the obsession with code elegance vs shipping velocity is telling here. Whitney's style works for him because he's building tools he'll maintain himself for decades. same product, same developer, same context.

most startups are in the opposite situation. you need three different engineers to understand what you built last quarter because two people quit and one went to a different team. your clever abstractions become technical debt when the person who made them isn't around to explain them.

here's the real question: are you optimizing for the code or the business? sometimes boring, verbose, googleable patterns beat clever compression because your constraint isn't keystrokes - it's hiring, onboarding, and velocity when half your team is new. that's startup reality.

I’m wondering now with LLM in the loop, how the languages of solving complex problems will evolve in the long run.

Perhaps I will start to playing with this macro style ladder of abstraction with the help of LLM. Such as literate programming with an AI agent. Computer is much better at parsing than us. We can stand on highest rung of the ladder.