Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiveness.
The platform risk is a valid concern but alleviated by China's theft and redistribution of open models.
We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore?
Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me — in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.
They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like reliability and speed of development.
Now do the same exercise for "impressiveness" and "crassness."
Here, I'll do it for you:
> Nobody cares about code quality /s
> They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like impressiveness and lack of crassness.
Sounds silly doesn't it?
Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques don’t matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fact that you achieve the desired outcome by using the right materials and techniques. The materials and techniques don’t matter, just the outcome.
This analogy is more true than you think. This is why modern homes/appartments are trash. You can pass safety inspections using subpar materials and the house will fall apart after a few years, but who cares right? At least you achieved the business outcome!
This mentality is so infuriating. This is why I need to buy new shoes every year. Or why my washer/dryer motherboard craps out in 2 years instead of 10. Nobody gives a shit about quality anymore, this is why society is crumbling around us. Profit driven incentive for fast/cheap over everything else. And now I need to spend my day prompting an AI to fix AI slop code to keep the business hobbling along another day. What a fucking joke.
Where do you live? Because where I live, new houses and apartments are superb. But I'm guessing we don't use two by fours and plaster walls to erect whole structures.
e.g. the bill is definitely coming true for a lot of "non-traditional construction" materials and methods in immediately post-war properties in the UK. There are many unmortgageable properties using Mundic Block in Cornwall and to some extend Devon, in the heavily bombed south east there was a lot of pre-stressed concrete with catastrophic rebar failure, not to mention Orlit construction, and all across the country a lot of RAAC. Almost all of it for good, necessary, upbeat reasons.
It feels a bit like this kind of crisis from AI generated code could hit in ten, fifteen years time; people often fail to understand how long a bit of website code can last.
Costs of those things have gone down over time. The high end still exists, you just don't actually care about quality as much as you think you do.
And yes, for capital-intensive things like real estate development, fast/cheap matters a lot because otherwise there would be no capital available to build any of it at any reasonable scale.
GP said Claude's code "doesn't impress" them and that it's "crass."
Do you think a valid "long term strategy" is to create code that impresses GP and is not crass, but doesn't achieve the business outcomes it's meant to?
Inversely, do you think one can achieve business outcomes if "quality" is so abysmal that the code doesn't work or is unmaintainable?
Is it possible to write perfectly good, maintainable, performant, legible code that "doesn't impress" GP, or feels "crass" to them? Well gee, probably! Because "impressiveness" and "crassness" are literally meaningless.
I will accept "of fully subjective value". But not "literally meaningless".
It's insane to me that you're implying we could build houses with pre-fabricated materials or pneumatic nail guns and still somehow "have houses?" No sticks/jute cord and special symbols, then no house.
What you saw in this thread was someone arguing against the dimensions of "impressiveness" and "crassness" as valid things to care about when it comes to code.
It's your mistake to assume that those are related to any meaningful concept of actual quality.
I clearly said elsewhere that I think they are predictive of problems with the person who writes it, and I fear I can generalise that to LLM tooling that generates it.
Are you not, by developing this way, making yourself more interchangeable, less indispensable, than ever before?
I hate to say this tbh, I loved hand-writing code. I made a great living for 20 years, and I absolutely loved it and was quite good at it.
Hand-typing code is just slower now; there’s no two-ways about it. You are either going to be slow and a bad hire for businesses, or you figure out how to adopt AI into your workflow to speed up.
One thing I think people don't realize is that deep knowledge of programming, performance, architectural, and domain specific trade-offs makes a skilled engineer about 1000X faster than someone without those skills -with AI. But yes, now unskilled people can actually make apps/software. They just tend to be slow, and their products are full of bugs, security flaws, and abysmal performance.
So we went from: Skills = can or cannot ship any software at all. Now we are at: Skills = can ship better software much faster than unskilled people.
I was actually faced with this recently. I decided to learn Rust and port one of my side projects to it. Initially, I moved extremely slowly, and the AI made truly horrific architectural decisions because I didn't have the knowledge of how to direct it, especially compared to my primary languages.
However, once I gained a firm grasp of Rust, I was better able to properly direct the AI to fix fundamental issues and architect things properly. My speed increase multiplier proved to be directly proportional to my growing knowledge of both the language and the domain.
Skill and knowledge combined with AI, when used appropriately, absolutely multiply your speed and quality. I really think once you understand what AI can do, and how to utilize it to produce better code, faster than before, there truly is no going back.
I'm finding a path forward that I actually enjoy now and don't really see losing my value (no telling how things will change in the future), I can have more time to focus on really quality/solid/performant and useful systems with less time just typing one character out at a time.
You could have talked to me 3 months ago and I'd never imagine I'd say the above btw. I REALLY enjoyed code writing and earlier AI models without harnesses were pretty useless for anyone skilled at development. Now with stuff like deepseek Flash I feel like I have a happy medium of 100% directed/fast code turnaround, less typing, more deep focus on architecture, systems, and the actual end product.
I am not convinced it isn't vulnerable to the same problems but the whole tenor of the community around open source/open weights models just doesn't have the same YOLO madness to it.