Hacker Timesnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I love that Naur paper! Also love this essay that extends it: https://hiringengineersbook.com/post/autonomy/

I literally maintain a conceptual-model.md that describes the “things” in our entire system, how they relate to each other, and some bits about how that maps to the code (the DB schema maps sort of closely to it but sometimes not that close, and so does the API, and that’s ok). I wrote most of the doc myself, but plan to coauthor with LLMs going forward.

So far it’s saved me tons of typing as I add features. I don’t have enough data yet on how well it will guide myself and others when adding stuff that really stretches the model, but I’m also optimistic that it’s a valuable approach.



This is the kind of practice I was going to get an insight into.

For your conceptual-model.md, do you find natural language is sufficient? Do you use pseudo code, Entity Relationship modeling, or anything like that?

And how do you go about round-tripping it from the source code, keeping it up to say with any changes, and yet at the right later of abstraction?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: