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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Adriano 1d ago

@frank @janl @jacob

On the other hand, we've just seen what LLMs did rewriting sqlite, a monstrous botch that resulted in a monstrous decrease in performance. And we've *just* seen the quality of claude code, which was, purportedly, vibe-coded. So.

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Adriano 1d ago

@frank @janl @jacob I'm obviously not Jan, but maybe Jacob gets pushback like that because stuff like "imagine a codebase that’s magically bug-free and feature-complete. " and going on from there to talk about LLMs is practically indistinguishable from the propaganda and grandstanding Altman and Amodei and Musk peddle. Just imagine what would be possible if. Fascinating.

Yeah it's fascinating but so is imagining what we could do if we could photosynthesize. And...

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jacobian

@adriano @frank @janl It’s frustrating because the thing I was trying to discuss about the question of why code quality matters, not yet another “LLMs: good or evil” argument. And for the most part replies have been focused on that — and have really teased out some super interesting points about what “quality” means and why it’s important. And in doing so I think makes a much better case against agentic coding ever working the way proponents claim it might!