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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@jacob et tu brute?

@janl I’m not sure what you mean?

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Jan Lehnardt

1d ago

@jacob Every week someone I look up to falls for the genai scam.

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Frank Wiles 1d ago

@janl @jacob can I ask the last time you used genai for some code? Maybe not even your main/work codebase just anything even a toy script?

I’ve found that often the people who hold this opinion tried it for a couple hours a year or more ago and formed an opinion.

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Jan Lehnardt

@frank you can ask and the answer is never.

I do not think evaluating these things based on their merits is ethical.

The tool you are using has been built by stealing* from me** and my friends and it offers to rent their theft back to me, so excuse me when I am not interested.

*and that’s only one of the many issues
**I’d be entitled to thr Anthropic lawsuit money if I were a US citizen