The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"

"There's plenty of space for "disposable and single use software." Sure, to a trained software engineer, this might be "bad code" but doing today's task has value, even if the code that performs that task isn't "accretive.""

Grant me the serenity to accept the bad code i shouldn't fix, the courage to change the code I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

It could be that this person has something profound to say, but ... it's about AI. Sigh and swipe left.

Guys really pushing to remain relevant with the reverse centaurs shtick.

There's a 'joke' that goes around occasionally that has some truth to it: "Excel is the world's most popular programming language." Occasionally it's 'Excel macros' or 'VBA' instead of just Excel.[1]

The core truth of it is that a massive amount, possibly most, of the world's software is not a carefully hand-crafted application in that lives in Github written by expert software developers. It's a heap of Excel functions in an XSLX file, with no tests, no source control, no PRs, and no real planning behind it. And it works for that one specific task that the person who built it needed at the time.

AI vibe-coding is probably filling in the middle-ground between that stuff and 'real' code - it does more than just building somehting to complete today's task, and it is accretive in the sense that someone can build on top of it, but it doesn't really look that way to someone used to working on 'proper' software.

[1] Further reading if you're interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27048672