Your codebase doesn't care how it got written • Hacker News Board

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#11

Post by yrds96 » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

Not sure what to think about the first part, but what you said about writing style, I think it's still reasonable to judge developers/engineers by writing style:

- Writing style does reveal how people understand problems and their approach for solving them. People that prioritize direct solutions over complex abstractions are still valuable to catch over engineered code.

- People with "good taste" in code can catch when AI generated code takes shortcuts to accomplish a certain task, this happens every day and we can't ignore it.

The state of AI code can be way better by 6 months or 1 year, or even more (we don't really know), but we're not there yet, and we can't wait until there to hire new people without considering those points.

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#12

Post by siriusastrebe » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 7:38 AM UTC

squigz wrote: post #10

MattGaiser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This cohort has always existed though. Users of Notepad and Vim still exist.

Grouping Notepad and vim together under "tools that make your job harder" is pretty wild. Has anyone ever known a serious, professional programmer who used Notepad to code?

Next you'll be telling me there's punch card programmers still. For love of the punch card craft.

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#13

Post by dzonga » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 8:19 AM UTC

never seen people who are hellbent on shooting themselves in the foot.

A.I or more accurately LLMs are currently trained on shitty open source code.

the best practice code out there is locked in some cabinets for private companies.

if you insist on 100% A.I written code - then how are you gonna train the new generation to write software well.

you will come to the singular point - where the new generation knows nothing & the LLMs themselves can't be trained further (we are almost there btw).

LLMs as better autocomplete are perfect use case. or as a rubber duck that talks back in terms of debugging. anything else is frivolous.

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#14

Post by graemep » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 8:49 AM UTC

dzonga wrote: post #13

never seen people who are hellbent on shooting themselves in the foot. A.I or more accurately LLMs are currently trained on shitty open source code. the best practice code out there is locked in some cabinets for private companies. if you insist on 100% A.I written code - then how are you gonna train the new generation to write software well. you will come to the singular point - where the new generation knows nothin…

Do you have any evidence that open source code is lower quality?

The leaks of proprietary code, and the many examples of known security issues, the quality issues evident is most software, and the opinions of people who work on proprietary software all suggest the opposite.

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#15

Post by incrudible » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 9:09 AM UTC

I detest the way ChatGPT writes. You can tell immediately when someone had a rough draft or just an idea thrown into the ChatGPT filter. At least tell it to cut to these chase next time, nobody has time for fluff in this attention economy.

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#16

Post by imtringued » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 10:31 AM UTC

incrudible wrote: post #15

I detest the way ChatGPT writes. You can tell immediately when someone had a rough draft or just an idea thrown into the ChatGPT filter. At least tell it to cut to these chase next time, nobody has time for fluff in this attention economy.

I noticed that recently blog posts have gotten much longer and that the information content is increasingly spaced out without telling you anything really.

A blog post built on a premise that could fit inside a paragraph and be elaborated to death within 2000 words now gets to have multiple chapters of useless fluff where the main purpose is lost because those words were supposed to convey the life circumstances or mindset of the author that lead to the premise.

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#17

Post by ahartmetz » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 10:36 AM UTC

graemep wrote: post #14

dzonga wrote: post #13

never seen people who are hellbent on shooting themselves in the foot. A.I or more accurately LLMs are currently trained on shitty open source code. the best practice code out there is locked in some cabinets for private companies. if you insist on 100% A.I written code - then how are you gonna train the new generation to write software well. you will come to the singular point - where the new generation knows nothin…

Do you have any evidence that open source code is lower quality? The leaks of proprietary code, and the many examples of known security issues, the quality issues evident is most software, and the opinions of people who work on proprietary software all suggest the opposite.

I remember reading a study on source code quality quite some years ago, maybe it was featured on Slashdot. The result was that the lowest quality and the highest quality source code was proprietary, open source code was "pretty good but not the best". And that high quality proprietary code was stuff like operating system kernels and network equipment firmware, not business applications.

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#18

Post by croemer » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 10:45 AM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #16

incrudible wrote: post #15

I detest the way ChatGPT writes. You can tell immediately when someone had a rough draft or just an idea thrown into the ChatGPT filter. At least tell it to cut to these chase next time, nobody has time for fluff in this attention economy.

I noticed that recently blog posts have gotten much longer and that the information content is increasingly spaced out without telling you anything really. A blog post built on a premise that could fit inside a paragraph and be elaborated to death within 2000 words now gets to have multiple chapters of useless fluff where the main purpose is lost because those words were supposed to convey the life circumstances or m…

Yep, the LLMisms are there. "It's not X, it's Y", "Here's...":

> The codebase doesn’t care how it got written. It cares whether it works, whether it can be maintained, and whether it helps the business do what it needs to do.

> That’s not a bait and switch. That’s what happens when your organization gets access to new tools and the economics shift underneath everyone’s feet.

> What we have now is a training problem. A reclassification problem. And I’m not sure what the best HR-friendly way to frame this is… but here’s a serious question:

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#19

Post by spicyusername » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:03 AM UTC

vips7L wrote: post #5

How about we just let people code how they want if the codebase doesn’t care how it gets written? If it doesn’t matter why must we use one particular tool versus another?

Because most code is paid for and the people paying want as much code as possible for as cheap as they can get it.

If your code is expensive, the fact is that now someone can write it cheaper.

Re: Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

#20

Post by hgoel » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:26 AM UTC

incrudible wrote: post #15

I detest the way ChatGPT writes. You can tell immediately when someone had a rough draft or just an idea thrown into the ChatGPT filter. At least tell it to cut to these chase next time, nobody has time for fluff in this attention economy.

Yeah, I think if you're going to use LLMs, the least you can do is distill what you want to say to the minimum necessary text to convey your point accurately.