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Comment by jcgrillo | Hacker News Reader

Sloppy code usually has sloppy ideas behind it. Clear thinking begets competent execution. I'd be really wary of any codebase that doesn't pass the smell test, because usually when you really get into it you find flawed premises left and right.

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To play the devil's advocate: AI allows non-tech people to bootstrap a functional application. A global good design may be missing when the code is generated in small quantities and stitched together. It's sloppy in the sense that it cannot be maintained and extended easily but it works™

The ideas underlying the implementation are not necessarily tied to the implementation given the skill gap.

Ok, but how long does it work™ for? I don't know of any "immutable businesses" that are actually successful. Every single business out there from the corner store down the street to the largest megacorps are always changing things, experimenting, and trying to find a competitive edge. So it seems all the AI really did was allow this nontechnical founder to dig themselves and any customers unfortunate enough to trust them very deeply into a hole.

This is true for professional developers. I'm talking about people who are not developers, and may not understand even the most basic programming concepts, like variables, loops or functions.

I don't think such people would be able to compile, let alone scale and operate the software, maintain databases, reverse proxies, manage logs, configure monitoring, etc. It's hard to think of any real world use for a tool which spits out a "website for X" unless it's going to own it in production as well. But it can't. So all it does is rack up a huge amount of technical debt right at the start.

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