Comment by andrenotgiant
13 hours ago
> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code
which has always been true
13 hours ago
> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code
which has always been true
Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it
Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward
I'm pretty sure that will be true with AI as well.
No accounting for taste, but part of makes code hard for me to reason about is when it has lots of combinatorial complexity, where the amount of states that can happen makes it difficult to know all the possible good and bad states that your program can be in. Combinatorial complexity is something that objectively can be expensive for any form of computer, be it a human brain or silicon. If the code is written in such a way that the number of correct and incorrect states are impossible to know, then the problem becomes undecidable.
I do think there is code that is "objectively" difficult to work with.
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Entropy and path dependence are unavoidable laws of mathematics. Not even evolution can avoid them.
AIs struggle with tech debt as much if not more than humans.
Ive noticed that theyre often quite bad at refactoring, also.
I think someday it will be completely unreadable for humans. Ai will have its optimized form.
Because LLMs are designed as emulators of actual human reasoning, it wouldn't surprise me if we discover that the things that make software easy for humans to reason about also make it easier for LLMs to reason about.
Now with AI, you're not only dealing with maintenance and mental overhead, but also the overhead of the Anthropic subscription (or whatever AI company) to deal with this spaghetti. Some may decide that's an okay tradeoff, but personally it seems insane to delegate a majority of development work to a blackbox, cloud-hosted LLM that can be rug pulled from underneath of you at any moment (and you're unable to hold it accountable if it screws up)
Call me naive, but I don't believe that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and ChatGPT.com and Claude.ai are going to be hard down and never come back. Same as Gmail, which is an entirely different corporation. I mean, they could, but it doesn't seem insane to use Gmail for my email, and that's way more important to my life functioning than this new AI thing.
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It’s also possible to sell chairs that are uncomfortable and food that tastes terrible. Yet somehow we still have carpenters and chefs; Herman Miller and The French Laundry.
Some business models will require “good” code, and some won’t. That’s how it is right now as well. But pretending that all business models will no longer require “good” code is like pretending that Michelin should’ve retired its list after the microwave was invented.
Are you saying Herman Miller chairs are uncomfortable?
I'll say it. They are for people of my small proportions
Those high end restaurants are more like art and exploration of food then something practical like code. The only similarity is maybe research in academia. There's not real industry uses of code that's like art.
I used the extreme of the spectrum, I can’t imagine you’re arguing that food is binary good / bad? There’s a litany of food options and quality, matching different business models of convenience and experience.
Research in academia seems less appropriate because that’s famously not really a business model, except maybe in the extractive sense
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Still, talk about "good" code exist for a reason. When the code is really bad, you end up paying the price by having to spend too more and more time and develop new features, with greater risk to introduce bugs. I've seen that in companies in the past, where bad code meant less stability and more time to ship features that we needed to retain customers or get new ones.
Now whether this is still true with AI, or if vibe coding means bad code no longer have this long term stability and velocity cost because AI are better than humans at working with this bad code... We don't know yet.
Not only true but I would guess it's the normal case. Most software is a huge pile of tech debt held together by zip-ties. Even greenfield projects quickly trend this way, as "just make it work" pressure overrides any posturing about a clean codebase.
long ago, wordpress plugins were often a proper mess
Not according to some on HN. They consider it impossible to create a successful business with imperfect code. Lol
A cornerstone of this community is "if you're not embarrassed by the first release you've waited too long", which is a recognition that imperfect code is not needed to create a successful business. That's why ShowHN exists.
It depends on the urgency. Not every product is urgent. CC arguable was very urgent; even a day of delay meant the competitors could come out with something slightly more appealing.
See also Salesforce, Oracle, SAP
Most of their products are so large that you can easily find parts with very bad and parts with excellent code. I am not sure a whole ERP product could work with all very bad code, though.
Wordpress hides behind a cabinet