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Comment by wasmainiac | Hacker News Reader

> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.

When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service.

When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in.

When millions of dollars in production data is lost or corrupted, who is responsible? Not AI. Quality matters.

I keep hearing this one phrase about code quality again and again. Sure, no one cares about the dumb little linter failing your builds, but when code quality comes to responsibility, it goes hand in hand. It’s either that or your all working on hobby projects.

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I understand where you are coming from, but you're addressing the 0.01% of the code written.

More importantly, I bet none of the companies running with that level of risk are touching Generative AI powered tools with a 30 feet pole. Maybe Boeing.

Many people I know are using GenAI in their day to day professional lives, and loving it. I'm not one of them. I'm a quality freak. While development is not my primary job, I love to write dependable code, which lets me to sleep well at night and forget that it even exists after some point.

But not everyone is enjoying and caring about their job and quality of their work, as long as they get paid and tick boxes. Even in companies where people write millions lines of code touching billions of people's lives (e.g.: Microsoft).

Time to market, retention, engagement, getting that promotion, a new car, meeting KPIs are more important than that pesky thing called quality. Because it slows them down. They are doing something amazing, so they need no permission, and the new amazing thing is "software built with AI in record time with less developers". letter Q in previous sentence stands for quality, if you find one.

I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business" section like fines for not respecting laws.

That's why AI is hurting us so much right now.

We were always trying to have quality in our project, whether it was for readability or for code evolution.

No, Steve, you don't name your 42 variables with only two letter and no you don't use Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure. Yes Odin is the most powerful so it's the production server but Tyr for the source control and print server isn't really obvious.

Well now AI is Steve.

It will create nice little 300 lines functions with a block repeating 6 times. You know that you will have 6 fix to make instead of one if this block was in a simple function.

It's not instinct a this point, is pure knowledge screaming "it's wrong".

And you now realise that the hidden strength from your craft wasn't about coding the best binary tree search algorithm, it was about knowing the underlying soft unknowns that really made it software.

We have a strong feeling that we're watching dozens of kids running with scissors and we don't know whether it's really scissors, we're just getting too old for this shit, or if we should just stop "progress" because we don't like it.

We're the horse breeders when everyone discovered cars.

> I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business"

But that cost is not trivial. In some topics (but not limited) like medial devices, the legal liability would just bankrupt the company. Not so cheap compared to hiring a few humans. I’m picking an obvious cases here, but there are many others.

> Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure

Ouch, yeah seen this a few times, outside of Scandinavia.

Bad quality is already a cost of doing business and has been for years. Does AI write perfect code? No, but guess what. It writes better code than any of my coworkers. And my boss not only never was complaining about them but also tries to hire more of them all the time.

I just sat on an enterprise onboarding call where their success engineer did in fact blame the AI and the client said "OK"

Not a good look lol.

More like a failure engineer, am I right?

to be fair, the blog post is talking about personal side projects, not Lasik software.

for personal side projects of the "handy SAAS thing that gives all your JSON a lustrous sheen" variety, he's probably more on target that quality seems to have gone by the wayside.

> thousands of people ... millions of dollars in production data

Doesn't sound like a hobby side project. Sounds like a business. And then yeah, you get all that comes with it.

it was not clear enough, you need quality if you are running a business, the risk is too high in many cases

As a Saas or tool company, you’re a manufacturer or maybe a wholesaler.

Your customers are paying you $1000 a month to handle a process that is worth $10k to them and might be worth $50k to their customers. If you lose that data you haven’t lost $1000 of data. Even if you only made $100 off of the transaction.

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