alt Hacker NewsI find it funny how the best practices for programmers, ignored in most IT companies, get reinvented as the best practices for AIs.
Boring: The documentation should be in code, not in external Word documents uploaded to the company SharePoint server.
Exciting: The documentation for the AI should be in code, not in external Word documents uploaded to the company SharePoint server.
Boring: You should give your developers the big picture of the project, not just micromanage them using Jira tasks.
Exciting: You should give your AI the big picture of the project in CLAUDE.md, not just micromanage it using prompts.
Boring: Refactoring makes your developers more productive in long term.
Exciting: Refactoring makes your AI more productive in long term.
Replies
No this isn't mindless reinventing --- this is finally having clear empiric evidence for something that we knew the entire time. This is a huge relief!
Next up is demonstrating the AI is more productive with better programming languages.
Exactly
To be clear, the guy who wrote this article is Martin Fowler. Fowler was the author of a book literally titled "Refactoring", which he wrote over 20 years ago (it didn't invent the term "refactoring", but it's widely credited as popularizing it).
In other words, this is not some new AI-bandwagon-jumping blogger trying to rebrand old practices as something new ... this is the guy who coined the very term "refactoring"! He's not pretending what's old is new, he's arguing that best practices from 20+ years ago remain relevant (and showing receipts).