Overview
This article argues that developers should systematically collect and document solutions to coding problems they’ve encountered. Building a personal “hoard” of working code examples becomes a powerful resource for spotting opportunities and accelerating future development, especially when working with AI coding agents.
Key Arguments
- **Accumulating knowledge of what’s technically possible gives you a competitive advantage in identifying solution opportunities others might miss.**: Understanding capabilities across different technologies (like web OCR, Bluetooth pairing, memory-efficient file processing) helps you spot novel ways to solve problems that others may not consider.
- **Collecting working code examples is more valuable than just theoretical knowledge for professional development.**: Having actual running code that demonstrates concepts provides concrete reference points and proof-of-concept materials that can be adapted for new projects.
- **Your code collection becomes a powerful input for AI coding agents when building new solutions.**: AI agents can effectively combine existing working examples from your collection to create new tools, as demonstrated by the author’s OCR tool that merged Tesseract.js and PDF.js libraries.
Implications
For developers, this means systematically documenting your technical experiments and solutions can dramatically accelerate your ability to build new things, especially in the AI-assisted development era. Your personal code library becomes a force multiplier that helps you spot opportunities and rapidly prototype solutions by recombining proven components.
Counterpoints
- Time investment may not pay off: Spending time documenting and organizing code snippets could be seen as overhead that takes away from productive development time.
- Information overload risk: Maintaining large collections of code examples might become unwieldy and harder to search through effectively over time.