alt Hacker NewsGarbage software that is slow as a dog has been winning. While we’ve been obsessing over our craft and arguing about what makes software beautiful, slow crappy software has taken over the world.
Quality of code is just not that important of a concept anymore for the average web developer building some saas tool. React code was always crap anyways. Unless you are building critical systems like software that powers a plane or medical equipment, then code quality just doesn’t really matter so much in the age of AI. That may be a hard pill to swallow for some.
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> then code quality just doesn’t really matter so much in the age of AI
Except at scale it really does, because garbage in garbage out. The crappier the code you feed the current models, the worse and more confusing the broken leaky abstractions, the more bugs the AI will generate.
There's a lot of space between web dev and medical equipment. I've never met a user that loved how often their work was lost or how long it took to implement feature requests amid all the ship-it-quick duct tape.
The question is whether it has to be that way. Developers who are against slop don’t believe that the current state of software is the best possible world.
I believe a lot if large software companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft have very high quality code. Past a certain level of complexity, bad code will just collapse under the weight of its low quality.