When code is a maze, smart developers make maps (2025)

bboxesnlines 1 day ago 41 commentsRead Article on medium.com

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tromp•about 3 hours ago

When code is a maze describes my 1988 IOCCC entry [1]

    char*M,A,Z,E=40,J[40],T[40];main(C){for(*J=A=scanf(M="%d",&C);
    --            E;             J[              E]             =T
    [E   ]=  E)   printf("._");  for(;(A-=Z=!Z)  ||  (printf("\n|"
    )    ,   A    =              39              ,C             --
    )    ;   Z    ||    printf   (M   ))M[Z]=Z[A-(E   =A[J-Z])&&!C
    &    A   ==             T[                                  A]
    |6<<27<rand()||!C&!Z?J[T[E]=T[A]]=E,J[T[A]=A-Z]=A,"_.":" |"];}

[1] https://tromp.github.io/pearls.html#maze

ghgr•about 2 hours ago

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

If, like me, you're trying to compile it, don't forget to set the

    -std=gnu89

flag in gcc, so:

    gcc -std=gnu89 -w -o maze maze.c

Then run it as:

    echo 10 | ./maze

wumms•about 1 hour ago

Got seg fault (gcc 15.2.0 on nixos 26.05) when writing to

    M[Z] = ...

Had to add:

    char fmt[] = "%d";

and change to:

    scanf(M=fmt,&C);

Works now:

    char*M,A,Z,E=40,J[40],T[40];main(C){char fmt[]="%d";for(*J=A=scanf(M=fmt,&C);
    --            E;             J[              E]             =T
    [E   ]=  E)   printf("._");  for(;(A-=Z=!Z)  ||  (printf("\n|"
    )    ,   A    =              39              ,C             --
    )    ;   Z    ||    printf   (M   ))M[Z]=Z[A-(E   =A[J-Z])&&!C
    &    A   ==             T[                                  A]
    |6<<27<rand()||!C&!Z?J[T[E]=T[A]]=E,J[T[A]=A-Z]=A,"_.":" |"];}

jorisw•about 3 hours ago

Smart developers don’t write mazes.

> In code, comments are our signposts

No. Naming and good architecture are. Intuitive folder trees. Concise docs. Clear separation of concerns such that naming can suffice.

The more comments you need to ‘map’ your code, the worse of a job you’ve done.

boxesnlines•about 1 hour ago

I absolutely agree that those things should take priority, but I think those things can only go so far and there's a threshold of complexity beyond which there will always be some benefit to comments. You can absolutely reduce the need for 'signposts' if you avoid creating a maze.

As others have said, you didn't always build the maze. Or you built a lovely intuitive path and then were hit with an unexpected new requirement that forced you to add twisty little passages. Or, like me, you're not a perfect being and had to compromise based on some complication you didn't expect.

pyrale•about 2 hours ago

> Smart developers don’t write mazes.

You don’t choose what your forebears have written, though.

jorisw•about 2 hours ago

Patching that up by using comments as a 'map' isn't the right way to deal with that. Refactors and rearchitecture are. Putting in comments just helps procrastinate what's necessary.

pyrale•17 minutes ago

> Patching that up by using comments as a 'map' isn't the right way to deal with that.

There is no right way. Only grey ones that help relieve pain for the team.

> Refactors and rearchitecture are.

Yeah... if you have the cash and the people. Usually, mature codebases are driven by limited investment with proven business value, because the sweet VC money is no longer there (or never was, in some industries).

If you don't, reachitecturing is vanishingly rare, and your refactor budget is limited and you spend it carefully. If a piece of code hasn't moved recently but still comes up frequently when onboarding newcomers, documenting the code may be more profitable and less risky than changing it. It also helps preparing a case for a potential refactor.

stingraycharles•about 2 hours ago

Rewrites require a lot of effort, significantly more than just adding comments. It’s a pragmatic tool until you actually have the time to do the rewrite.

adrianN•about 1 hour ago

It's difficult to refactor and rearchitect without first understanding what's there and why.

misswaterfairy•about 1 hour ago

Though the onus is on us to improve what our forebears wrote, for the sake of our own and others' future.

Tade0•about 2 hours ago

I'm afraid this all gets thrown out the window nowadays.

Unless I tell them not to, LLMs lean on slapping verbose comments of the worst kind - describing the code instead of the reasons for putting it there.

I ask them to write comments in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, but all I really get from that is tersness.

Also the other day I stumbled upon a huge pile of documentation and I'm still trying to figure out if it's human or machine written. I stopped reading it half way through as I figured that perhaps it wasn't written for humans to read.

rootlocus•about 2 hours ago

The most WTF comments are the ones that describe how the code looked during a rewrite session with no commits. It writes bad code, I ask it to rewrite it, and it leaves a comment saying why the previous implementation was bad, with no history in git of the previous implementation.

Edit: changed the LLMs pronoun to it.

kuschku•about 1 hour ago

Who is this "he" you're talking about? Or were you referring to an LLM? If so, the correct pronoun would be "it".

Your english is really good, except for that little mistake.

onion2k•about 2 hours ago

Unless I tell them not to, LLMs lean on slapping verbose comments of the worst kind - describing the code instead of the reasons for putting it there.

I wonder if that's actually useful for an LLM though. It's additional context that should steer the LLM not to change the code to do something else.

TeMPOraL•about 2 hours ago

> Unless I tell them not to, LLMs lean on slapping verbose comments of the worst kind - describing the code instead of the reasons for putting it there.

Well, my LLMs are "smarter" than yours. They'll describe why the code is there. They'll even try to keep these comments in sync with code as it makes changes.

This includes describing the "why" behind the change even on code affected only accidentally, e.g. by reformat or reindent. And, if it wrote some code and then later learned half of it is wrong, it'll remove the offending parts and leave comments telling what used to be there, and why it isn't anymore.

Same for commit/PR messages.

May or may not be related to a recent tendency in Opus/Fable models I noticed, to eagerly turn user feedback into rules, self-correct by adding more rules, and then when some rule fails, correct it by adding a counter-steering rule - accumulating rules until eventually getting lost in them.

AIorNot•35 minutes ago

Everyone disagrees about Good Architecture and it changes with new technologies btw

Years ago I worked on a project that had a n tier architecture and facade pattern for the frontend

It was good architecture for the lead developer who set it up but bad for the new team who need to update the tech

So comments and docs are both valuable

Nowadays with AI the calculus has changed once more

jarofgreen•about 3 hours ago

> Typically keep comments on a single line without line breaks — if a comment is useful, developers will scroll to read them, if it’s not they can easily scroll past it.

Disagree. Personally that sounds like a massive barrier to reading the comment to me. Limited width column text is generally regarded as easier to read, make your comments easier to read. Especially as I probably have the code open in a limited width window, as that's what I expect from code.

medwards666•36 minutes ago

Yeah, this particular bullet point almost made me stop reading the rest of the article thinking that the author has zero idea what the hell they're on about...

someothherguyy•about 3 hours ago

What? You don't like horizontally scrolling 6000 columns to read something?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_folding

jarofgreen•about 3 hours ago

Yeah, if IDE's allowed code folding of comments then the authors original problem (having to scroll past comments they thought weren't useful) wouldn't be that big a deal.

someothherguyy•about 3 hours ago

many do. for example: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/code-folding-settings.ht...

there are also extensions for vscode that do this, vim plugins, etc

dozerly•about 3 hours ago

Who doesn’t have soft wrapping enabled in 2026? Line breaks are irrelevant

jarofgreen•about 3 hours ago

If line breaks really were irrelevant, the author wouldn't have felt the need to give a tip all around optimising line breaks.

Personally, I would have hoped by 2026 we had better IDE's and tools for managing code in text files such that developers with different preferences for a number of characters in a column or things like how you display comments can be accommodated. Yet still teams end up arguing about what standard to use.

Lindby•about 3 hours ago

Soft like breaks in a code editor? That's insane

Cockbrand•about 3 hours ago

And so the war began.

This is a bit like vim vs Emacs - everyone should be able to use their favorite setup, and the formatting should not get in the way of the engineer's preferences.

ezrabuenk•about 3 hours ago

I, in fact, do not have wrapping enabled in my IDE....

tacomagick•about 3 hours ago

You never wrote Java I see

verdverm•about 3 hours ago

Who makes assumptions about how others do things in 2026? Line breaks are apparently relevant, review agents complain about them, soft breaks are super annoying for vim motion users, opinions are still like ani

lintfordpickle•about 2 hours ago

I disagree with the overall sentiment of this article. I wouldn't say comments are never useful, because they certainly can be. But once verbose commenting becomes the norm, people (and now especially LLMs) will overuse them, making the code unnecessarily obtuse and difficult to read. And the point about maintenance is real.

There are also a couple of 'pointless' statements in the article itself:

> "Use a combination of in-line and standalone comments, depending on the situation"

isn't that just every kind of comment?

boxesnlines•about 1 hour ago

(I am the author)

The point of that statement was to run counter to the standards of "always us X type of comments" that some teams adopt. My suggestion is that there isn't a "correct" type of comment that you should always use, but rather that it's highly situational.

It's really a parallel to grammar in any other kind of language - there isn't a singular 'correct' way to structure a piece of writing into paragraphs, but it's also typically incorrect to treat each sentence as a paragraph or to avoid paragraphs entirely and write everything as a single block of text.

It's unthinkable that a team of writers would ever try to standardise on "never use paragraphs" or "every line is a paragraph", but some programming teams do exactly the equivalent of that!

lintfordpickle•20 minutes ago

Thanks for the reply. I didn't mean to be dismissive or discredit the article.

The problem you described is real, and one I face daily at work. Anecdotally, every time we've tried to curate the comments and organize them (especially when referencing external documentation, as you also mentioned), it invariably ends up becoming stale and just another point of contention down the road.

I'm now more of a proponent of either not commenting, or putting the context and rationale in the commit message instead.

jdw64•about 3 hours ago

Sounds good. I've lost count of how many mazes I've made. Just call me the Architect of the Labyrinth.

monster_truck•about 3 hours ago

Once again I am asking, who is this person and why do they think they are qualified to tell me what's best?

boxesnlines•about 1 hour ago

Hello, I am that person. I have been programming for a long time, but I'm not trying to make any claims that my experience means I know any better. The claim is simply that modern coding practices often produce code that is difficult to navigate and that useful comments and documentation can deliver great benefits.

I do make some suggestions on how to approach those things, but they're simply suggestions based on my own experience, I'm not trying to assert any kind of absolute correct approach.

deadbabe•about 1 hour ago

You don’t need maps. You need search. Introducing: ripgrep.

aktenlage•33 minutes ago

I use Ag integrated in the editor all the time. But while it is indispensable for me, I wouldn't say that this helps in all situations, nor is it the best tool to find connections in many situations.