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The silent death of good code

amit.prasad.me

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Re: The silent death of good code

#71

Post by bitwize »

There's just no longer any value in good code, just like there's no value in Mel Kaye's beautiful hand-assembled programs:

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

But now, reading, understanding, and maintaining the software is the job of coding agents. You are free to do the interesting work: setting goals and directions for the agents, evaluating the finished product, communicating with stakeholders, etc. This has always been the hard and interesting part of systems design: solving real-world problems for people and businesses.

Re: The silent death of good code

#72

Post by anonymous908213 »

love2read wrote: post #61
anonymous908213 wrote: post #13

Good code was approximately never valued in enterprise. How many companies worth billions or even trillions have webpages that take 5+ seconds to load text, and use Electron for their desktop applications? In that regard, nothing has changed. There is still a market for good code in the world, however. The uses of software are nearly infinite, and while certain big-name software gets a free pass on being shitty due t…

So funny when people point at electron as if it singlehandedly makes every program unusable. Also, I would assume there are not many significant pages on $B/Trillion companies that take 5 seconds to load text that are used frequently. > I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them? People never get tired of reading or commenting on commentary on their hobbies.

New Reddit and Outlook.com are two off the top of my head. It is not uncommon to be looking at a spinner for several seconds. There are other websites that are not primarily for text but are still insane. Twitch.TV, an old favorite of mine, now routinely takes 10+ seconds despite having Amazon money behind it. Youtube routinely takes several seconds to load the page, which is still unacceptable even for a video website. These sites are maintained by FAANG-tier engineers being paid mid-high 6 figures or 7 figures, who I'm sure are mostly perfectly competent, and yet they are completely dysfunctional because enterprise environments inevitably create structural disincentives to producing good code.

I use Electron applications. They are usable, for some value of the word. I am certainly not happy about it, though. I loathe the fact that I have 32GB RAM and routinely run into memory issues on a near-daily basis that should literally never happen with the workloads I'm doing. With communication-based apps like Slack and Discord where your choice of software to use comes down entirely to where the people you're communicating are, you will use dogshit because there is no point to communicating to the void on a technically superior platform.

Re: The silent death of good code

#73

Post by bigstrat2003 »

thenanyu wrote: post #14
mixdup wrote: post #2

The worst part of vibe coding, and developers as managers of "agents" AI is at best a good intern or a new junior developer. We're locking in mediocrity and continuing enshittification. "Good enough" is codified as good enough, and nothing will be good or excellent. Non-determinism, and some amount of inaccuracy on the margins continually, no matter the industry or task at hand including finance, just so we can avoid…

That's not even remotely close to true anymore. Agents are far better than any intern or junior developer.

They most certainly are not.

Re: The silent death of good code

#74

Post by ChicagoDave »

FjordWarden wrote: post #44
ChicagoDave wrote: post #23

I love the sentiment, but 40 years in the business realm of software development has taught me “good code” is never a priority for management. It’s difficult to explain good unit testing, tech debt, or just going through proper solution selection with management. So having used Claude Code since it came out I’ve decided the resulting code is overall just as good as what I’d see in regular programming scenarios.

Let management argue there case, don't do it for them.

I am management, but now also in front of delivery because I know how to construct software.

Re: The silent death of good code

#75

Post by erelong »

After reading a bunch of blog posts like this, I'm now kind of glad to see "good code" go away and am also glad to pour more gasoline on the flames of fire burning away at such code, so to speak

I think "good code" t was a "nice" pursuit but became too much of an end in itself while code was always - for me - just a means to create something that "just werks"

But I'm not sure the "good code" fans need to worry because they might be able to obsess over "proper prompting" and the "correct way to use agents" or "appopriate ai tooling" or something like that on this next wave of "code creation"

Re: The silent death of good code

#76

Post by IhateAI_3 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #43
IhateAI_3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Is there anything you really have to get done regardless of quality right this second? A vast number of things. There are a vast number of things I will accept having done in even mediocre quality, as in the old pre-AI world, I would never get to them at all. Every friend with a startup idea. Every repetitive form I have to fill out every month for compliance. Just tooling for my day to day life.

Please name a single "startup" you've shipped from vibe coding thats gotten a paying customer that you didnt know IRL.

Everyone thinks they're a startup founder now is a major part of the problem. Y'all are falling for the billionaire marketing. Anything that can be built with vibe coding for a startup can be instantly copied by someone else. This makes no sense.

Re: The silent death of good code

#77

Post by jmspring »

sibeliuss wrote: post #8

> This same colleague then invested time into understanding the kernel subsystem, the exact reasons why the original C program was written how it was, and rewrote the Rust translation himself. The difference was night and day; the code flowed naturally, explained itself and the underlying subsystems, and may genuinely be some of the nicest parts of the entire codebase. This is the point that everybody needs to calm d…

I'm not sure how this guideline makes sense. LLMs are great at dumb things I shouldn't have to type but can be well defined before they write something.

This statement, makes almost zero sense - A perfectly reasonable rule in software organizations is: For greenfield code, LLMs are strictly required for 1st-pass prototyping (also required!). And then: Hand writes (within reason) for production code. Your company will not lose their competitive edge following this guideline, and this includes your hard-earned skills.

"Give me a proxy, written in go, that can handle jwt authentication" isn't your traditional crud stuff, but Claude answers that quite well.

Re: The silent death of good code

#78

Post by IhateAI_3 »

charcircuit wrote: post #68
bilinguliar wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is irrelevant. Why?

That commenter is try is trying to imply that AI agents are a form of crutch. Like if you are bad at programming you use an AI agent to program for you. In reality programmers of all skill levels are migrating to using AI agents for programming.

Just because a high skilled programmer can use an LLM with some effectiveness doesnt mean someone with less skills will be able to match their ability. You LLM-kiddies are worse than nft people in 2021 claiming they're making art.

I really cant wait until the inference providers 5x their prices and you guys realize you're completely incompetent and that you've tied your competency 1:1 to the quality and quantity of tokens you can afford. You're going to be a character from the movie idiocracy.

Of course you'll still be coping by claiming you're so productive using some budget kimi 2.5 endpoint that consumes all your personal data and trains on your inputs.

Re: The silent death of good code

#79

Post by EPWN3D »

No one likes good code because it takes a lot of upfront time.

- PMs hate it because you're busy putting up scaffolding instead of painting

- Managers hate it because they have to cover for it

- Other engineers hate it because they could be doing it better

- VPs and directors hate it because they can't think beyond the release cycle, so the engineer is an architecture astronaut who should focus

There is basically no reward for actually putting thought into a programming solution anymore. The incentives are aligned against it unless you can get your manager to run interference for you.

Re: The silent death of good code

#80

Post by charcircuit »

IhateAI_3 wrote: post #78
charcircuit wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That commenter is try is trying to imply that AI agents are a form of crutch. Like if you are bad at programming you use an AI agent to program for you. In reality programmers of all skill levels are migrating to using AI agents for programming.

Just because a high skilled programmer can use an LLM with some effectiveness doesnt mean someone with less skills will be able to match their ability. You LLM-kiddies are worse than nft people in 2021 claiming they're making art. I really cant wait until the inference providers 5x their prices and you guys realize you're completely incompetent and that you've tied your competency 1:1 to the quality and quantity of t…

>with some effectiveness doesnt mean someone with less skills will be able to match their ability

I never said they would.

>Of course you'll still be coping by claiming you're so productive using some budget kimi 2.5 endpoint

I would. I already run my persistent agent on Kimi 2.5 and use Kimi CLI.

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