Test code is total: we require it to always terminate or it's a failure! It also typically has 100% line and branch coverage.
I feel way less nervous about refactoring tests, you can always just run them.
I've been working on a search tool for a website with 9K items and a dumb implementation works just fine. I'd normally gravitate to a library or tool like elasticsearch (ES).
Adding custom filters etc is trivial on handrolled code. I wonder what scale requires actual search infra like ES.
My default assumption is that external libraries are better than what I (or an LLM) would write in a v1.
The extra effort to publish a project generally signifies that the author has spent a good amount of time on the problem. I end up prompting LLMs to prefer external code.
