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0 pointscrystal_revenge14d ago0 comments

We've lived in a software bubble for so long, most software engineers have completely forgotten that the purpose of (most) software is to solve a problem. If that problem solves the problem well and reliably it doesn't matter the quality of the code.

In fact, that's the entire reason we care about "quality code", because we assume that quality code is code that does what you expect well and consistently.

I say this as someone who hand writes code pretty much every night for fun, just to experiment with computation. Which, oddly, is more fun than ever because I don't feel like there's any need to connect this type of programming with "real world software", and I can really enjoy code for it's own sake, meanwhile my job is mostly just running agent loops (which I quite like as well).

0 pointscrystal_revenge14d ago0 comments

In fact, that's the entire reason we care about "quality code", because we assume that quality code is code that does what you expect well and consistently.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

munksbeer14d ago· 2 in thread

Exactly. Quality of code is a programming invention to make it easier to write and maintain correctly functioning applications.

That is the entire purpose of "quality of code".

If the end user experiences a correctly performing application, now, and in the future, they don't care at all what the code looks like.

AIs could resort to a single global array of primitives and forget all about functions, and just use gotos if it helped them (it probably doesn't).

Anamon10d ago

That is only true for one-shot applications, though, whether written by human or machine. The reason we care about code quality is because rarely we don't have to look at code again after we first wrote it. Poor code quality makes maintenance and extension more difficult and expensive -- again, regardless of the degree of LLM support.

At least for human-written code, there's usually a thought and concept to be discovered underneath. For LLMs, one-shotting is all they know, and getting them to consider months or years of expanding and changing requirements will quickly turn into an impossible game of Twister.

munksbeer9d ago

I doubt this will turn out to be true. That seems trivially easy to solve for with correct training.

SpicyLemonZest14d ago

I haven't forgotten that, I affirmatively think it's false. High quality code is necessary to solve problems reliably. Perhaps some people call things code quality when they don't matter (I really don't care what most variables are named), but there have always been teams who try to increase velocity by disregarding code quality, and from what I've seen AI does not stop them from shipping outages constantly.

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