Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

Before making a change to legacy code, you must understand the code. This often requires understanding why it does the things it does which may not be obvious 10+ years after code was written. Even the code written for this website by a single individual (me) 7 years ago, this can take a long time.

With LLMs, teams are writing code at an unprecedented rate. Some of them will review the code and make changes to what the LLM did, offsetting some of the downstream effort.

Others have gone with a different approach though. Some folks are checking in code that somebody else has read and barely tested. This means that teams are producing code faster than they can understand it - the author coins this "comprehension debt". if the software gets used then the odds are high that at some point the generated code will need to change.

The comprehension debt is the extra time it's going to take us to understand the code. Of course, if you're trying to understand somebody else's code, you already had to do this. For your own code, this will slow you down though. Not even LLMs can save you from the ever-growing mountain of "comprehension debt" in many companies.