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.