[DanielHB]

> What code is truly about is precision: code is unambiguous, even when it’s abstract. It’s easy to conflate ambiguity and abstraction—both refer to “a single statement that could have to multiple meanings.” But the meanings of an ambiguous statement are entirely unconstrained.

I used to believe this, but after working at a successful SaaS I have come to believe that correctness and unambiguity are not entirely necessary for successful software products.

It was a very sad realization that systems can be flaky if there is enough support people to solve edge case problems. That features can be delivered while breaking other features as long as enough users don't run into the middle of that venn diagram, etc.

Fact is it always comes down to economics, your software can afford to be as broken and unpredictable as your users will still be willing to pay money for it.

[TeMPOraL]

Right. One thing I learned over the years is that you can support arbitrarily high level of tech debt and still be able to effectively maintain and enrich a successful software system, as long as you throw enough warm bodies at it.

The overhead will get absurd, you'll end up with 10x or more increase in engineers working on the system, all of them making slow progress while spending 90% time debugging, researching, or writing docs and holding meetings to work out this week's shared understanding of underlying domain semantics - but progress they will make, system will be kept running, and new features will be added.

If the system is valuable enough for the company, the economic math actually adds up. I've seen at least one such case personally - a system that survived decades and multiple attempts at redoing it from scratch, and keeps going strong, fueled by massive amount of people-hours spent on meetings.

Adding AI to the mix today mostly just shifts individual time balance towards more meetings (Amdahl's Law meets Parkinson's law). But ironically, the existence of such systems, and the points made in the article, actually reinforce the point of AI being key to, if not improving it, then at least keeping this going: it'll help shorten the time to re-establish consensus on current global semantics, and update code at scale to stay consistent.

[yxhuvud]

The classical case of this are banks that tend to keep ancient systems alive for a very, very long time.

[dr2df]

The implicit cost of systems associated with banks failing is why they continue going on as is.

[TheOtherHobbes]

> Amdahl's Law meets Parkinson's Law

[Infinite screaming]

[dr2df]

What a 'fancy' way of distinguishing between capital expenses vs operating expenses....

Why do people on here do this? Just keep it simple. lmao.

"the economic math actually adds up"

just lol.

[stingraycharles]

This is the realization that pretty much all engineers go through as they become more senior. The areas where the business really can’t afford issues is very small. Usually only accounting / billing and then that’s solved not by great code / design but just audit it once and never touch it again.

In the end most challenges for a business holding them back to better code quality are organizational, not technical.

[sdeframond]

> In the end most challenges for a business holding them back to better code quality are organizational, not technical.

This is true. And I get sad every time it is used as an argument not to improve tooling. It feels like sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy: an organizational problem that prevents us from investing into technical improvements... is indeed an organizational problem.

[satvikpendem]

Well yeah, I'm not sure why that's sad. One can't find all edge cases at the beginning but only through usage of the app, and fix them over time. Be glad at least someone is using the app as that means the role of software is being fulfilled, as a tool to help people accomplish some goal, because much software written isn't even used by a single person.

[gessha]

A decision can be right even if the outcome doesn’t work out and a decision can be wrong even if the outcome works out.

Example: Gambling is wrong but you can win big money.

[arboles]

That comment seems off-topic, but just to exemplify:

In your example even as the interface for those products is unstable (UI that changes all the time, slightly broken API), those products are coded in a language like C++ or Java, which benefit from compiler error checking. The seams where it connects with other systems is where they're unstable. That's the point of this blog post.

[soyyo]

Yeah that's true, a product can be successful with truly bad code, but it also makes developers lives miserable each time they need to add a new feature, solve a bug, or simply understand how that entangled mess works.

Management and sales may not appreciate good software design and good code, the next developer that has to work on system will.

[0xBA5ED]

You can also run a successful manufacturing company without considering environmental impact. A successful tobacco company without considering public health. A successful social media persona without considering cultural impact. A mobile app slop farm that floods the app store. If economics is your priority, then everything comes down to that.