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Comment by doodaddy | Hacker News Reader

There’s a cold reality that we in this profession have yet to accept: nobody cares about our code. Nobody cares whether it’s pretty or clever or elegant. Sometimes, rarely, they care whether it’s maintainable.

We are only craftsmen to ourselves and each other. To anyone else we are factory workers producing widgets to sell. Once we accept this then there is little surprise that the factory owners want us using a tool that makes production faster, cheaper. I imagine that watchmakers were similarly dismayed when the automatic lathe was invented and they saw their craft being automated into mediocrity. Like watchmakers we can still produce crafted machines of elegance for the customers who want them. But most customers are just going to want a quartz.

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They don't care until the whole thing collapses in on itself from the technical debt. Then they have surprised pikachu face when it takes an insane about of effort to add a simple feature.

I agree, but nothing about LLM assisted coding is by neccessity "technical debt". Tons of developers will use it to spit out shitty code they don't even review themselves, but the concept at it's core doesn't always mean a lower quality end product.

I like Simon Willison's take on this: "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work". If someone is spitting out LLM trash and shipping it, that means the job isn't being done properly. That can be done with and without an LLM.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/

I accepted this years ago. In fact I go a step further - code is a liability.

It's certainly intellectually stimulating to create it, but I've learned to take joy in discarding vast swathes of it when it's no longer required.

I think it varies. Most enterprise software is good enough if it just works. In the consumer space quality and polish is way more important. Then there are things like modeling and video where performance is a much bigger deal.

Sure, no one really cares about the code but the quality of the code matters more for some products (and in different ways) than others.

Exactly....

I will just copy paste my comment from another thread but still very relevant>

Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares

Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.” They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?”

Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market.

Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.” In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is.

That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering.

So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry.

I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.

This is just sad. If your passion for creating something you can be proud of is entirely propped up by imaginary sex appeal that not even most teenagers would believe exists, it's no surprise you'd arrive at such a cynical, pathetic conclusion.

Your perspective is a path with only one logical end. That nothing you do or think or believe matters unless someone you're attracted to finds it attractive.

That is not how I or most others live. We take pride in and derive satisfaction from our accomplishments without the need for external validation.

Yeah, only I care whether the solution I found to a problem today was elegant, or whether my kitchen was pristine and well organized after I prepped for next week's lunches, but so what? I care and it injects more than enough meaning into my life to be worth it.

Yeh cool story. But being passionate about a hobby is not gonna pay my bills...

When I charge a customer for a solution they don't care about how elegant my code is. They just care if it works for solving their problem...

Sure... but the slop that LLMs spit out isn't going to solve their problem, which is what they care about.

It is not going to solve their problem. But It allows ME to solve their problem WAYYY faster-

Think about it like this... Its like a bank, but for software not money...

>does it work, is it fast enough..

Isn't the problem right now the vibe coded sotware does not appear to meet these requirements?

You didn't write this post. Your LLM did. Are you proud of yourself for copy and pasting "thoughts" that aren't yours?

Does it really matter how or who wrote it ? I would argue that LLMs have better and deeper thoughts than 65% to 70% of the world population ! Have you even talked to your fellow citizens ?

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