5 ms·

I'll take the other side of this. Professional software engineers like many of us have a big blind spot when it comes to AI coding, and that's a fixation on co

by csallen 6mo ago

I'll take the other side of this. Professional software engineers like many of us have a big blind spot when it comes to AI coding, and that's a fixation on code quality. It makes sense to focus on code quality. We're not wrong. After all, we've spent our entire careers in the code. Bad code quality slows us down and makes things slow/insecure/unreliable/etc for end users. However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. There are two forces contributing to this: (1) more people coding smaller apps, and (2) improvements in coding models and agentic tools. We are increasingly moving toward a world where people who aren't sophisticated programmers are "building" their own apps with a user base of just one person. In many cases, these apps are simple and effective and come without the bloat that larger software suites have subjected users to for years. The code is simple, and even when it's not, nobody will ever have to maintain it, so it doesn't matter. Some apps will be unreliable, some will get hacked, some will be slow and inefficient, and it won't matter. This trend will continue to grow. At the same time, technology is improving, and the AI is increasingly good at designing and architecting software. We are in the very earliest months of AI actually being somewhat competent at this. It's unlikely that it will plateau and stop improving. And even when it finally does, if such a point comes, there will still be many years of improvements in tooling, as humanity's ability to make effective use of a technology always lags far behind the invention of the technology itself. So I'm right there with you in being annoyed by all the hype and exaggerated claims. But the "truth" about AI-assisted coding is changing every year, every quarter, every month. It's only trending in one direction. And it isn't going to stop.

vlovich123 6mo ago
> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Strong disagree. I just watched a team spend weeks trying to make a piece of code work with AI because the vibe coded was spaghetti garbage that even the AI couldn’t tell what needed to be done and was basically playing ineffective whackamole - it would fix the bug you ask it by reintroducing an old bug or introducing a new bug because no one understood what was happening. And humans couldn’t even step in like normal because no one understood what’s going on.
- csallen 6mo ago
  Okay, so you observed one team that had an issue with AI code quality. What's your point? In 1998, I'm sure there were newspaper companies who failed at transitioning online, didn't get any web traffic, had unreliable servers crashed, etc. This says very little about what life would be like for the newspaper industry in 1999, 2000, 2005, 2010, and beyond.
  - atomicnumber3 6mo ago
    There's almost no point in arguing about this anymore. Neither you nor the other person are going to be convinced. We just have to wait and see if a new crop of 100x productivity AI believer companies come along and unseat all the incumbents.
  - mnsc 6mo ago
    But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. In 2020 people predicted that Facebook Horizon would only go one direction, always improve and become as pervasive as the internet. So when you predict that the design and architecture capabilities of models will continue to improve, thus making code quality irrelevant, you sound very confident. And if in five years you are right, you will brag about it here. If not, well I for one will not track you down and rub it in your face. Peace out.
    - csallen 6mo ago
      You're confusing betting on a company/product vs betting on technological improvement in general. It is absolutely the case that virtual reality technology will only get better over time. Maybe it'll take 5, or 10, or 20, or 40 years, but it's almost a certainty that we'll eventually see better AR/VR tech in the future than we have in the past. Would you bet against that? You'd be crazy to imo.
      - slfnflctd 6mo ago
        There's a kid outside the window of the place I'm staying who's been in the yard playing and talking with people online through his VR headset for like 2+ hours. He's living in the future. Whatever happens, he and his friends are going to continue to be interested in more of this. Whether what they're using in 20 years is produced by the company formerly known as Facebook or not is a whole different question.
lowsong 6mo ago
> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. It's the opposite, code quality is becoming more and more relevant. Before now you could only neglect quality for so long before the time to implement any change became so long as to completely stall out a project. That's still true, the only thing AI has changed is it's let you charge further and further into technical debt before you see the problems. But now instead of the problems being a gradual ramp up it's a cliff, the moment you hit the point where the current crop of models can't operate on it effectively any more you're completely lost. > We are in the very earliest months of AI actually being somewhat competent at this. It's unlikely that it will plateau and stop improving. We hit the plateau on model improvement a few years back. We've only continued to see any improvement at all because of the exponential increase of money poured into it. > It's only trending in one direction. And it isn't going to stop. Sure it can. When the bubble pops there will be a question: is using an agent cost effective? Even if you think it is at $200/month/user, we'll see how that holds up once the cost skyrockets after OpenAI and Anthropic run out of money to burn and their investors want some returns. Think about it this way: If your job survived the popularity of offshoring to engineers paid 10% of your salary, why would AI tooling kill it?
- csallen 6mo ago
  > That's still true, the only thing AI has changed is it's let you charge further and further into technical debt before you see the problems. But now instead of the problems being a gradual ramp up it's a cliff, the moment you hit the point where the current crop of models can't operate on it effectively any more you're completely lost. What you're missing is that fewer and fewer projects are going to need a ton of technical depth. I have friends who'd never written a line of code in their lives who now use multiple simple vibe-coded apps at work daily. > We hit the plateau on model improvement a few years back. We've only continued to see any improvement at all because of the exponential increase of money poured into it. The genie is out of the bottle. Humanity is not going to stop pouring more and more money into AI. > Sure it can. When the bubble pops there will be a question: is using an agent cost effective? Even if you think it is at $200/month/user, we'll see how that holds up once the cost skyrockets after OpenAI and Anthropic run out of money to burn and their investors want some returns. The AI bubble isn't going to pop. This is like saying the internet bubble is going to pop in 1999. Maybe you will be right about short term economic trends, but the underlying technology is here to stay and will only trend in one direction: better, cheaper, faster, more available, more widely adopted, etc.
wiether 6mo ago
> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. > [...] > We are increasingly moving toward a world where people who aren't sophisticated programmers are "building" their own apps with a user base of just one person. In many cases, these apps are simple and effective and come without the bloat that larger software suites have subjected users to for years. The code is simple, and even when it's not, nobody will ever have to maintain it, so it doesn't matter. Some apps will be unreliable, some will get hacked, some will be slow and inefficient, and it won't matter. This trend will continue to grow. I do agree with the fact that more and more people are going to take advantage of agentic coding to write their own tools/apps to maker their life easier. And I genuinely see it as a good thing: computers were always supposed to make our lives easier. But I don't see how it can be used as an argument for "code quality is becoming less and less relevant". If AI is producing 10 times more lines that are necessary to achieve the goal, that's more resources used. With the prices of RAM and SSD skyrocketing, I don't see it as a positive for regular users. If they need to buy a new computer to run their vibecoded app, are they really reaping the benefits? But what's more concerning to me is: where do we draw the line? Let's say it's fine to have a garbage vibecoded app running only on its "creator" computer. Even if it gobbles gigabytes of RAM and is absolutely not secured. Good. But then, if "code quality is becoming less and less relevant", does this also applies to public/professional apps? In our modern societies we HAVE to use dozens of software everyday, whether we want it or not, whether we actually directly interact with them or not. Are you okay with your power company cutting power because their vibecoded monitoring software mistakenly thought you didn't paid your bills? Are you okay with an autonomous car driving over your kid because its vibecoded software didn't saw them? Are you okay with cops coming to your door at 5AM because a vibecoded tool reported you as a terrorist? Personally, I'm not. People can produce all the trash they want on their own hardware. But I don't want my life to be ruled by software that were not given the required quality controls they must have had.
- csallen 6mo ago
  > If AI is producing 10 times more lines that are necessary to achieve the goal, that's more resources used. With the prices of RAM and SSD skyrocketing, I don't see it as a positive for regular users. If they need to buy a new computer to run their vibecoded app, are they really reaping the benefits? I mean, I agree, but you could say this at any point in time throughout history. An engineer from the 1960s engineer could scoff at the web and the explosion in the number of progress and the decline in efficiency of the average program. An artist from the 1700s would scoff at the lack of training and precision of the average artist/designer from today, because the explosion in numbers has certain translated to a decline in the average quality of art. A film producer from the 1940s would scoff at the lack of quality of the average YouTuber's videography skills. But we still have millions of YouTubers and they're racking up trillions of views. Etc. To me, the chief lesson is that when we democratize technology and put it in the hands of more people, the tradeoff in quality is something that society is ready to accept. Whether this is depressing (bc less quality) or empowering (bc more people) is a matter of perspective. We're entering a world where FAR more people will be able to casually create and edit the software they want to see. It's going to be a messier world for sure. And that bothers us as engineers. But just because something bothers us doesn't mean it bothers the rest of the world. > But then, if "code quality is becoming less and less relevant", does this also applies to public/professional apps? No, I think these will always have a higher bar for reliability and security. But even in our pre-vibe coded era, how many massive brandname companies have had outages and hacks and shitty UIs? Our tolerance for these things is quite high. Of course the bigger more visible and important applications will be the slowest to adopt risky tech and will have more guardrails up. That's a good thing. But it's still just a matter of time, especially as the tools improve and get better at writing code that's less wasteful, more secure, etc. And as our skills improve, and we get better at using AI.
Philip-J-Fry 6mo ago
I don't buy this at all. Code quality will always matter. Context is king with LLMs, and when you fill that context up with thousands of lines of spaghetti, the LLM will (and does) perform worse. Garbage in, garbage out, that's still the truth from my experience. Spaghetti code is still spaghetti code. Something that should be a small change ends up touching multiple parts of the codebase. Not only does this increase costs, it just compounds the next time you need to change this feature. I don't see why this would be a reality that anyone wants. Why would you want an agent going in circles, burning money and eventually finding the answer, if simpler code could get it there faster and cheaper? Maybe one day it'll change. Maybe there will be a new AI technology which shakes up the whole way we do it. But if the architecture of LLMs stays as it is, I don't see why you wouldn't want to make efficient use of the context window.
- csallen 6mo ago
  I didn't say that you "want" spaghetti code or that spaghetti code is good. I said that (a) apps are getting simpler and smaller in scope and so their code quality matters less, and (b) AI is getting better at writing good code.
  - camdenreslink 6mo ago
    Apps are getting bigger and more ambitious in scope as developers try to take advantage of any boost in production LLMs provide them.
    - csallen 6mo ago
      Every metric I've seen points to there being an explosion in (a) the number of apps that exist and (b) the number of people making applications.
      - pessimizer 6mo ago
        What relevance do either of those claims have to the claim of the comment you are responding to? Are you trying to imply that having more things means that each of them will be smaller? There are more people than there were 500 years ago - are they smaller, or larger? Also, the printing press did lead to much longer works. There are many continuous book series that have run for decades, with dozens of volumes and millions of words. This is a direct result of the printing press. Just as there are television shows that have run with continuous plots for thousands of hours. This is a consequence of video recording and production technologies; you couldn't do that with stage plays. You seem to be trying to slip "smaller in scope" into your statement without backing, even though I'd insist that applications individuals wrote being "smaller in scope" was a obvious consequence of the tooling available. I can't know everything, so I have to keep the languages and techniques limited to the ones that I do know, and I can't write fast enough to make things huge. The problems I choose to tackle are based on those restrictions. Those are the exact things that LLMs are meant to change.
subhobroto 6mo ago
> nobody will ever have to maintain it, so it doesn't matter I'm curious about software that's actively used but nobody maintains it. If it's a personal anecdote, that's fine as well
- csallen 6mo ago
  I mean I've written some scripts and cron jobs for websites that I manage that have continued trucking for years with no changes or monitoring on my end. I suppose it's a bit easier on the web.
mjr00 6mo ago
> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Strongly disagree with this thesis, and in fact I'd go completely the opposite: code quality is more important than ever thanks to AI. LLM-assisted coding is most successful in codebases with attributes strongly associated with high code quality: predictable patterns, well-named variables, use of a type system, no global mutable state, very low mutability in general, etc. I'm using AI on a pretty shitty legacy area of a Python codebase right now (like, literally right now, Claude is running while I type this) and it's struggling for the same reason a human would struggle. What are the columns in this DataFrame? Who knows, because the dataframe is getting mutated depending on the function calls! Oh yeah and someone thought they could be "clever" and assemble function names via strings and dynamically call them to save a few lines of code, awesome! An LLM is going to struggle deciphering this disasterpiece, same as anyone. Meanwhile for newer areas of the code with strict typing and a sensible architecture, Claude will usually just one-shot whatever I ask. edit: I see most replies are saying basically the same thing here, which is an indicator.
- csallen 6mo ago
  > LLM-assisted coding is most successful in codebases with attributes strongly associated with high code quality: predictable patterns, well-named variables, use of a type system, no global mutable state, very low mutability in general, etc. That's all very true, but what you're missing is that the proportion of codebases that need this is shrinking relative to the total number of codebases. There's an incredible proliferation of very small, bespoke, simple, AI-coded apps, that are nonetheless quite useful. Most are being created by people who have never written a line of code in their life, who will do no maintenance, and who will not give two craps how the code looks, any more than the average YouTuber cares about the aperture of their lens or the average forum commenter care about the style of their prose. We don't see these apps because we're professional software engineers working on the other stuff. But we're rapidly approaching a world where more and more software is created by non-professionals.
  - mjr00 6mo ago
zozbot234 6mo ago
However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding It actually becomes more and more relevant. AI constantly needs to reread its own code and fit it into its limited context, in order to take it as a reference for writing out new stuff. This means that every single code smell, and every instance of needless code bloat, actually becomes a grievous hazard to further progress. Arguably, you should in fact be quite obsessed about refactoring and cleaning up what the AI has come up with, even more so than if you were coding purely for humans.
- bananamogul 6mo ago
  Even non-frontier models now offer a context window of 1 million tokens. That's 100K-300K LOCs. I would not call that a limited context.
hokkos 6mo ago
If strongly typed languages are preferred for AI coding, maybe the fixation on code quality make LLM produce better code.
vehementi 6mo ago
Nothing you wrote seems to support what you said at the start there. Why is the importance of code quality decreasing?
danielmarkbruce 6mo ago
Maybe, but how exactly are you defining "code quality" ?
Gigachad 6mo ago
I’ve been told repeatedly now that if AI coding isn’t working for me it’s because my projects code quality is too poor so the agents can’t understand it. Now I’m being told code quality doesn’t matter at all.
HeyLaughingBoy 6mo ago
Controversy much :-) I completely agree. Just going through the beginner & hobbyist forums, the change from "can you help me with code to do X" to "I used ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot to write code to do X" happened with absolutely startling speed, and it's not slowing down. There was clearly a pent-up demand here that wasn't being met otherwise. People are using AI to get code written. They have no idea what code quality is and only care that what they built works. AFAICT, every time technology has allowed non-technical people to do more, it's opened up new opportunities for programmers. I don't expect this to be any different, I just want to know where the opportunities are.

by csallen 6mo ago

vlovich123 6mo ago

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Strong disagree. I just watched a team spend weeks trying to make a piece of code work with AI because the vibe coded was spaghetti garbage that even the AI couldn’t tell what needed to be done and was basically playing ineffective whackamole - it would fix the bug you ask it by reintroducing an old bug or introducing a new bug because no one understood what was happening. And humans couldn’t even step in like normal because no one understood what’s going on.

csallen 6mo ago
Okay, so you observed one team that had an issue with AI code quality. What's your point? In 1998, I'm sure there were newspaper companies who failed at transitioning online, didn't get any web traffic, had unreliable servers crashed, etc. This says very little about what life would be like for the newspaper industry in 1999, 2000, 2005, 2010, and beyond.
- atomicnumber3 6mo ago
  There's almost no point in arguing about this anymore. Neither you nor the other person are going to be convinced. We just have to wait and see if a new crop of 100x productivity AI believer companies come along and unseat all the incumbents.
- mnsc 6mo ago
  But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. In 2020 people predicted that Facebook Horizon would only go one direction, always improve and become as pervasive as the internet. So when you predict that the design and architecture capabilities of models will continue to improve, thus making code quality irrelevant, you sound very confident. And if in five years you are right, you will brag about it here. If not, well I for one will not track you down and rub it in your face. Peace out.
  - csallen 6mo ago
    You're confusing betting on a company/product vs betting on technological improvement in general. It is absolutely the case that virtual reality technology will only get better over time. Maybe it'll take 5, or 10, or 20, or 40 years, but it's almost a certainty that we'll eventually see better AR/VR tech in the future than we have in the past. Would you bet against that? You'd be crazy to imo.
    - slfnflctd 6mo ago
      There's a kid outside the window of the place I'm staying who's been in the yard playing and talking with people online through his VR headset for like 2+ hours. He's living in the future. Whatever happens, he and his friends are going to continue to be interested in more of this. Whether what they're using in 20 years is produced by the company formerly known as Facebook or not is a whole different question.

lowsong 6mo ago

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. It's the opposite, code quality is becoming more and more relevant. Before now you could only neglect quality for so long before the time to implement any change became so long as to completely stall out a project. That's still true, the only thing AI has changed is it's let you charge further and further into technical debt before you see the problems. But now instead of the problems being a gradual ramp up it's a cliff, the moment you hit the point where the current crop of models can't operate on it effectively any more you're completely lost. > We are in the very earliest months of AI actually being somewhat competent at this. It's unlikely that it will plateau and stop improving. We hit the plateau on model improvement a few years back. We've only continued to see any improvement at all because of the exponential increase of money poured into it. > It's only trending in one direction. And it isn't going to stop. Sure it can. When the bubble pops there will be a question: is using an agent cost effective? Even if you think it is at $200/month/user, we'll see how that holds up once the cost skyrockets after OpenAI and Anthropic run out of money to burn and their investors want some returns. Think about it this way: If your job survived the popularity of offshoring to engineers paid 10% of your salary, why would AI tooling kill it?

csallen 6mo ago
> That's still true, the only thing AI has changed is it's let you charge further and further into technical debt before you see the problems. But now instead of the problems being a gradual ramp up it's a cliff, the moment you hit the point where the current crop of models can't operate on it effectively any more you're completely lost. What you're missing is that fewer and fewer projects are going to need a ton of technical depth. I have friends who'd never written a line of code in their lives who now use multiple simple vibe-coded apps at work daily. > We hit the plateau on model improvement a few years back. We've only continued to see any improvement at all because of the exponential increase of money poured into it. The genie is out of the bottle. Humanity is not going to stop pouring more and more money into AI. > Sure it can. When the bubble pops there will be a question: is using an agent cost effective? Even if you think it is at $200/month/user, we'll see how that holds up once the cost skyrockets after OpenAI and Anthropic run out of money to burn and their investors want some returns. The AI bubble isn't going to pop. This is like saying the internet bubble is going to pop in 1999. Maybe you will be right about short term economic trends, but the underlying technology is here to stay and will only trend in one direction: better, cheaper, faster, more available, more widely adopted, etc.

wiether 6mo ago

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. > [...] > We are increasingly moving toward a world where people who aren't sophisticated programmers are "building" their own apps with a user base of just one person. In many cases, these apps are simple and effective and come without the bloat that larger software suites have subjected users to for years. The code is simple, and even when it's not, nobody will ever have to maintain it, so it doesn't matter. Some apps will be unreliable, some will get hacked, some will be slow and inefficient, and it won't matter. This trend will continue to grow. I do agree with the fact that more and more people are going to take advantage of agentic coding to write their own tools/apps to maker their life easier. And I genuinely see it as a good thing: computers were always supposed to make our lives easier. But I don't see how it can be used as an argument for "code quality is becoming less and less relevant". If AI is producing 10 times more lines that are necessary to achieve the goal, that's more resources used. With the prices of RAM and SSD skyrocketing, I don't see it as a positive for regular users. If they need to buy a new computer to run their vibecoded app, are they really reaping the benefits? But what's more concerning to me is: where do we draw the line? Let's say it's fine to have a garbage vibecoded app running only on its "creator" computer. Even if it gobbles gigabytes of RAM and is absolutely not secured. Good. But then, if "code quality is becoming less and less relevant", does this also applies to public/professional apps? In our modern societies we HAVE to use dozens of software everyday, whether we want it or not, whether we actually directly interact with them or not. Are you okay with your power company cutting power because their vibecoded monitoring software mistakenly thought you didn't paid your bills? Are you okay with an autonomous car driving over your kid because its vibecoded software didn't saw them? Are you okay with cops coming to your door at 5AM because a vibecoded tool reported you as a terrorist? Personally, I'm not. People can produce all the trash they want on their own hardware. But I don't want my life to be ruled by software that were not given the required quality controls they must have had.

csallen 6mo ago
> If AI is producing 10 times more lines that are necessary to achieve the goal, that's more resources used. With the prices of RAM and SSD skyrocketing, I don't see it as a positive for regular users. If they need to buy a new computer to run their vibecoded app, are they really reaping the benefits? I mean, I agree, but you could say this at any point in time throughout history. An engineer from the 1960s engineer could scoff at the web and the explosion in the number of progress and the decline in efficiency of the average program. An artist from the 1700s would scoff at the lack of training and precision of the average artist/designer from today, because the explosion in numbers has certain translated to a decline in the average quality of art. A film producer from the 1940s would scoff at the lack of quality of the average YouTuber's videography skills. But we still have millions of YouTubers and they're racking up trillions of views. Etc. To me, the chief lesson is that when we democratize technology and put it in the hands of more people, the tradeoff in quality is something that society is ready to accept. Whether this is depressing (bc less quality) or empowering (bc more people) is a matter of perspective. We're entering a world where FAR more people will be able to casually create and edit the software they want to see. It's going to be a messier world for sure. And that bothers us as engineers. But just because something bothers us doesn't mean it bothers the rest of the world. > But then, if "code quality is becoming less and less relevant", does this also applies to public/professional apps? No, I think these will always have a higher bar for reliability and security. But even in our pre-vibe coded era, how many massive brandname companies have had outages and hacks and shitty UIs? Our tolerance for these things is quite high. Of course the bigger more visible and important applications will be the slowest to adopt risky tech and will have more guardrails up. That's a good thing. But it's still just a matter of time, especially as the tools improve and get better at writing code that's less wasteful, more secure, etc. And as our skills improve, and we get better at using AI.

Philip-J-Fry 6mo ago

I don't buy this at all. Code quality will always matter. Context is king with LLMs, and when you fill that context up with thousands of lines of spaghetti, the LLM will (and does) perform worse. Garbage in, garbage out, that's still the truth from my experience. Spaghetti code is still spaghetti code. Something that should be a small change ends up touching multiple parts of the codebase. Not only does this increase costs, it just compounds the next time you need to change this feature. I don't see why this would be a reality that anyone wants. Why would you want an agent going in circles, burning money and eventually finding the answer, if simpler code could get it there faster and cheaper? Maybe one day it'll change. Maybe there will be a new AI technology which shakes up the whole way we do it. But if the architecture of LLMs stays as it is, I don't see why you wouldn't want to make efficient use of the context window.

csallen 6mo ago
I didn't say that you "want" spaghetti code or that spaghetti code is good. I said that (a) apps are getting simpler and smaller in scope and so their code quality matters less, and (b) AI is getting better at writing good code.
- camdenreslink 6mo ago
  Apps are getting bigger and more ambitious in scope as developers try to take advantage of any boost in production LLMs provide them.
  - csallen 6mo ago
    Every metric I've seen points to there being an explosion in (a) the number of apps that exist and (b) the number of people making applications.
    - pessimizer 6mo ago
      What relevance do either of those claims have to the claim of the comment you are responding to? Are you trying to imply that having more things means that each of them will be smaller? There are more people than there were 500 years ago - are they smaller, or larger? Also, the printing press did lead to much longer works. There are many continuous book series that have run for decades, with dozens of volumes and millions of words. This is a direct result of the printing press. Just as there are television shows that have run with continuous plots for thousands of hours. This is a consequence of video recording and production technologies; you couldn't do that with stage plays. You seem to be trying to slip "smaller in scope" into your statement without backing, even though I'd insist that applications individuals wrote being "smaller in scope" was a obvious consequence of the tooling available. I can't know everything, so I have to keep the languages and techniques limited to the ones that I do know, and I can't write fast enough to make things huge. The problems I choose to tackle are based on those restrictions. Those are the exact things that LLMs are meant to change.

subhobroto 6mo ago

> nobody will ever have to maintain it, so it doesn't matter I'm curious about software that's actively used but nobody maintains it. If it's a personal anecdote, that's fine as well

csallen 6mo ago
I mean I've written some scripts and cron jobs for websites that I manage that have continued trucking for years with no changes or monitoring on my end. I suppose it's a bit easier on the web.

mjr00 6mo ago

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Strongly disagree with this thesis, and in fact I'd go completely the opposite: code quality is more important than ever thanks to AI. LLM-assisted coding is most successful in codebases with attributes strongly associated with high code quality: predictable patterns, well-named variables, use of a type system, no global mutable state, very low mutability in general, etc. I'm using AI on a pretty shitty legacy area of a Python codebase right now (like, literally right now, Claude is running while I type this) and it's struggling for the same reason a human would struggle. What are the columns in this DataFrame? Who knows, because the dataframe is getting mutated depending on the function calls! Oh yeah and someone thought they could be "clever" and assemble function names via strings and dynamically call them to save a few lines of code, awesome! An LLM is going to struggle deciphering this disasterpiece, same as anyone. Meanwhile for newer areas of the code with strict typing and a sensible architecture, Claude will usually just one-shot whatever I ask. edit: I see most replies are saying basically the same thing here, which is an indicator.

csallen 6mo ago
> LLM-assisted coding is most successful in codebases with attributes strongly associated with high code quality: predictable patterns, well-named variables, use of a type system, no global mutable state, very low mutability in general, etc. That's all very true, but what you're missing is that the proportion of codebases that need this is shrinking relative to the total number of codebases. There's an incredible proliferation of very small, bespoke, simple, AI-coded apps, that are nonetheless quite useful. Most are being created by people who have never written a line of code in their life, who will do no maintenance, and who will not give two craps how the code looks, any more than the average YouTuber cares about the aperture of their lens or the average forum commenter care about the style of their prose. We don't see these apps because we're professional software engineers working on the other stuff. But we're rapidly approaching a world where more and more software is created by non-professionals.
- mjr00 6mo ago

zozbot234 6mo ago

However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding It actually becomes more and more relevant. AI constantly needs to reread its own code and fit it into its limited context, in order to take it as a reference for writing out new stuff. This means that every single code smell, and every instance of needless code bloat, actually becomes a grievous hazard to further progress. Arguably, you should in fact be quite obsessed about refactoring and cleaning up what the AI has come up with, even more so than if you were coding purely for humans.

bananamogul 6mo ago
Even non-frontier models now offer a context window of 1 million tokens. That's 100K-300K LOCs. I would not call that a limited context.

hokkos 6mo ago

If strongly typed languages are preferred for AI coding, maybe the fixation on code quality make LLM produce better code.

vehementi 6mo ago

Nothing you wrote seems to support what you said at the start there. Why is the importance of code quality decreasing?

danielmarkbruce 6mo ago

Maybe, but how exactly are you defining "code quality" ?

Gigachad 6mo ago

I’ve been told repeatedly now that if AI coding isn’t working for me it’s because my projects code quality is too poor so the agents can’t understand it. Now I’m being told code quality doesn’t matter at all.

HeyLaughingBoy 6mo ago

Controversy much :-) I completely agree. Just going through the beginner & hobbyist forums, the change from "can you help me with code to do X" to "I used ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot to write code to do X" happened with absolutely startling speed, and it's not slowing down. There was clearly a pent-up demand here that wasn't being met otherwise. People are using AI to get code written. They have no idea what code quality is and only care that what they built works. AFAICT, every time technology has allowed non-technical people to do more, it's opened up new opportunities for programmers. I don't expect this to be any different, I just want to know where the opportunities are.