4 ms·
> After months of refactoring I had an uncomfortable realization: I may have built a system that is above my own level of understanding. When everything works,
by nico 16d ago
> After months of refactoring I had an uncomfortable realization: I may have built a system that is above my own level of understanding. When everything works, that gap is almost invisible. When it doesn't, it becomes very real.
> "Sometimes I genuinely don't know what to do next without asking another model. That made me wonder whether I spent a year building a product, or partly building the appearance of one: something sophisticated enough to work, but which I don't yet understand deeply enough to truly own
This is always the reality for a sufficiently complex system. We only have an illusion of understanding
Now, more specifically about this feeling, it’s the way a lot of managers feel as well. They can only ask others to fix/change things, and they don’t really understand how/why things break in the code. Even if they lead the whole team to build the product
- avgDev 16d agoAccurate. I've wrote a rather large system that runs a medium business, solo. When a bug pops up, I feel unfamiliar with the code. It was all written by hand with 0 LLM usage. It is normal to feel this way. However, I am still very capable of resolving the issues in a timely manner. Adding any new big features is a big undertaking and usually involves a lot of refactoring to fix the dumb decisions I've made.
- rsolva 16d agoI have this feeling whenever I read my own (no llm) code that I wrote 6 months ago. Sometimes a couple of weeks is enough to feel alienated from my own, well considered code, that I spent a lot of time crafting with love. That is why I try to make good, high level descriptions of what is going on at several levels of a project. Funny thing is, I just kept on doing this with llms, using AGENTS.md at almost any subdir of a project. It works for me, and it seems to work for the llms too.