[suzzer99]

For future greenfield projects, I can see a world where the only jobs are spec-writer and test-writer, with maybe one grumpy expert coder (aka code janitor) who occasionally has to go into the code to figure out super gnarly issues.

[cratermoon]

A good spec-writer, as the article notes, is writing code.

[suzzer99]

It's part of the job, but has never been the fun part for me. Solving the puzzle with code and that "holy shit it actually works" moment has always been the part I get the most satisfaction from.

[drzaiusx11]

This is already happening, many days I am that grumpy "code janitor" yelling at the damn kids to improve their slop after shit blows up in prod. I can tell you It's not "fun", but hopefully we'll converge on a scalable review system eventually that doesn't rely on a few "olds" to clean up. GenAI systems produce a lot of "mostly ok" code that has subtle issues you on catch with some experience.

Maybe I should just retire a few years early and go back to fixing cars...

[suzzer99]

Yeah I imagine it has to be utterly thankless being the code janitor right now when all the hype around AI is peaking. You're basically just the grumpy troll slowing things down. And God forbid you introduce a regression bug trying to clean up some AI slop code.

Maybe in the future us olds will get more credit when apps fall over and the higher ups realize they actually need a high-powered cleaner/fixer, like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction.

[allthetime]

I’ve got a “I haven’t written a line of code in one year” buddy whose startup is gaining traction and contracts. He’s rewritten the whole stack twice already after hitting performance issues and is now hiring cheap juniors to clean up the things he generates. It is all relatively well defined CRUD that he’s just slapped a bunch of JS libs on top of that works well enough to sell, but I’m curious to see the long term effects of these decisions.

Meanwhile I’m moving at about half the speed with a more hands on approach (still using the bots obviously) but my code quality and output are miles ahead of where I was last year without sacrificing maintain ability and performance for dev speed

[drzaiusx11]

I've had to slowly and painfully learn the lesson that early on in a company's lifycycle it doesn't really matter how terrible the code is as long as it mostly works. There are of course exceptions like critical medical applications and rocket/missile guidance systems but as a general rule code quality is only a problem when it inevitably bites you much farther down the line, usually when customers start jumping ship when it's obvious you can't scale or reach uptime contact targets. By then you'll hopefully have enough money saved from your initial lax approach to put some actual effort into shoring up the losses before they become critical. Sometimes you just get by with "good enough" for decades and no one cares. For someone that cares about the quality of their work it can be sad state of affairs, but I've seen this play out more times than I'd care to.

[genthree]

> There are of course exceptions like critical medical applications and rocket/missile guidance systems but as a general rule code quality is only a problem when it inevitably bites you much farther down the line, usually when customers start jumping ship when it's obvious you can't scale or reach uptime contact targets.

My experience is it hits both new-feature velocity and stability (or the balance between those two) really early, but lots of managers don't realize that this feature that's taking literal months could have been an afternoon with better choices earlier on (because they're not in a position to recognize those kinds of things). For that matter, a lot of (greener) developers probably don't recognize when the thing that's a whole-ass project for them could have been toggling a feature flag and setting a couple config entries in the correct daemon, with better architecture, because... they don't even know what sort of existing bulletproof daemon ought to be handling this thing that somehow, horrifically, ended up in their application layer.

So the blame never gets placed where it belongs, and the true cost of half-assed initial versions is never accounted for, nor is it generally appreciated just how soon the bill comes due (it's practically instantly, in many cases).

[drzaiusx11]

There are phases in a company's lifecycle which carries different weights associated with code quality depending on factors like the domain, how many customers you have, what your risk aversion is etc. I'm just saying don't build a cathedral when a mole hill will do. If the product doesn't work that's another story, it still needs to stand up without falling over when you look at it sideways and having only juniors would be a good way to get the latter. Use basic design principles, and proven architectures but don't sweat things like code coverage, reinventing wheels because you think you can do it better than something you can just grab off the shelf rn. It'll inevitably be a bit of a hodgepodge in the beginning but that's ok. Consider early code as "throwaway", don't spend your limited time rewriting anything already working "better" unless you actually have the leisure to do so (few actually do, and even fewer realize they don't)