10 pointsby valyala2 hours ago1 comment
  • hankbond2 hours ago
    I think the only way out of a fully slop codebase is to basically "Clean-room design" it by encoding all of the desired behaviors of what you build into a spec and then start again from fresh.

    I think constrained slopping is kind of ideal in some ways (although thats not what this article is describing). Constrained slopping would be you slop out a request, iterate on behaviors, look at what code/architecture changes were required to get there, then redo the plan with field lessons learned and start that section from scratch again.

    This loop is kind of what I'm recommending its just going to have to be everything all at once and not a nice meal sized slice.

    Traditionally the answer was rarely rebuild from scratch because the bad code was usually "needed decisions poorly abstracted", but in the slop era bad code may be 60% completely unnecessary code. In that way I foresee many more rebuilds than prior eras.