Comment by woeirua
8 hours ago
No one cares about code quality. No one has ever cared about code quality. It’s only been tolerated in businesses because no one could objectively say that ignoring code quality can result in high velocity. With coding agents, velocity is now extremely high if you get humans out of the way.
"No one cares about code quality" - disagree. As a dev, I care about code quality in that shitty code makes my life suck.
As a user of terrible products, I only care about code quality in as much as the product is crap (Spotify I'm looking at you), or it takes forever for it to evolve/improve.
Biz people don't care about quality, but they're notoriously short sighted. Whoever nerfed Google's search is angering millions of people as we speak.
> Whoever nerfed Google's search is angering millions of people as we speak
This guy, supposedly:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
"Code quality" here isn't referring to some aesthetic value. Coding agents write code that doesn't converge, meaning code that they cannot evolve after a while. They get to the point where fixing one bug causes another, and then the codebase is in such a state that no human or agent can salvage.
People who say they don't care about the quality of code produced by agents are those who haven't been evolving non-trivial codebases with agents long enough to see just how catastrophically they implode after a while. At that point, everyone cares, and that point always comes with today's agents given enough lines and enough changes.
> Coding agents write code that doesn't converge, meaning code that they cannot evolve after a while
That's not true, and I'm not sure what that even means. It's totally up to you the human to ensure AI code mergable or evolvable, or meet your quality standard in general. I certainly have had to tell Claude to use different approaches for maintainability, and the result is not different than if I do it myself.
Yep. Good quality, succinct code saves time and money. Always has and always will.
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Nobody cares about costs until they pay them themselves.
Regarding code quality and tech debt, it's sensible not to care if it doesn't lead to anything observable. Do you really care of some "bad" code somewhere that hasn't changed for 5 years but keeps working fine, and has no new requirements?
On the other hand, if you work on an active codebase where fixing one bug inevitably leads to another, maybe it's worth asking whether the code quality is simply too low to deliver on the product expectations.
It's not even obvious to me in which direction coding agents move the needle. Do you want higher quality, at least at a higher (design) level, when you heavily use agents, so that you know know the mess will at least compartmentalized, and easier to deal with later if needed? Or do you just assume the agent will always do the work and you won't need to dig into the code yourself? So far I've mostly done the former, but I understand that for some projects, the latter can make sense.
It really shows that nobody cares about uptime at github or the jankiness of claude.
I wouldnt say that customers are indifferent, but it wouldnt be the first time that investor expectations are prioritized far above customer satisfaction.