Declining Sentimentality in the Transition from Handwritten Code
This is a brain dump.
I've been practising some NeetCode recently and I realised I have forgotten the feeling of pride in writing code how I did at university, when I coded on paper.
Now with IDE autocomplete and AI help it costs next to nothing to iterate.
However, NeetCode has made me conscious of Sunk Cost Fallacy, where it is painful to delete bad code I've invested time into and the IKEA effect, where a personally assembled product is valued more and maintained better by the consumer but may also be overvalued (not just a table from the store, a table I built).
The positive side of sentimentality is, coding becomes an art. Naturally I have been taking more care and effort in making code good and pleasing to read.
On a side note, I have noticed a growing velocity addiction in the industry. When test suites pass - that is refinement complete for a change, even for production environments.
I think this can be explained by perhaps an inverse ikea effect/ sunk-cost fallacy. Since the equivalent of assembling a table is gone, people take the output from an llm like it's free assembled furniture from the store and naturally use it with less care. It is human nature.
lower time invested into a change = lower sentimentality for the change
Even for me pride in what is shipped is starting to feel more intentional than natural, because of the lower time investment.
Linus Torvalds, lead Linux Kernel developer. Has allowed AI for kernel development, but with a rule that you must take full ownership of the AI code you ship - you cannot say "Ooops, I blame the AI - it hallucinated". See rule ref.
I think without realising he is not just increasing ownership but also sentimentality.
To stretch my analogy further, you may not be assembling IKEA furniture anymore and instead be buying pre-assembled furniture. But when you place it in the office lobby, the furniture shall have your name on it instead of having the furniture point to the store.
I'm not sure how well this will work to bring back the pride and care we used to feel in what we shipped, but I like this direction.
I've heard the argument "Prettiness rarely delivers business value and it will be mostly agents who deal with this substandard code anyway, why be concerned with this?"
That may be right in the future - time will tell. But definitely not right now. Read: Claude Code's Source Code Leaked. Here's What We Found Inside.
Claude Code CLI source code slop, what is a minimal human input exemplar project by Anthropic - is an extreme example if I am being fair.
In more sensible projects where there is still a good amount of human input. Despite green test suites, it feels like something important is being lost right now and good review process is starting to become more of a discipline rather than what used to be natural.