Comment by shinycode
25 days ago
I thought the same and it depends on which context you work. Below is an answer on slack from our CEO when I said talking about Claude code source leak : « Dirty, un-architected code is the new norm; it makes billions, who cares… »
He answered:
> Well, yeah, who cares?
> This is where we need to differentiate between what truly needs to be clean (critical APIs) and where some random guy coding a product in a week will wipe the floor with a team of engineers with a clean architecture and no product after three months.
> What's more, this "vibe coder" is on the right side of history… Who's to say AI won't be able to just rewrite the code cleanly while keeping the core idea within 6, 12, or 18 months?
> This is also the question that drives business... and in business, "good enough" has almost always trumped "perfect." Except when you're making an ultra-luxury product like a Ferrari or something. Which software almost never is (if ever).
So when head of companies don’t care about quality, they’ll push hard no matter what to have speed.
> Who's to say AI won't be able to just rewrite the code cleanly while keeping the core idea within 6, 12, or 18 months?
Well lets say it's 18 months from now and AI writes lovely, ideal code. At that moment, the AI would have eliminated the need for AI, right? If the code is good, you can just read it and edit it.
The selling point of AI is that you will embrace that idea that you code is a mile-high stinking garbage heap, so that any human would be overwhelmed by the stench. Only so long as the best strategy for engineering is to pile the garbage as high as possible as fast as possible will the best tool for engineering be AI.
So my counter argument is: just wait 18 months and you can completely skip adopting AI.
> So when head of companies don’t care about quality, they’ll push hard no matter what to have speed.
This is especially true when the people who suffer the consequences of bad software are far removed from the company making it. You'll be forced to spend hours fighting with customer service over errors made by people using that bad software, but it won't impact the CEO of the company who vibe coded it. I hate that we're moving to a world where everything around is getting worse and less reliable while marketing companies try to convince us all that this is somehow progress.