Good is a direction. A painter might study and practice enough to be as good as Michealangelo, but the attempt to be 'more good' or 'better than Michaelangelo'

Good is a direction. A painter might study and practice enough to be as good as Michealangelo, but the attempt to be 'more good' or 'better than Michaelangelo' stops as soon he starts a serious painting. He has to finish the painting with the skill he has at that point. I agree code should be unattached and you can throw it away. As soon as you start coding a program for a client, your attempts to become 'more good' as a coder and to write more ideal code, have stopped and it's time to make some code you can throw away or sell to the client. But all the 'training' paintings you made on the journey to becoming 'good' have to be kept, because you trashed thousands of attempts along the way in pursuit of an ideal painting. The good painting is framed and hung on my wall. The commercial painting is sold to the client or trashed. Yes, give up on 'good code' at work. Keep the ideal of good code as a direction to improve towards, not an end result in commercial works. As soon as 'good' became explictly defined/bike-shedded it died anyway..... it's an infinite direction, not a limited thing that can be defined and boxed up.