Thread

1. appleappleapple · 1789564633 · focus · HN ↗

   Nice idea. Our new CTO brought in a tool he made for analyzing cyclomatic complexity and it’s been useful since we’re a heavily AI-forward shop.

   BTW, you can avoid your comments being flagged and killed by writing them yourself! I know it’s tempting to offshore it to AI (especially after you’ve vibe-coded a whole project) but some genuine human communication goes a long way.

   1. crab_galaxy · 1789565437 · focus · HN ↗

      I know cyclomatic complexity has been heavily debated for a long time, but I do think it’s valuable. It’s really good at highlighting common annoyances like overly clever code, nested ternaries, dense functions with too many branches…

      The only thing is that these issues seem like human code problems and IME LLMs don’t really write code like this anymore. It’s almost the opposite in python, actually, where Claude leans on writing lots of 2-3 liner private utils which is a separate kind of complexity and organization problem.

      I still find it useful specifically for React where it’s frustratingly normalized to write many branches in your JSX though.

      1. sagenschneider · 1789567256 · focus · HN ↗

         The difference to previous CC use, is the the change impact formula looks at the complexity already in the class/file. Typical CC just looks at the function it is change and not the context of the change. The Change Impact formula incorporates that to avoid god class and god method issues. Plus multiplying by number of files punishes for non-cohesive code bases. For me it puts the intuition of high cohesion and low coupling into a measurable metric.

         1. crab_galaxy · 1789573980 · focus · HN ↗

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