I get more done by writing the stupid code, and fixing it, than junking the old code... but every now and then I can see clearly a structure for a rewrite, and then I rewrite, but its rare.

I feel like people should be writing stupid code, and in the case where its a compiled language, we should ask compiler or the language for better optimization. The other day, I was writing a check of a struct that have certain structures (protobuf probably have something like this)

struct S { int a; int b; int c; int d; int e; /* about 15 more members */ }

so I wrote

const auto match_a = s.a == 10; const auto match_b = s.c == 20; const auto match_c = s.e == 30; /* about 15 more of these */ if (match_a && match_b && match_c) { return -1; }

Turns out compilers (I think because of the language) totally shit the bed at this. It generates a chain of 20 if-else instead of a mask using SIMD or whatever. I KNOW this is possible, so I asked an LLM, it was able to produce said code that uses SIMD.