[shinycode]

That’s exactly part of the feelings I have. I always loved to learn, dig subjects, debug, create. Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value. I feel indolence and apathy. In my company the CEO explicitly says that code quality does not matter. He doesn’t care as long as we ship fast and iterate.

I am genuinely sad and feel I’m losing something and if I do everything like I used to do, I am pressured that I waste time.

[selcuka]

I'm in a similar boat. Today I commented on a junior developer's pull request, and he pasted the answer he got from Claude Code, verbatim.

Ignoring how disrespectful that behaviour is, I can't understand what value he thinks he brings in. Were you hired to be an interface between me and Claude? Because I don't need you. You are just accepting that you are redundant by doing that.

[shinycode]

Completely, we even added Claude and Cubic in our ci that drop comments on their own. It’s laziness and/or « I don’t care » on his part

[aembleton]

> Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value.

Did you feel similar when Wikipedia was created or Google or when you first got access to the internet?

All of these tools have made digging into subjects and learning easier. I find the same with AI. I love it when a random thought pops into my head and I can explore it with an AI such as Gemini. Then ask it for the sources it used so that I can read further.

AI is just a tool, much like StackOverflow. It doesn't prevent creativity, it just makes it easier and more accessible.

[amelius]

> AI is just a tool

You are forgetting that AI can also use tools.

And those AIs can be used as tools as well by other AIs.

The moment you start working on something, someone else is already automating the exact thing you are doing now.

[aembleton]

> The moment you start working on something, someone else is already automating the exact thing you are doing now.

Good. If a machine can do my job then I can work on something more interesting. Perhaps a more interesting problem to fix is having the people working on something getting told about the automation.

[karlgkk]

> If a machine can do my job then I can work on something more interesting

Oh my god, you don't get it.

The more interesting thing? Someone else is already automating doing that exact interesting thing you are doing now.

All the way down.

[xtracto]

I recently at around 42yo learned how to darn/mend my socks. My mom taught me how to do it.

I have enough money that I could just throw my socks with holes to throw trash and buy new ones inconsequentialy, but mending them by hand gives me something, it is kind of therapeutic and a sense of accomplishment.

Im sure there are machines that could do it in a second, or a patch I could stick on it as well.

Point being that we can still find satisfaction in doing things by hand that technology can do fast/easily. We just stop doing it by hand for profit.

[giardini]

I too enjoy mending my socks! I wear mostly cotton athletic socks, so sewing them up is enough. I can't darn worth a darn.

Patches I tried didn't last and I haven't found a machine that works. And it feels bad to buy a new pair of socks only b/c of a hole in the heel.

[azinman2]

Do you use a washing machine or do you manually wash your clothes in a stream?

Much of modern life is automating away the boring useless bits.

AI, on the other hand, changes the conversation on what’s boring or useless.

[trhway]

>Much of modern life is automating away the boring useless bits.

>AI, on the other hand, changes the conversation on what’s boring or useless.

A compression algorithm finds and removes redundancy. Simple automation is like simple compression algorithms (RLE like). AI (which even internally - at least the encoding to the representation parts - looks like compression) just like a much more sophisticated compression algorithm which finds and removes redundancy where we thought the creativity and originality were.

It does look like our civilization has accumulated a lot of cruft masquerading as creative/original/intellectual activities ("Bullshit jobs" comes to mind, also all that talk about stagnation in science, and all those huge collective collaborations - where collective there is a stagnation - and now with AI individual scientists will again be able to wield all the bleeding edge across the wide fields while digging deep in desired target research direction), and the AI is the vacuum cleaner for that cruft.

[gspr]

I feel the same as you. But at the same time: do you not think your CEO will be proven wrong? Maybe I'm delusional, maybe I'm just rationalizing, but surely code quality, and code understanding, does matter?

And if your CEO is right, then surely their business is doomed? If they don't understand, or can't maintain their own product, what's to stop their customers from just "making it" themselves?

How is anyone happy with this trajectory?!

[shinycode]

I’m in a similar line of thinking and actually some customers are making their own version of our tool. It’s nowhere near feature complete but it suits their needs.

Code quality does matter it’s just marketing people being shortsighted because their job is to react to the market. LLM gives a sense of « it’s kind of easy to build stuff, why bother loosing time with quality when I’m there at 80% in 20% of the time ? ».

There is compounding effects where given any big enough system this won’t scale, even Google did talks this week on this topic. So I guess you’re right, time will prove who’s right or wrong and what bet was the best with which consequence

[imtringued]

They matter, but you can't argue that human written quality code that strokes the developer's ego is so much better than AI written code of slightly less quality. Understanding also matters, but now you're trying to familiarize yourself with the AI's code, not your colleagues' code and never the code you've written yourself.

[throawayonthe]

i guess it really depends... look at claude code itself, terrible code but rakes in the money dunnit

[gspr]

> i guess it really depends... look at claude code itself, terrible code but rakes in the money dunnit

I don't know. Does it?

Also: Maintainability is a property for which the associated costs don't show up right away.