8 ms·

I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.

• smugglerFlynn 17d ago
  Can't help but notice that this line is not true anymore in 2026: > It’s harder to read code than to write it.
  • bigstrat2003 17d ago
    It's more true than ever. It's still hard to read code, much more so when it's the AI slop people tend to send you these days. And on top of that, you have to read more of it because you can't trust said AI slop to actually be correct without a thorough review.
  • woodrowbarlow 17d ago
    what? my impression is that it's truer than ever and this is why so many open-source projects are limiting ai contributions. and the reason GitHub can't seem to stay online for more than a day.
  • spockz 17d ago
    > It’s harder to read -bad- code than to write -good- code. There. Fixed it for you.
    • cronofdoom 17d ago
      It’s harder to read -any- code than to write it.
• bitwize 18d ago
  Written before LLMs made Big Rewrites an absolute doddle.
  • ameliaquining 18d ago
    LLMs have meaningfully decreased the cost of rewrites, such that many rewrites that wouldn't previously have made sense now do. They are still significantly costly and often a bad idea.
    • hinkley 17d ago
      They also remove the secret menu item of rewrites which is to have some peace from management because you’re not delivering anything for a long time while you do the rewrite. I predict AI will cause the number of rewrites people ask for to go down. AI is better at doing Ship of Theseus rewrites too, and those are the superior option because they leave the system available for hotfixes at all times.
      • fmajid 15d ago
        I've heard it referred to as the Strangler Fig pattern.
  • Calavar 18d ago
    An absolute doddle assuming you have an absolutely excellent test suite. Otherwise on any nontrivial codebase you will still have regressions that make it to production and you will waste your time squashing bugs rather than writing new features.
    • paimapi 18d ago
      the thing companies seem to be finding out is that quality is much more important when you're shipping 3-5x more per sprint and incident rates are multiplying at an even higher factor. allocating even less time to code review and testing is the norm, however, and it feels like the modern Agile SDLC is breaking a bit under this new mode there's good skills to write test suites but each codebase needs its own bespoke implementation paired with so much institutional knowledge. but companies keep laying off those knowledge holders and QA to boot it's almost like shareholders > leadership > middle managers see 'enshittification' as aspirational and are doing their best to implement a systems-level strategy in pursuit of it
• Ariarule 18d ago
  Joel Spolsky wrote that about "large scale commercial applications", which Monica definitely is not.
  • Lord_Zero 15d ago
    Why is a large non-commercial app somehow immune from the concepts Joel speaks of?
• petcat 18d ago
  that made sense when people painstakingly typed out code by hand. Nowadays the code doesn't really matter and can be trivially thrown away and regenerated as needed.
• mgkimsal 17d ago
  IIRC the monica team already did this between v1 and v2, so v2 to v3 as another rewrite would be the same move.