"Code quality" encompasses a lot of dimensions, one of which is impressing your colleagues, and many of which there's virtually no reason to care about now.

Nobody cares about code quality /s

They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like reliability and speed of development.

> Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques don’t matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fact that you achieve the desired outcome by using the right materials and techniques.

This analogy is more true than you think. This is why modern homes/appartments are trash. You can pass safety inspections using subpar materials and the house will fall apart after a few years, but who cares right? At least you achieved the business outcome!

This mentality is so infuriating. This is why I need to buy new shoes every year. Or why my washer/dryer motherboard craps out in 2 years instead of 10. Nobody gives a shit about quality anymore, this is why society is crumbling around us. Profit driven incentive for fast/cheap over everything else. And now I need to spend my day prompting an AI to fix AI slop code to keep the business hobbling along another day. What a fucking joke.

No the materials and techniques matter a lot. This is why we need to build houses with sticks and jute cord, just like we always have. It's vital also that we paint our special symbols above the door to ward off the spirits.

It's insane to me that you're implying we could build houses with pre-fabricated materials or pneumatic nail guns and still somehow "have houses?" No sticks/jute cord and special symbols, then no house.

No. Anyone who doesn't code with AI - while retaining a deep knowledge and understanding of the problem domain - is falling behind.

I hate to say this tbh, I loved hand-writing code. I made a great living for 20 years, and I absolutely loved it and was quite good at it.

Hand-typing code is just slower now; there’s no two-ways about it. You are either going to be slow and a bad hire for businesses, or you figure out how to adopt AI into your workflow to speed up.

One thing I think people don't realize is that deep knowledge of programming, performance, architectural, and domain specific trade-offs makes a skilled engineer about 1000X faster than someone without those skills -with AI. But yes, now unskilled people can actually make apps/software. They just tend to be slow, and their products are full of bugs, security flaws, and abysmal performance.

So we went from: Skills = can or cannot ship any software at all. Now we are at: Skills = can ship better software much faster than unskilled people.

I was actually faced with this recently. I decided to learn Rust and port one of my side projects to it. Initially, I moved extremely slowly, and the AI made truly horrific architectural decisions because I didn't have the knowledge of how to direct it, especially compared to my primary languages.

However, once I gained a firm grasp of Rust, I was better able to properly direct the AI to fix fundamental issues and architect things properly. My speed increase multiplier proved to be directly proportional to my growing knowledge of both the language and the domain.

Skill and knowledge combined with AI, when used appropriately, absolutely multiply your speed and quality. I really think once you understand what AI can do, and how to utilize it to produce better code, faster than before, there truly is no going back.

I'm finding a path forward that I actually enjoy now and don't really see losing my value (no telling how things will change in the future), I can have more time to focus on really quality/solid/performant and useful systems with less time just typing one character out at a time.

You could have talked to me 3 months ago and I'd never imagine I'd say the above btw. I REALLY enjoyed code writing and earlier AI models without harnesses were pretty useless for anyone skilled at development. Now with stuff like deepseek Flash I feel like I have a happy medium of 100% directed/fast code turnaround, less typing, more deep focus on architecture, systems, and the actual end product.

In coding we usually change it to "cheap, fast or correct: choose two"

I reject your correction: I present the options as nouns, not modifiers to the work. Maybe I should say "Cheap, Fast, or Good" as a compromise.