alt Hacker NewsSometimes I wonder what 'product-level' code really means. What actually is a product?
The code that goes into PLC equipmentss and hardware is incredibly simple—but it's still a product. If you look under the hood of a lot of software, the code is a mess. Still, it's a product. And when Claude's code leaked, everyone laughed at the code hygiene—but a lot of people still used it.
What is a product, really?
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I belief is product simply has come to mean the most visible layer of the thing. For hardware "visible" layer is a literal device but more important product is what the device can do, a port is useless if there are no driver codes for it. For websites product can just mean the site/app does the thing, regardless of if it does it well, consistently, or could be done better. This is why words like "taste is what matters" and "code was never the goal" are said so often, I argue code is in the point but more people just care it works without going much deeper.
A product is what people (or now agents) can use to carry out any activity.
There is a lot of hand wringing in the software space about ai code being a mess - but from a product perspective code quality doesn’t matter. It’s the reliability of what people (or agents) use that matters.
Code quality used to further that goal but only because it was really hard to rewrite or fix code. If that barrier is removed does anyone really care what the code quality under the hood is?
Relevant.
What is a product? 106 points by rogix 4 days ago | 68 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49202690