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🐛Kernighan's Law

Cliff Brake September 09, 2025 #simplicity #maintenance #ai #improvement

Kernighan's Law: Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Cliff's Law: In three months, it will be three times harder to read the code you just wrote than writing the code in the first place. With AI, add a 10x factor.

Maintaining code over a product lifecycle is many times harder than the initial implementation. With AI, doc or spec driven development is critical. Otherwise, you will bury yourself in technical debt. Make it easy on others and your future self.