[acquisitionsilk]

It is quite heartening to see so many people care about "good code". I fear it will make no difference.

The problem is that the software world got eaten up by the business world many years ago. I'm not sure at what point exactly, or if the writing was already on the wall when Bill Gates' wrote his open letter to hobbyists in 1976.

The question is whether shareholders and managers will accept less good code. I don't see how it would be logical to expect anything else, as long as profit lines go up why would they care.

Short of some sort of cultural pushback from developers or users, we're cooked, as the youth say.

[JackSlateur]

Code is meant to power your business

Bad code leads to bad business

This makes me think of hosting departement; You know, which people who are using vmware, physical firewalls, dpi proxies and whatnot;

On the other edge, you have public cloud providers, which are using qemu, netfilter, dumb networking devices and stuff

Who got eaten by whom, nobody could have guessed ..

[chii]

> Bad code leads to bad business

Bad business leads to bad business.

Bad code might be bad, or might be sufficient. It's situational. And by looking at what exists today, majority of code is pretty bad already - and not all businesses with bad code lead to bad businesses.

In fact, some bad code are very profitable for some businesses (ask any SAP integrator).

[JackSlateur]

It is the survivor bias: "by looking at what is still alive today, majority of code is pretty bad"

It eludes all of those who died in the process : those still alives are here despite bad IT, not due to a bad IT

[tcoff91]

The vast majority of code that makes money is pretty shitty.

[BirAdam]

This is fun to think about. I used to think that all software was largely garbage, and at one point, I think this _was_ true. Sometime over the last 20 years, I believe this ceased to be the case. Most software these days actually works. Importantly, most software is actually stable enough that I can make it half an hour without panic saving.

Could most software be more awesome? Yes. Objectively, yes. Is most software garbage? Perhaps by raw volume of software titles, but are most popular applications I’ve actually used garbage? Nope. Do I loathe the whole subscription thing? Yes. Absolutely. Yet, I also get it. People expect software to get updated, and updates have costs.

So, the pertinent question here is, will AI systems be worse than humans? For now, yeah. Forever? Nope. The rate of improvement is crazy. Two years ago, LLMs I ran locally couldn’t do much of anything. Now? Generally acceptable junior dev stuff comes out of models I run on my Mac Studio. I have to fiddle with the prompts a bit, and it’s probably faster to just take a walk and think it over than spend an hour trying different prompts… but I’m a nerd and I like fiddling.

[acquisitionsilk]

I ended up watching this talk this evening:

> Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (English only) :: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

and it made me think of your comment. In summary, I disagree, and think that video argues the point very convincingly.

[robocat]

> Short of some sort of cultural pushback from developers or users

Corporations create great code too: they're not all badly run.

The problem isn't a code quality issue: it is a moral issue of whether you agree with the goals of capitalist businesses.

Many people have to balance the needs of their wallet with their desire for beautiful software (I'm a developer-founder I love engineering and open source community but I'm also capitalist enough to want to live comfortably).