Mastodawn

Look this isn’t at all a defense of slop code, but it has me thinking — how much does code quality matter, and why?

It’s maintenance, right? We care about readability because we know we’ll have to make changes, fix bugs, etc.

But so … imagine a codebase that’s magically bug-free and feature-complete. (I’m aware this is a strawman - that’s the point, it’s a thought experiment.) Does it matter if this codebase is well-written? I’m not sure it does! (1/5)

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jacobian 1d ago

Code quality has always been ONE factor; it’s never been always the most important. Eg we often accept complex internals as the price for a clean external API; and we all write sloppy code for one-offs, prototypes, etc. So part of me accepts the “code quality doesn’t matter” argument. I can see a vision of agentic engineering with systems that prove correctness; if an agent produces code that is provably correct, maybe the quality really doesn’t matter! (2/5)

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jacobian 1d ago

I’m far from convinced that this is actually possible. It’s certainly not now — and I’m not talking about models. Testing and verification tools are nowhere near where they’d need to be, regardless of model quality. Today, code quality DOES still matter; even the best-case version of agentic engineering can’t produce code that’ll never require maintenance. But I can see a possible future where code quality might not matter, or will matter a lot less, and that’s FASCINATING. (3/5)

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filipa mv

@jacob code quality does not matter *if the code never has to change*. it’s always a forward looking statement: we want easy to understand code because we will have to modify it later.

if later never comes then i agree entirely;

but in my own very limited explorations imho the LLMs also find good code easier to read and reason about…

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filipa mv 1d ago

@jacob if we stop seeing transformative improvements in model quality, i suspect we’ll get more of a bifurcation along business models? facebook can move fast and break stuff; orgs with high uptime demands can’t. pressure to yolo will be higher with one than the other