Simon Willison’s Weblog

26th December 2024 - Link Blog

Cognitive load is what matters (via) Excellent living document (the underlying repo has 625 commits since being created in May 2023) maintained by Artem Zakirullin about minimizing the cognitive load needed to understand and maintain software.

This all rings very true to me. I judge the quality of a piece of code by how easy it is to change, and anything that causes me to take on more cognitive load - unraveling a class hierarchy, reading though dozens of tiny methods - reduces the quality of the code by that metric.

Lots of accumulated snippets of wisdom in this one.

Mantras like "methods should be shorter than 15 lines of code" or "classes should be small" turned out to be somewhat wrong.