Code like Hemingway
Article excerpt
Software developers are soon going to have to take a lesson from Hemingway. It’s not hard to be concise in code. You have to be, by design. Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, and the rest all love to be “spoken” to in Markdown. We used to define our code with unit tests and specifications written for humans. […]
Software developers are soon going to have to take a lesson from Hemingway.
It’s not hard to be concise in code. You have to be, by design. Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, and the rest all love to be “spoken” to in Markdown.
We used to define our code with unit tests and specifications written for humans. Now, it’s all about the spec. And the spec needs to be both complete and concise.
It needs to be complete in the sense that if you leave something out or forget to define something, the agent will very likely fill in the gaps for you. Forget a feature or requirement, and the agent will go off confidently and almost certainly in the wrong direction.
At the same time, you need to be concise. Because if you are too effusive, you may give the agent ideas that you don’t want it to have. If you write like Fitzgerald, lush and expansive, the agent will be off and running in a direction you can’t be sure about.
Check it out on InfoWorld.