Comment by taurath

When slop code needs to do something different or new or in a different environment but still stay working on the original things, it’s hard to change, sometimes catastrophically so. When your code has concequences, quality means more people understand it which means more people can maintain it.

Arguments against it are sort of like why have devs on staff at all when you build the thing the first time, or why not outsource everything, or why should I care what my code looks like when the code seems to work?

The cost of tokens is not zero, and the bigger the thing you’re doing the more low quality will cost. When your company is the software, you take on an existential risk based on the software working or not.

Pure AI generated code without human curation is full of bad wordy comments but those comments can mislead, be stale, contain duplicates, and drastically reduce the ability to understand things. I watch teams that still care about code understanding ship good products while those vibe coding in the same org just flounder after the initial burst of features. Some problems only come up after the first 90%, and AI can help you solve them but a big ball of spaghetti is still a big ball of spaghetti.