For instance, does DRY matter?
I totally believe it does not!
I think that we will discover an important distinction in what we now consider the pool of good coding practices: on one side what makes code generally evolvable, on the other what make it maintainable and evolvable by humans.
I suspect that even without too much explicit design, a lot of evolvability will come for free when cumbersome implementations that just happen to pass all tests will start being adopted at a massive scale. I actually have a longer form of this argument here
Has there been sp far documented drift toward extreme compression / borderline neuralese out of RL alone? I tried to research the question a bit and from what I gather without deliberate pressure on the CoT for concealing / compression so far it does not seem to be something models start doing.
But I have so many unknown unknowns (to me) that I might just be searching wrong :)