Don't confuse work ethic with work volume

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:36:00 +0000

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.

TechnicalDebt on