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Comment by estearum | Hacker News Reader

> That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass.

Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiveness.

The platform risk is a valid concern but alleviated by China's theft and redistribution of open models.

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I'm not talking about impressing people.

We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore?

Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me — in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.

"Code quality" encompasses a lot of dimensions, one of which is impressing your colleagues, and many of which there's virtually no reason to care about now.

On the contrary, it's more important than ever. With ever more code being generated, it's essential that the code be understandable and maintainable - by human and machine.

And quality is the new differentiator when everyone can generate slop.

Nobody cares about code quality /s

They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like reliability and speed of development.

Right, and to the extent that your coding practices contribute to reliability and speed of development, they are "of quality."

Now do the same exercise for "impressiveness" and "crassness."

Here, I'll do it for you:

> Nobody cares about code quality /s

> They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like impressiveness and lack of crassness.

Sounds silly doesn't it?

Your comment made no sense to me whatsoever.

GP was complaining about Claude's "lack of impressiveness" and "crassness."

I said that's silly.

You said "code quality matters".

I said "it's not clear that lack of impressiveness and crassness have anything to do with code quality."

Some evidence that crassness is going to matter:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48798815

It doesn’t matter what materials or techniques you use to build a house. 99.99% of construction exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot more than using the right materials or techniques.

Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques don’t matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fact that you achieve the desired outcome by using the right materials and techniques. The materials and techniques don’t matter, just the outcome.

No the materials and techniques matter a lot. This is why we need to build houses with sticks and jute cord, just like we always have. It's vital also that we paint our special symbols above the door to ward off the spirits.

It's insane to me that you're implying we could build houses with pre-fabricated materials or pneumatic nail guns and still somehow "have houses?" No sticks/jute cord and special symbols, then no house.

The argument isn’t to not use better materials or techniques, it’s that inferior materials and techniques are fine because they don’t impact the end result, which is so obviously false when it comes to pretty much anything, but supposedly true when it comes to software.

I'm not sure who you saw arguing for inferior materials and techniques, but let me know when you find them.

What you saw in this thread was someone arguing against the dimensions of "impressiveness" and "crassness" as valid things to care about when it comes to code.

It's your mistake to assume that those are related to any meaningful concept of actual quality.

FWIW I never suggested that they were indicative of problems with the code. Unimpressive, crass code can run, after all.

I clearly said elsewhere that I think they are predictive of problems with the person who writes it, and I fear I can generalise that to LLM tooling that generates it.

> Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques don’t matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fact that you achieve the desired outcome by using the right materials and techniques.

This analogy is more true than you think. This is why modern homes/appartments are trash. You can pass safety inspections using subpar materials and the house will fall apart after a few years, but who cares right? At least you achieved the business outcome!

This mentality is so infuriating. This is why I need to buy new shoes every year. Or why my washer/dryer motherboard craps out in 2 years instead of 10. Nobody gives a shit about quality anymore, this is why society is crumbling around us. Profit driven incentive for fast/cheap over everything else. And now I need to spend my day prompting an AI to fix AI slop code to keep the business hobbling along another day. What a fucking joke.

It does feel like a good analogy.

e.g. the bill is definitely coming true for a lot of "non-traditional construction" materials and methods in immediately post-war properties in the UK. There are many unmortgageable properties using Mundic Block in Cornwall and to some extend Devon, in the heavily bombed south east there was a lot of pre-stressed concrete with catastrophic rebar failure, not to mention Orlit construction, and all across the country a lot of RAAC. Almost all of it for good, necessary, upbeat reasons.

It feels a bit like this kind of crisis from AI generated code could hit in ten, fifteen years time; people often fail to understand how long a bit of website code can last.

Yeah I agree. And you have people on this forum who gleefully point out that quality doesn’t matter to the business, as if they think they’re so intelligent because they noticed that employees are there to make the company money. Not realizing that A) it’s a very antisocial attitude and B) it’s not a tenable long term strategy.

Hang on now. GP didn't say "I care about quality" and I didn't say caring about quality is wrong.

GP said Claude's code "doesn't impress" them and that it's "crass."

Do you think a valid "long term strategy" is to create code that impresses GP and is not crass, but doesn't achieve the business outcomes it's meant to?

Inversely, do you think one can achieve business outcomes if "quality" is so abysmal that the code doesn't work or is unmaintainable?

Is it possible to write perfectly good, maintainable, performant, legible code that "doesn't impress" GP, or feels "crass" to them? Well gee, probably! Because "impressiveness" and "crassness" are literally meaningless.

Crassness, in the context I meant it, is not "literally meaningless" at all.

I will accept "of fully subjective value". But not "literally meaningless".

You are aware that you can just pay more money and get a higher quality house and higher quality shoes, right?

Costs of those things have gone down over time. The high end still exists, you just don't actually care about quality as much as you think you do.

And yes, for capital-intensive things like real estate development, fast/cheap matters a lot because otherwise there would be no capital available to build any of it at any reasonable scale.

> You are aware that you can just pay more money and get a higher quality house and higher quality shoes, right?

False. You can pay more money for branding that purports to be higher quality. The Running shoe market is a perfect example. Best shoes I ever bought were Altra Loan Peaks from 2018, brand has been getting more expensive and lower quality every year. Whether that extra cost actually translates to quality require diligent research.

> This analogy is more true than you think. This is why modern homes/appartments are trash. You can pass safety inspections using subpar materials and the house will fall apart after a few years, but who cares right

Where do you live? Because where I live, new houses and apartments are superb. But I'm guessing we don't use two by fours and plaster walls to erect whole structures.

I’ve worked at many companies where this idea of velocity was claimed to matter, and it never did. The only thing it mattered for was to make it look like middle managers were worth anything, but the success was always in the foundational idea/concept.

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