Don’t confuse “work ethic” with “work volume.”
Bryan Cantrill’s latest post is a precision strike on the “37k lines of code a day” crowd.
In engineering, “virtuous laziness” is about spending hours in a hammock to find the one abstraction that saves weeks of toil.
It’s about minimising cognitive load because human time is finite.
LLMs have no such constraints. They don’t feel the “cost” of complexity, so they’ll happily bake you a 37,000-line layer cake of garbage just because it’s “free” to generate.
Virtuous Laziness: Writing a 10-line script to kill a 100-hour manual task.
Perilous Laziness: Letting an AI dump thousands of lines you don’t understand into a system you can no longer maintain.
If you use AI to bypass the “thinking” part of the job, you aren’t automating; you’re just outsourcing your expertise to a black box. The goal isn’t to see how much code we can generate, but how little we actually need to solve the problem.
Stay lean, stay lazy, and keep the bloat off the board. Why write many lines when few do the trick? That would be a comma-tose approach to coding.