Easely

In these wild times of modern software development we've been inundated with AI hype. We've been sold a bill of goods which led us to trade our hard-earned skills for the drudgery of reviewing slop. Recent studies have found that human brains go dark when paired with AI, developer productivity takes a 19% hit despite the developers feeling 20% more productive, and AI writes a greater amount of more costly and risky bugs in an inflated code base.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Daniel Brolund and Ola Elnestam discovered the Mikado Method through the trials of a massive refactoring effort. Its benefits are explained by Lean Manufacturing and the Theory of Constraints by cutting out waste and maximizing our productive efforts. We use our brains and our skills in a goal-oriented approach, using small experiments to morph the shape of our systems, which effectively cuts down behemoth changes into small steps. Our discovery of work occurs in a natural order, though we conduct the work in the opposite order: dependent-ordered execution. To facilitate this effort, record the discovered work in a directed acyclic graph, showing what each step depends on. How we execute is simple: focus on the leaves. Each dependency meets one (and only one) specific need of its parent, which limits our natural tendency towards over-engineering.

This is how we write the right code, the least amount of code. This is how we stay effective! LLMs produce mountains of code to maintain, which in turn raises token burn rate while reducing our understanding and our skills.

Easely brings the Mikado Method into the IDE. Type out dependencies with speed, as opposed to slowly handwritten. Manage dependencies and relationships with the ease of a hotkey, instead of carefully erasing and scribbling with a pencil. Delight in a dynamic and behavioural graph without worry of running out of white space.

Enjoy your new-found cognitive resources and your agency!