Code Like a Surgeon
37 comments
·October 24, 2025jumploops
makeitdouble
> bridge/skyscraper/cathedral
> Those details matter, yes, but they’re the type of detail that I can delegate now
No...
If you're building a skyscraper, there's no world where you can delegate where the steel or bolts come from. Or you'll at least need to care about what properties that exact steel has and guarantee every bit used on your project matches these constraints.
If you don't want to care about those, build residential houses with 1000x less constraints and can be rebuilt on a dime comparatively.
You might be thinking about interior decoration or floor arrangement ? Those were always a different matter left to the building owner to deal with.
libraryofbabel
It's a nice analogy, and I think I'll use it in future.
If you want another one, think of painting. An "Old Master" painter like Rembrandt or Rubens or Botticelli would have had a large workshops with a team of assistants, who would not only do a lot of the work like stretching canvases or mixing the paints, but would also - under the master's direction - actually do a lot of the painting too. You might have the master sketch out the composition, and then paint the key faces (and, most of all, the eyes) and then the assistants would fill in areas like drapery, landscape, etc.
This changed in the Romantic period towards the end of the 1700s, with the idea of the individual artist, working alone in a moment of creative inspiration and producing a single work of genius from start to finish. Caspar David Friedrich or JMW Turner come to mind here.
Some programmers want to be Turner and control the whole work and feel their creativity is threatened if a machine can now do parts of it as well as they could. I'd rather be Rembrandt and sketch out the outline, paint the eyes, and leave the rest to junior engineers... or an AI Agent. It's a matter of preference.
glenjamin
This reminded me of a slide from a Dan North talk - perhaps this one https://dannorth.net/talks/#software-faster? One of those anyway.
The key quote was something like "You want your software to be like surgery - as little of it as possible to fix your problem".
Anyway, it doesn't seem like this blog post is following that vibe.
martin-t
I like this quote.
Unfortunately, my predecessor at work followed a different principle - "copy paste a whole file if it saves you 5 minutes today".
Well, I am still a surgeon, I just do a lot of amputations.
phren0logy
The analogy I have used is “AI as sous chef.”
kragen
Like a surgeon
Coding for the very first time
Like a suuuuurgeon
Let your script run
Close to mineneilwilson
So the Chief Programmer Team structure [0] is back in fashion is it.
But this time with agents.
Fred Brooks has never been more relevant.
gklitt
Yes, I cite Brooks (and Harlan Mills, seemingly the original source of the idea) in the post!
neilwilson
I’m just glad I’m not the only one revisiting past structures that fell apart at the time because they involved humans.
Now we have human like automation, everything needs revisiting.
kulahan
I'm kinda surprised this isn't more popular. I figured we'd go this way eventually as we single out 10x-ers, give them a highly competent crew, and save a lot of money over your most expensive code monkey wasting time attending meetings, filling out Jira tickets, and giving presentations to the customer. You pay them a shitload of money - shouldn't you get every dollar's worth?
Honestly, at every job I spend an unreasonable amount of time getting up to speed on things that are only tangentially related to my job (No, here we need you to check all the boxes in the Jira ticket, ensure it's linked to a zephyr ticket, and ensure it's linked to a git PR - we don't care about you adding attachments or comments!)
ivape
“First, do no harm”.
“Surgically” is how one enters a foreign codebase, especially legacy ones.
simonw
I really like Geoffrey Litt's new analogy for working with AI coding tools:
> Personally, I'm trying to code like a surgeon.
> A surgeon isn't a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at.
It's also a neat callback to the Mythical Man Month, the most influential early textbook on large scale software engineering.
BrokenCogs
I'm somewhat of a prompt surgeon myself. I find prompts online and then hash them together to fit my needs.
handfuloflight
frankensteinian
notnmeyer
> My current goal with AI coding tools is to spend 100% of my time doing stuff that matters. (As a UI prototyper, that mostly means tinkering with design concepts.)
this struck me as weird. both in terms of “tinkering” being the most important thing to be doing, and then also describing “working like a surgeon” to be tinkering.
jibal
That isn't how analogies work--they are about partial similarities, not equivalence. The OP never says or implies that working like a surgeon is tinkering--allowing focus on the most important thing to be doing doesn't mean that the most important thing is the same for everyone.
simonw
Yeah, if an analogy is an exact match it's not an analogy any more.
alganet
The Mythical Man-Month focuses on a simple idea.
It can be summarized as "adding more workers to a project does not speed things up, that's a myth".
It's in the title of the book. It's a good book.
The entire IT field is about to test that idea in a massive scale. Can lots of new automated workers speed things up? We'll see.
adamzwasserman
Another way of saying this is:
If your development team consists of autistic junior programmers with eidetic memory, then you damn well better make sure that your documentation is exceedingly thorough, absolutely unambiguous, and as restrictive as you can make it.
I’ve long advocated that software engineers should read The Mythical Man-Month[0], but I believe it’s more important now than ever.
The last ~25 years or so have seen a drastic shift in how we build software, best trivialized by the shift from waterfall to agile.
With LLM-aided dev (Codex and Claude Code), I find myself going back to patterns that are closer to how we built software in the 70s/80s, than anything in my professional career (last ~15 years).
Some people are calling it “spec-driven development” but I find that title misleading.
Thinking about it as surgery is also misleading, though Fred Brooks’ analogy is still good.
For me, it feels like I’m finally able to spend time architecting the bridge/skyscraper/cathedral, without getting bogged down in terms of what bolts we’re using, where the steel come from, or which door hinges to use.
Those details matter, yes, but they’re the type of detail that I can delegate now; something that was far too expensive (and/or brittle) before.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month