upvote
> 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

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.

reply
It does feel like a good analogy.

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.

reply
You are aware that you can just pay more money and get a higher quality house and higher quality shoes, right?

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.

reply
Yeah I agree. And you have people on this forum who gleefully point out that quality doesn’t matter to the business, as if they think they’re so intelligent because they noticed that employees are there to make the company money. Not realizing that A) it’s a very antisocial attitude and B) it’s not a tenable long term strategy.
reply
Hang on now. GP didn't say "I care about quality" and I didn't say caring about quality is wrong.

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.

reply
Crassness, in the context I meant it, is not "literally meaningless" at all.

I will accept "of fully subjective value". But not "literally meaningless".

reply