Comment by marcus_holmes
6 hours ago
It's an unpopular truth for our industry, but the point of commercial software development is not to write good code; it's to write profitable code.
There are some cases where the most profitable code is also good code. We like those.
But in most (99%+) cases, the code is not going to survive contact with the market and so spending any time on making it good is wasted.
To my believe there was not a goal to write good code. The goal was maintainability and to keep it simple, so that people understand. People come and go, you constantly get to see foreign code and you have to do something with it.
Anyways, i see the maintainability hell coming onto us. I still wonder how i organize this with AI. I definitly do not want to touch it what is written by AI.
Yep this is especially true in the pre-product-market-fit phase. Most if not all of that code should be written to be thrown away. Any time you spend writing perfect code instead of your MVP is burnt runway and a chance for competitors to catch up.
Once you show PMF though the balance changes to long-term sustainability and maintainability.
What's going to be interesting is getting to a place where it generates better code than we would from specs. You can get better and better generated code by filling in the context the model infers. Do that long enough, and well, a perfect spec is just code.
We do live in interesting times.