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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Christopher Neugebauer 1d ago

@jacob Jumping on one specific thing: Rice's Theorem means that any "interesting" program has limits on the extent of static analysis, so "provably correct" is not a thing you can get.

The things that would improve product quality the most are things that provably can't actually be automated in the general case. Those are the limits we have to reckon with.

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jacobian

@chrisjrn Yes of course I already knew about Rice’s Theorem before your toot why would you think otherwise