3 ms·

Agents still pay a penalty for complexity even if it is a smaller one.

• digitaltrees 5mo ago
  Parsing single file is easier than navigating a file system for an LLM. Until the models have context windows large enough to hold the entire codebase in one shot, single files will beat multiple files every time.
  • bossyTeacher 5mo ago
    This. I suspect the codebases in the future will be made of a small number of gigantic source files. These will be able to be transpiled into a more human friendly that produces multiple smaller files per big file in human-debug mode.
    • cjbgkagh 5mo ago
      As a human who typically uses large files, 10k to 30K lines of code files are pretty common, I find the agents don’t read the whole file after the first time, they almost always do a range select for the bit they are interested in.
      • digitaltrees 5mo ago
        But you wouldn’t argue that a 30k line file is good code would you? Humans write bad code to. For me the litmus test is: will someone read this in the future. If yes, then write good code. I don’t think we are in the era when a human will never read the code again in human history. So we should still strive for human intelligibility.
        • cjbgkagh 5mo ago
          The code I write is good. I don’t write for the lowest common denominator, readers need to be hard core functional programmers as a pre-req. The great thing about AI is that it’s raising the bar on lowest common denominator.