"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."

("I have made this longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.")

Blaise Pascal

I feel like AI coding is accelerating everyone's work toward greater solution complexity and I think it's pushing people to build defenses and be more averse to someone else's complexity rather than being impressed by it. Bigco's are probably well behind the curve on this and are still impressed by complexity, but for people on the receiving end of AI stuff either directly via your own hand or indirectly via others, it seems like complexity is not as impressive as it once was.

There was a thread recently on HN about Claude Shannon and how his papers were filled with clear descriptions and explanations. Then someone commented how they had found an elegant solution to a problem that either could be described shortly and beautifully so that a high schooler could understand or take the long and tedious path of a convoluted explanation.

The director then clearly advised that they should use the complicated way because that's how you get published: not because you're clever, but because your solutions sound complicated.

It resonates perfectly with your comment and it's an unfortunate reality that most people don't bother for beautiful solutions and praise complicated processes. That's how we neded up with bureaucracy, probably :D

I have said it for decades - Basic is easy, Simple is hard.

But when someone comes up with something simple but effective, it always looks so obvious in retrospect.

The passage that comes to mind for me whenever this idea comes up, from the Brett version of the Holmes story "The Dancing Men":

  H: So, Watson.
  W: Hmm.
  H: You do not propose to invest in South African securities?
  W: How on earth do you know that?
  H: Now, confess, you are utterly taken aback.
  W: I am!
  H: I should make you sign a paper to that effect.
  W: Why?
  H: Because in a few minutes you will say it is all so absurdly simple.
  W: I should say nothing of the kind!
  H: You see, my dear Watson, it is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect.
  H: I can tell by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, that you have decided not to invest your small capital in the gold fields.
  W: I can see no connection.
  H: Very likely not; but I can quickly give you a close connection.
  H: Here are the missing links in the very simple chain: You had chalk between your forefinger and thumb when you returned from the club last night. You put chalk there when you play billiards, to ease the cue. You never play billiards except with Thurston. Now, Thurston, you told me, four weeks ago, had an option on some South African security which expired in a month, and which he desired you to share with him. Your checkbook is locked in my drawer, and you have not asked for the key. So, you do not propose to invest your money in that manner.
  W: How absurdly simple!
  H: Quite so. Every problem is absurdly simple when it is explained to you.

Every company where I've worked at as a SWE openly rewarded "engineering complexity" as a criteria for getting promoted, which I've always found to be absurd because complexity can always be manufactured (both of the problem and the solution).

One of those days, however, you come up with another of your elegant, simple solutions and it actually replaces a 150K LoC monstrosity with either a 1K script or, even better, with nothing as a simple shift in perspective or process obsoletes it completely.

In the long run, IME, you'll be recognized either by management or your peers if you keep doing that over and over again.

  > elegant solutions

My favorite is how people will yell at you about how elegance doesn't matter, that they "just care that it works", and "keep it simple". I'm certain all the sayings repeated in industry are metastasized variants of actually good practices repeated by those who can't be bothered to understand what they mean.

And of course that's true. We push for speed, absent of direction, while praising velocity. To be honest, at this point I'm disappointed the engineers gave up and just started becoming business people.

"elegance and speed go hand in hand" - d. mcilroy