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Comment by sodality2 | Hacker News Reader

Also true! But that world is one where the vast majority of time is spent cleaning up slop code, so if there's a general shift towards that, I think that still changes the job in a significant way. (I don't have extensive history in the industry yet so I may be wrong here)

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It's all cleaning up slop code. Always has been.

</tired old fart voice>

More optimistically, you can think of "user created code" as an attempt at a design document of sorts; they were trying to tell you (and the computer) what they wanted in "your language". And that dialog is the important thing.

Seriously. Unless you're one of the vanishingly rare few working with true Greenfield projects that start with an empty text file, you're basically cleaning up other developer's legacy slop.

I mean even when I'm working on my own projects I'm cleaning up whatever code I wrote when I didn't yet know as much about the shape of the problem.

We still don’t know what good code is. It is all contextual, and we can never decide what that context should be. We are influenced by what is hip today. Right now is static typing using Rust, tomorrow it might be energy usage with assembly, after that it might be Python for productiveness, after that C# for maintenance.

We can never decide, we just like learning, and there is little real, impactful research into programming as a business.

In two decades we will still collectively say ”we are learning so much”, ignoring that fact.

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