Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gspr 18 days ago
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?!

3 comments

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

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