Comment by NortySpock
7 hours ago
Ok, and? You can live with that if there are more important things to deal with.
I've stared at ugly LLM code, that I had just had generated, and worked well enough for my purposes. (generally, some quick recursion into a nested python dictionary in order to dig out some property -- especially for linting or quick data analysis).
And I wanted something better, sure, something a bit more readable ...but I just needed it to work well enough to recurse through a yaml file for config file linting, not be battle-hardened against every test case.
So to deal with the mess, I shoved it in a pure function, threw a few basic sanity unit tests around it, put a comment with a disclaimer of "#this is LLM generated code, it is lightly tested, do not use it for anything truly load-bearing without a lot more tests" and I moved on to something else.
Not everything has to be bulletproof.
You're on Hacker News. This is a site full of developers who are convinced that "proper software engineering" is 100% of what makes a business successful, and everything and everyone else is useless. You can't just waltz in here and point out that code in business is a means to an end and expect not to get downvoted.
As a technical product manager, this 1000%. It's just irrelevant how bad code is unless it impacts the business.
> As a technical product manager, this 1000%. It's just irrelevant how bad code is unless it impacts the business.
If you are, in fact, "a technical product manager", I would hope you understand that "bad code" is identified as such specifically because it "impacts the business."
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This is something I wish I understood sooner. There is strong merit to "good enough".
Of all the "concise" and "beautiful" code I worked hard to produce, I was the only one to ever lay eyes on it. It didn't actually matter, and nobody cared but me. The people in charge of my raises could never perceive quality of code, because it wasn't their area of expertise. They only cared (rightly so) that it did what it was supposed to, and all the elegant abstractions didn't practically help that purpose. It was, literally, wasted life that I should have spent just getting off work early, like most of my colleagues.
Every bit of code written in the last 50 years is going to be meaningless.
People need to get to grips with that fast.
Distribution, relationships, processes, mindshare, marketing, and politics matter. Code is just ephemeral glue and implementation detail.
Not every bit of code is going to be meaningless.
Just 99.999%.
Lmao. Have more respect for your elders, who wrote all the code that your ai psychosis is fuelled by.
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