Copy pasting to accelerate research

After been doing empirical research for a year+ now, I’ve concluded that copy pasting accelerates research. Consider not refactoring as the default.

Why not to refactor.

• Early in a project, you’ve got a lot of ideas and you want to try them out.
• You can refactor your code to take this into account. This adds alot of complexity and makes it very hard to debug.
• Most of the time, your final work isn’t going to use all these variations.
• Having to account for all these variations slows you down.

Copy pasting allows you to try out different things and keeps things simple.

• You don’t need to maintain complex branching anymore.
• It’s really easy to try new things.
• Whenever you stop using a piece of code, you can just delete it. Make your code easy to delete
• Once you converge on a solution, you can refactor to support the few variations that you actually need.

Related reads:

• Grug: Complexity bad
• Why huggingface’s transformer library copy pastes implementations.