Previously there was a tension between easy-to-write (helper functions to group together oft-repeated lines of code, etc) vs easy to read (where often modest repetition is fine and is clearer). I felt this tension a lot in tests where the future reader is very happy with explicit lines of code setting things up, whereas the test author is bored and writes layers of helper functions to speed their work up.
But for LLMs, it seems readability of code pretty much equals its writability?
To make code more authorable by LLM, we approximately just need to make it more readable in the traditional sense (code comments, actual abstractions not just code-saving helper functions, etc).
Previously there was a tension between easy-to-write (helper functions to group together oft-repeated lines of code, etc) vs easy to read (where often modest repetition is fine and is clearer). I felt this tension a lot in tests where the future reader is very happy with explicit lines of code setting things up, whereas the test author is bored and writes layers of helper functions to speed their work up.
But for LLMs, it seems readability of code pretty much equals its writability?
To make code more authorable by LLM, we approximately just need to make it more readable in the traditional sense (code comments, actual abstractions not just code-saving helper functions, etc).