A ton of huge business full of Sr Principal Architect SCRUM masters are about to get disrupted by 80 line ChatGPT wrappers hacked together by a few kids in their dorm room.
Software is interesting because if you buy a refrigerator, even an inexpensive one, you have certain expectations as to its basic functions. If the compressor were to cut out periodically in unexpected ways, affecting your food safety, you would return it.
But in software customers seem to be conditioned to just accept bugs and poor performance as a fact of life.
You're correct that customers don't care about "code quality", because they don't understand code or how to evaluate it.
But you're assuming that customers don't care about the quality of the product they are paying for, and you're divorcing that quality from the quality of the code as if the code doesn't represent THE implementation of the final product. The hardware matters too, but to assume that code quality doesn't directly affect product quality is to pretend that food quality is not directly impacted by its ingredients.
I worked in companies with terrible code, that deployed on an over-engineered cloud provider using custom containers hacked with a nail and a screwdriver, but the product was excellent. Had bugs here and there, but worked and delivered what needs to be delivered.
SWEs need to realize that code doesn't really matter. For 70 years we are debating the best architecture patterns and yet the biggest fear of every developer is working on legacy code, as it's an unmaintainable piece of ... written by humans.
What we need, admittedly, is more research and study around this. I know of one study which supports my position, but I'm happy to admit that the data is sparse.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04374
From the abstract:
"By analyzing activity in 30,737 files, we find that low quality code contains 15 times more defects than high quality code."
Most companies have no relation between their code and their products at all - a major food conglomerate will have hundreds or thousands of IT personnel and no direct link between defects in their business process automation code (which is the #1 employment of developers) and the quality of their products.
For companies where the product does have some tech component (e.g. refrigerators mentioned above) again, I'd bet that most of that companies developers don't work on any code that's intended to be in the product, in such a company there simply is far more programming work outside of that product than inside of one. The companies making a software-first product (like startups on hackernews) where a software defect implies a product defect are an exception, not the mainstream.
I've seen plenty of companies implode because they fired the one guy that knew their shitty codebase.
The day there is no need to debate systems architecture anymore is the heat death of the universe. Maybe before that AGI will be debating it for us, but it will be debated.
Having poor quality code makes refactoring for new features harder, it increases the time to ship and means bugs are harder to fix without side effects.
It also means changes have more side effects and are more likely to contain bugs.
For an MVP or a startup just running off seed funding? Go ham with LLMs and get something in front of your customers, but then when more money is available you need to prioritise making that early code better.