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Comment by anonymous908213 | Hacker News Reader

Good code was approximately never valued in enterprise. How many companies worth billions or even trillions have webpages that take 5+ seconds to load text, and use Electron for their desktop applications? In that regard, nothing has changed.

There is still a market for good code in the world, however. The uses of software are nearly infinite, and while certain big-name software gets a free pass on being shitty due to monopoly and network effects, other types of software will still find people who will pay for them if they are responsive, secure, not wildly buggy, and can add new features without a 6 month turnaround time because the codebase isn't a crime against humanity.

On another note, there have been at least four articles on the front page today about the death of coding. As there are every other day. I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them?

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> I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them?

I understand the sentiment here but it shouldn't be surprising that people are upset that their profession and livelihoods are being drastically changed due to advances in AI.

> I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them?

Look, it's either this or a dozen articles a day about Claude Code.

By good code people mean extensible usually (growth), not performant. Performant code has different value,often lower than extensible in eneterprise saas.

> Good code was approximately never valued in enterprise.

Nope, the value the code creates was always what was valued.

Now we can refactor more easily than ever. And quite a lot of code was throwaway to begin with.. so there’s no need to deliver good code. Not in the first iteration. But if it is going to be improved upon, part of the improvement will be to prepare it for that improvement.

Good code is extremely subjective, most bad code is built on a good code foundation. And most foundational software (think linux, ffmpeg, curl, v8, etc.) maintainers are pushing back.

Once AI/Agents actually master all tools we currently use (profilers, disassembly, debuggers) this may change but this won't be for a few years.

So funny when people point at electron as if it singlehandedly makes every program unusable.

Also, I would assume there are not many significant pages on $B/Trillion companies that take 5 seconds to load text that are used frequently.

> I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them?

People never get tired of reading or commenting on commentary on their hobbies.

New Reddit and Outlook.com are two off the top of my head. It is not uncommon to be looking at a spinner for several seconds. There are other websites that are not primarily for text but are still insane. Twitch.TV, an old favorite of mine, now routinely takes 10+ seconds despite having Amazon money behind it. Youtube routinely takes several seconds to load the page, which is still unacceptable even for a video website. These sites are maintained by FAANG-tier engineers being paid mid-high 6 figures or 7 figures, who I'm sure are mostly perfectly competent, and yet they are completely dysfunctional because enterprise environments inevitably create structural disincentives to producing good code.

I use Electron applications. They are usable, for some value of the word. I am certainly not happy about it, though. I loathe the fact that I have 32GB RAM and routinely run into memory issues on a near-daily basis that should literally never happen with the workloads I'm doing. With communication-based apps like Slack and Discord where your choice of software to use comes down entirely to where the people you're communicating are, you will use dogshit because there is no point to communicating to the void on a technically superior platform.

Not to mention that it seems like everything has to go through like 10 redirects just to log in, and then you have to dismiss various pop-ups before you can just do whatever you went there to do. Some will say that the last part is just a UX problem, but in my opinion, sluggishness is the king of UX prooblems.

On the topic of Electron, I’m really torn. I can’t help but feel some gratitude for the fact a few of the work tools I need work on Linux (stuff like Slack, Teams, Zoom).

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