Also developer UX, common antipatterns, etc
This “the only thing that matters about code is whether it meets requirements” is such a tired take and I can’t imagine anyone seriously spouting it has has had to maintain real software.
This “the only thing that matters about code is whether it meets requirements” is such a tired take and I can’t imagine anyone seriously spouting it has has had to maintain real software.
If the code is cheap to produce, you don't maintain it, you just throw it away and regenerate.
I’ve never seen this done even with LLMs. Not even close. And even if you did it, the test suite is almost definitely more complex than the code and will suffer from all the same maintainability problems.
Whether you are tired of it or not, absolutely no one in your value you chain - your customers who give your company money or your management chain cares about your code beyond does it meet the functional and non functional requirements - they never did.
And of course whether it was done on time and on budget
My home, which I own, for example, is very much a “what” that keeps me warm and dry. But the “how” of it was constructed is the difference between (1) me cursing the amateur and careless decision making of builders and (2) quietly sipping a cocktail on the beach, free of a care in the world.
“How” doesn’t matter until it matters, like when you put too much weight onto that piece of particle board IKEA furniture.
He’s mildly controversial, but watch some @cyfyhomeinspections on YouTube to get a good idea of what you can infer of the “how” of building homes and how it affects homeowners. Especially relevant here because he seems to specialize in inspecting homes that are part of large developments where a single company builds out many homes very quickly and cuts tons of corners and makes the same mistakes repeatedly, kind of like LLM-generated code.
No, I can have some idea. For example, “brand perception”, which can be negatively impacted pretty heavily if things go south too often. See: GitHub, most recently.
I mean, there are already companies that have a negative reputation regarding software quality due to significant outsourcing (consultancies), or bloated management (IBM), or whatever tf Oracle does. We don’t have to pretend there’s a universe where software quality matters, we already live in one. AI will just be one more way to tank your company’s reputation with regards to quality, even if you can maintain profitability otherwise through business development schemes.
The same as I’ve been arguing about using an agent to do the grunt work of coding.
If GitHub’s login is slow, it isn’t because someone or something didn’t write SOLID code.
I don’t think we’ll come to common ground on this topic due to mismatching definitions of fundamental concepts of software engineering. Maybe let’s meet again in a year or two and reflect upon our disagreement.