Comment by fooker
3 hours ago
For most code, this never happens in the real world.
The vast majority of code is garbage, and has been for several decades.
3 hours 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 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.
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.