properly” with defensive guardrails and handling of edge cases “that will never happen (but are technically possible)” and then you run into the coworker that says “it’s overengineered. YAGNI. Just do the one-line fix”

But...were they wrong? There is a difference between "edge case" and "cannot ever happen". I've seen this trend a lot lately where Claude suggests a lot of extra code to handle things that cannot possibly happen. Unless you ask it to, it won't trace the flow of data through the app to confirm the edge case actually exists, if local conditions appear to allow it. Then the developer lets it implement this crap without asking that one question, and I have to say YAGNI in the review.

I've seen so many software bugs in my career where when you traced execution, you'd find the code crashing in a block with the comment //this can never happen

That’s not a bad thing though — what that means is that the original dev believed this could never happen and probably therefore could not decide exactly what the right way to handle the error is.

Whether they were wrong is a matter of perspective.

I think they were against over engineering because they were constantly firefighting bugs and didn’t have time to thoughtfully review.

I’m a big fan of “Parse dont validate” and I feel like injecting that approach into python has so many benefits.

there’s all the code correctness stuff that we all love. But the biggest benefit is making it so much easier to maintain other parts of the stack.

Following a stack trace into somebody else’s functions and you see that the args are completely untyped or just a bunch of ‘dict[str, Any]’ is the worst. But if you see those inputs as more narrowly typed data classes it makes it so much easier to grok what the function is supposed to do

I had a very hard lesson in that once when I inherited a legacy Clojure application.

Previously I had been somewhat sympathetic to Rich Hickey’s impassioned monologues about making maps first-class and how everything gets easier when you let data just be itself. But when I had to learn my way around code that someone else had written according to that philosophy… hoo boy. Clojure quickly got demoted from being one of my favorite languages to merely being one of my favorite write-only languages.

The AI art is also a class/status marker.

If a business markets itself with these AIgen posters, you get wildly different responses from different groups.

boomers that spend all their time on Facebook will think “this is such a nice pretty poster” and be oblivious to the fact it is even ai. Even if they knew it was ai they don’t care.

Young people will think it is low class/trashy. Some hate it because it’s ai, others hate it because the poster is ugly/busy/confusing.

its interesting that people view different parts of the job as 'the fun part'.

you like typing out the code, but i see that as the drudgery that I have to slog through after the fun of drawing architecture diagrams and writing out the api specs.

Different strokes for different folks. I have never written an architecture diagram or api spec in my entire career. I predict I would not want to do either.

I’m pretty sure the Beale ciphers are a hoax, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

`potato + sunflower = chicken` is some weird videogame crafting/alchemy logic

Real world “crafting” is far stranger than any game.

i'd love it if spotify split into two companies: - an enterprise platform that just provided a an API to access/play songs and direct the payment to the correct rightsholders - a consumer app that built on top of that to provide the 'spotify' we all have

let a whole ecosystem of music streaming apps take off that cater to different niches of listeners.

each app would be able to differentiation themselves with their UI but also features like recommendations/playlists/etc. And spotify wouldn't see them as competitors because they'd still be getting their cut because they all go through their API.

Rights holders would never allow it. It would be too easy for their enterprise customer to underreport plays.

Automating the c-suite doesn’t save you money by cutting headcount, it saves you money by reducing salaries. Having a decently competent AI executive would put a lot of downward pressure on the insane benefits packages these folks get

typos mean its more likely to have been made by a human.

typos mean it's more likely to have been made by a careless human.

Certainly. But in the current social environment, being seen as (mildly) careless is less bad than being seen as someone who lets an LLM write prose for them.

That's kind of sad. I miss being an OG em dash user.

i make typos constantly (seriously, check my post history). i probably have typos in my resume. i just dont know why anybody should care.

the meaning is still easily parseable. i cant imagine letting something so superficial matter

I make typos all the time as well, on stuff I am just writing off the cuff like a forum or chat message. But when it comes to something important, don't you check it over dozens of times? hundreds of times? A mere missing semicolon will make your code not compile. How could you let a superficial typo go uncorrected once you see it? How could you not see it when it's in the most obvious spot?

It suggests a certain lack of diligence; like you didn't proofread your work. What about the person that should have proofread it as a second opinion? Did this really follow a rigorous academic process at all? <- That's the first impression when the presentation is sloppy.