Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer

fun fact: after 25 years as a software engineer in silicon valley, I'm convinced nobody cares about code quality and they never have.

I have 23 years,and I'm convinced too.

Only a dozen but same. Just ship the shit. Quality never mattered.

Also most attempts at code quality lead to even worse code - into overengineered abstraction layers that no one will be able to adjust once it's inevitably realized that the assumptions were all wrong.

They do, but very few people are good enough to either write a pull request or review one well. I wouldn’t put myself in the really good category for either.

Most people write pull requests that are scoped too poorly to tell what they’re doing. Like I get a single function with unit tests, so the best I can do for a review is check whether there are any obvious missed edge cases for a function whose purpose I don’t understand.

On the review side, most people review by doing basically what a linter does. I joke with people that if they want to nitpick my variable names then I’ll start DMing them to ask what name they want every time I need a variable. A meaningful review would analyze whether abstractions are good, whether there is behavior that relies on an unspecified part of an abstraction (timing), etc. Nobody does those.

Totally. YAGNI - you ain't gonna need it. That beautiful framework you spent extra weeks writing, designing from first principles, turns out to be the wrong layer of abstraction because of a bad assumption. the client left off critical business logic details, or a pivot to a more popular feature of the program. The only question then is how to get out of that tech debt.

Yeah, no, things have changed in the last 30 years...

How/where? We see a lot of companies inside as nature of business our business; almost no one cares. Some say they care but in the end it's money and shipping fast. If that can get code quality for the same price, they feel they are overpaying and they can ship faster.

Some care but most don't or cannot care as talking code quality means to managers that you could be doing more, faster and cheaper that is relevant to the bottom line. In large corps, everything is slow and expensive as it is, so 'wasting time' on things that are hard/impossible to measure is not something that is a great sell.

I mean, things seemed a little different 30 years ago.