Comment by fooker
11 days ago
For most code, this never happens in the real world.
The vast majority of code is garbage, and has been for several decades.
11 days ago
For most code, this never happens in the real world.
The vast majority of code is garbage, and has been for several decades.
So we should all work to become better programmers! What I'm seeing now is too many people giving up and saying "most code is bad, so I may was well pump out even worse code MUCH faster." People are chasing convenience and getting a far worse quality of life in exchange.
I've seen all four quadrants of [good code, bad code] x [business success, business failure].
The real money we used to get paid was for business success, not directly for code quality; the quality metrics we told ourselves were closer to CV-driven development than anything the people with the money understood let alone cared about, which in turn was why the term "technical debt" was coined as a way to try to get the leadership to care about what we care about.
There's some domains where all that stuff we tell ourselves about quality, absolutely does matter… but then there's the 278th small restaurant that wants a website with a menu, opening hours, and table booking service without having e.g. 1500 American corporations showing up in the cookie consent message to provide analytics they don't need but are still automatically pre-packaged with the off-the-shelf solution.
I’ve seen those quadrants too, because I’ve come into several companies to help clean up a mess they’ve gotten into with bad code that they can no longer ignore. It is a compete certainty that we’re going to start seeing a lot more of that.
One ironic thing about LLM-generated bad code is that churning out millions of lines just makes it less likely the LLM is going to be able to manage the results, because token capacity is neither unlimited nor free.
(Note I’m not saying all LLM code is bad; but so far the fully vibecoded stuff seems bad at any nontrivial scale.)
3 replies →
I disagree, most code is not worth improving.
I would rather make N bad prototypes to understand the feasibility of solving N problems than trying to write beautiful code for one misguided problem which may turn out to be a dead end.
There are a few orders of magnitude more problems worth solving than you can write good code for. Your time is your most important resource, writing needlessly robust code, checking for situations that your prototype will never encounter, just wastes time when it gets thrown away.
A good analogy for this is how we built bridges in the Roman empire, versus how we do it now.
Have you ever been frustrated with software before? Has a computer program ever wasted your time by being buggy, obviously too slow or otherwise too resource intensive, having a poorly thought out interface, etc?
1 reply →
This type of comments get downvoted the most on HN but it is absolute truth, most human-written code is “subpar” (trying to be nice and not say garbage). I have been working as a contractor for many years and code I’ve seen is just… hard to put it into words.
so much discussion here on HN which critiques “vibe codes” etc implies that human would have written it better which is vast vast majority is simply not the case
I have worked on some of the most supposedly reliable codebases on earth (compilers) for several decades, and most of the code in compilers is pretty bad.
And most of the code the compiler is expected to compile, seen from the perspective of fixing bugs and issues with compilers, is absolutely terrible. And the day that can be rewritten or improved reliably with AI can't come fast enough.
I honestly do not see how training AI on 'mountains of garbage' would have any other outcome than more garbage.
I've seen lots of different codebases from the inside, some good some bad. As a rule smaller + small team = better and bigger + more participants = worse.
8 replies →