When I worked at Apple, I remember seeing code that was 15 years old
twitter.com
twitter.com
This is highly debatable. They look better, but whenever I inspect the walls and see what is holding the house together, I just shrug and leave my contact info, because I know I’ll be called to fix the mess.
> ...and building them increasingly feels like magic.
Engineering should not feel like magic to those with a proper education. Otherwise, we are merely practicing alchemy.
Unfortunately the author never even tried to debate. He made a big mental leap from "you can build entire neighborhoods and immediately remodel them with a click" to "the houses are better", with no word on how and why they are they better.
When something feels increasingly like magic it means you understand less and less of it. So in fact you are less and less qualified to say anything about the result.
The author is wowed by the process and the glitz and sees this as an equivalent to "quality of results".
Sure, quality and security suffer, but you're just to look at any airline's mobile app to see how little quality matters.
Sure, it gave you a bad E. coli infection, but look how much of it you could eat.
You use a very selective or narrow definition of "better". The "worse" gets swept under the rug without the step where you balance to see if you have a net win. But at least unlike the author of the tweet you made your definition clear, and I appreciate that.
Maybe that was possible 2 years ago, but for the last year it's just not simply true.
Sure there will be codebases that will get messy, outgrow the amateur vibe coder, etc. But AI is already better than 90% coders. Certainly can focus better than 99% of coders.
We had better built houses when they came as kits from Sears than we have today.
I worked on a reactor physics simulation app with 50 year old code then, which is now approaching 75 years old now. It compiled on Windows and *NIX.
It's windows - its broken.
Just the other day, I got Fable to help generate a sign-up flow for a Django app. It looked perfect to me, and like the Twitter post linked to, I looked at it with marvel and delight. But I got Sol to review the code and it spotted some fundamental issues with the flow that would have let bad actors enumerate accounts and log in before their account was verified - both of which were supposed to be checked.
To continue with the analogy, yes we can "will houses into existence", but unless we've checked the bricks and the foundations, these houses can easily crumble into rubble.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asobo_Studio [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalisto_Entertainment
15 years ago people weren't crafting artisanal lines of code to build by dry-stacking.
I bet some of the oldest artifacts in code say "TODO" or "Temporary work-around"...
Yeah that is most likely less about pride in the craftsmanship and more likely a reflex from bad source version control software.
EDIT: Also, you know they didnt type these comments by hand right? And that the first code completion systems date back to the 70s, granted it was mostly spell checkers.
Are they? Why? Even in the brick metaphor that doesn't work.