Comment by delbronski
2 months ago
Garbage software that is slow as a dog has been winning. While we’ve been obsessing over our craft and arguing about what makes software beautiful, slow crappy software has taken over the world.
Quality of code is just not that important of a concept anymore for the average web developer building some saas tool. React code was always crap anyways. Unless you are building critical systems like software that powers a plane or medical equipment, then code quality just doesn’t really matter so much in the age of AI. That may be a hard pill to swallow for some.
I believe a lot if large software companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft have very high quality code. Past a certain level of complexity, bad code will just collapse under the weight of its low quality.
> Past a certain level of executions
I don't think complexity is the right metric. The listed companies still do write a lot of shit software, but mostly smaller things you don't see much. Anything in the 'fast path' of these companies is getting executed trillions or quadrillions of times and because of that any bugs will become shallow.
I think you can scrap Microsoft there when it comes to their pc stuff and their mainly B2B stuff (dynamics and the like) As for the rest other than apple I think pageloads are an obvious metric to track and there's always going to be a contingent of their programmers incentivized to care about their code quality because slow code and the like runs on their machines at such scale that it often costs them a lot of money, same with uptimes of various services. Their amount spent on wages is comparatively very low.
There's a lot of space between web dev and medical equipment. I've never met a user that loved how often their work was lost or how long it took to implement feature requests amid all the ship-it-quick duct tape.
> then code quality just doesn’t really matter so much in the age of AI
Except at scale it really does, because garbage in garbage out. The crappier the code you feed the current models, the worse and more confusing the broken leaky abstractions, the more bugs the AI will generate.
The question is whether it has to be that way. Developers who are against slop don’t believe that the current state of software is the best possible world.