I mean, I agree, but you could say this at any point in time throughout history. An engineer from the 1960s engineer could scoff at the web and the explosion in the number of progress and the decline in efficiency of the average program.

An artist from the 1700s would scoff at the lack of training and precision of the average artist/designer from today, because the explosion in numbers has certain translated to a decline in the average quality of art.

A film producer from the 1940s would scoff at the lack of quality of the average YouTuber's videography skills. But we still have millions of YouTubers and they're racking up trillions of views.

Etc.

To me, the chief lesson is that when we democratize technology and put it in the hands of more people, the tradeoff in quality is something that society is ready to accept. Whether this is depressing (bc less quality) or empowering (bc more people) is a matter of perspective.

We're entering a world where FAR more people will be able to casually create and edit the software they want to see. It's going to be a messier world for sure. And that bothers us as engineers. But just because something bothers us doesn't mean it bothers the rest of the world.

> But then, if "code quality is becoming less and less relevant", does this also applies to public/professional apps?

No, I think these will always have a higher bar for reliability and security. But even in our pre-vibe coded era, how many massive brandname companies have had outages and hacks and shitty UIs? Our tolerance for these things is quite high.

Of course the bigger more visible and important applications will be the slowest to adopt risky tech and will have more guardrails up. That's a good thing.

But it's still just a matter of time, especially as the tools improve and get better at writing code that's less wasteful, more secure, etc. And as our skills improve, and we get better at using AI.