alt Hacker News> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.
When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service.
When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in.
When millions of dollars in production data is lost or corrupted, who is responsible? Not AI. Quality matters.
I keep hearing this one phrase about code quality again and again. Sure, no one cares about the dumb little linter failing your builds, but when code quality comes to responsibility, it goes hand in hand. It’s either that or your all working on hobby projects.
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I just sat on an enterprise onboarding call where their success engineer did in fact blame the AI and the client said "OK"
I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business" section like fines for not respecting laws.
That's why AI is hurting us so much right now.
We were always trying to have quality in our project, whether it was for readability or for code evolution.
No, Steve, you don't name your 42 variables with only two letter and no you don't use Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure. Yes Odin is the most powerful so it's the production server but Tyr for the source control and print server isn't really obvious.
Well now AI is Steve.
It will create nice little 300 lines functions with a block repeating 6 times. You know that you will have 6 fix to make instead of one if this block was in a simple function.
It's not instinct a this point, is pure knowledge screaming "it's wrong".
And you now realise that the hidden strength from your craft wasn't about coding the best binary tree search algorithm, it was about knowing the underlying soft unknowns that really made it software.
We have a strong feeling that we're watching dozens of kids running with scissors and we don't know whether it's really scissors, we're just getting too old for this shit, or if we should just stop "progress" because we don't like it.
We're the horse breeders when everyone discovered cars.