[heavyset_go]

We're still in the very early days of generative AI, and people and markets are already prioritizing quality over quantity. Quantity is irrelevant when it comes value.

All code is not fungible, "irreverent code that kinda looks okay at first glance" might be a commodity, but well-tested, well-designed and well-understood code is what's valuable.

[danielovichdk]

Generative what? Code is not a thing anymore, in fact it never really was, but now it's definitely not.

Code today can be as verbose and ugly as ever, because from here on out, fewer people are going to read it, understand and care about it.

What's valuable, and you know this I think, is how much money your software will sell for, not how fine and polished your code is.

Code was a liability. Today it's a liability that cost much much less.

[sleepychu]

and once you've got your wish: ugly code without tests or a way to comprehend it, but cheap!

How much value are you going to be able to extract over its lifetime once your customers want to see some additional features or improvements?

How much expensive maintenance burden are you incurring once any change (human or LLM generated) is likely to introduce bugs you have no better way of identifying than shipping to your paying customers?

Maybe LLM+tooling is going to get there with producing a comprehensible and well tested system but my anectodal experience is not promising. I find that AI is great until you hit its limit on a topic and then it will merrily generate tokens in a loop suggesting the same won't-work-fix forever.

[babol]

What you wrote aligns with my experience so far. It's fast and easy to get something working, but in a number of cases it (Opus) just gets stuck 'spinning' and no number of prompts is going to fix that. Moreover - when creating things from scratch it tends to use average/insecure/ inefficient approaches that later take a lot of time to fix.

The whole thing reminds me a bit of the many RAD tools that were supposed to 'solve' programming. While it was easy to start and produce something with those tools, at some point you started spending way too much time working around the limitations and wished you started from scratch without it.

[heavyset_go]

I'm of the opinion that the diligence of experts is part of what makes code valuable assets, and that the market does an alright job of eventually differentiating between reliable products/brands and operations that are just winging it with AI[1].

[1] https://museumoffailure.com/exhibition/wonka-chocolate-exper...

[galaxyLogic]

I would think that the better the code is designed and factored and refactored, the easier it is to maintain and evolve, detect and remove bugs and security vulnerabilties from it. The ease of maintenance helps both AI and humans.

There are limits to what even AI can do to code, within practical time-limits. Using AI also costs money. So, easier it is to maintain and evolve a piece of software, the cheaper it will be to the owners of that application.

[ajb]

You may not need to read it, but you still need to test it.

Code that has not been thoroughly tested is a greater liability, not a lesser one.l, the faster you can write it.