What you've learned along the way is so much more important.
When I'm actually coding, I'm usually not learning as much, because I'm generally intentionally choosing boring tech everyone already knows.
Most of the learning is less about deeply internalizing concepts and more about things like new features in the Python stdlib.
The whole value proposition of the digital world is that we can store and manipulate it for virtually nothing: there isn't the same cost to having digital stuff, and so there isn't the same gains from throwing it away IMO.
A quick grep every blue moon can be faster than wrangling a LLM into place, and as an added bonus you can look back and laugh at how big of an idiot you were.
It’s faster (yes) than prototype-then-fixup. Why? Because the ”live refactor” is harder than the greenfield writing phase. The new knowledge often makes the impl straightforward.
It’s also better quality than design-then-build. The optimal architecture and modularization change with knowledge increase, which is best to get via experience. You can design fully upfront but it’s riddled with analysis paralysis - it’s notoriously hard (and slow) to predict unknowns.
Sounds like good advice? Well, the hardest part isn’t to follow it – it’s to know upfront what size of task it is. If it turns out to be easier, you waste a bit of work (prototype-fixup is faster). However, if it’s bigger than you thought – you’re in the best possible position to break down the new problem into subtasks, with no wasted work.
But we need to get rid of this silly, infantile, unwavering attachment to our source code files. Throw code away. All. the. time. The first version of code is, by definition, being built in the absence of critical information. Why on earth would we get so attached to that which was built in ignorance? In this case we're not "reusing code", we're throwing away knowledge!
Why would you discard everything valuable you learned in favor of a code artifact written before you learned it? Throw away the code instead! Surely the code written AFTER gaining the knoweldge will be both faster and better quality. (and more clear, less tech debt, etc)
I believe that if you truly accept what Hemingway said, that writing is rewriting, you get less attached to the idea of reaching the best design on the first try, and feel better when starting with a suboptimal solution.
Of course this sometimes conflicts with organizational pressures, where that quick and dirty solution may be deemed as enough by some and you won't get to finish with the proper design. For me the trick is to consider first version just an internal stage of work on a feature, not even communicated outwards most of the times, until the appropriate design is reached.
Code written to learn and explore a problem space? Sure.
Code written in response to a prompt, which could easily be rewritten - things like a throwaway “please tell me a story about the contents of this CSV for me and also write code to graph it”. Yep throw it away.
Or keep it as an example for a later model.
That’s very different to code written to high standards intended for others’ use.
We need different words for all of those 3 varieties of code.
RedShift1•5mo ago
notTooFarGone•5mo ago
I had to manage my 350 notepad++ new tabs as I migrated to a new PC - it was not pretty.