Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

a year ago

Developers spend most of their time figuring out the system, with maintenance and comprehension being significant time consumers.
Research from 1979 and 2018 shows that comprehension and navigation account for a large portion of development effort (~58% and 24% respectively).
The 'figuring out' time is the largest expense in development, yet it's often not explicitly discussed or optimized.
Reading code is the primary method for gathering information, but it's manual and inefficient, leading to incomplete information and uncertainty.
Moldable development is proposed as a solution, where tools are customized to the context of the problem, reducing the need for manual code reading.
Glamorous Toolkit is introduced as a moldable development environment to facilitate the creation of custom tools for software systems.

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