Certainly mostly what I did wasn't great but throughout 20+ years I think at some point I found a balance between "doing this shit because someone f'cking overpromised" and "I am doing this because I want a brain teezer". But it is not like I always do the same. I understood that there are times to do things in one way and times to do in another way.

I think with AI, most people are getting lazy to do it properly.

The other day, I deleted 65K LOC that were dead code or stupid explanations over very obvious code from a vibe coded repository which had 95K LOC (but should have 10k imo)

It's getting off topic, but I think a major reason for $30 cardboard tables is the strange modern idea that furniture isn't part of the house.

If you buy a house or rent an apartment in most of the US, any furniture will be stripped out, even if the only thing you plan to do with it afterwards is throw it away. Then the new tenant provides their own furniture, which they either moved from elsewhere at great expense or had to purchase on the spot. No part of this makes any sense. We don't strip countertops when selling a house even if they're unfashionable, we don't replace white goods, but somehow it's expected for the furniture.

If you buy a house in Hawaii, it's understood that you're buying the furniture that's already in the house. I assume the reason is that it's more difficult to obtain new furniture in Hawaii.

If you rent an apartment in China, it will come with furniture, because how else are you supposed to live in it? And if you're not happy with the furniture it's shown with, you negotiate with the landlord for the furniture you need.

If Americans sold their furniture when they moved instead of throwing it away, you'd see everyone using much higher-quality furniture. It would have come with their house. And providing it to houses that didn't have it yet would be an investment, just like the countertops.

Nice point. But I still have way too many vibe coded tests that passes and break in production despite they should have failed but Claude fixed the test by mocking the test to pass. I am not kidding.

Yep. The only reason for automated testing is to enable future refactoring, which might be needed for future development. If we only wrote software once, we wouldn't need automated tests. You'd just write the software, test manually as you go, then ship it when you're happy. Ideally not all future development would even need any refactors. A good software architecture would allow one to add features simply by adding more modules of code. But, of course, we don't know what the perfect software architecture is from the start, so we need to assume someone will one day need to refactor.

> I’ve seen people say this kind of code was written, but I’ve never seen this kind of code anywhere I have ever worked.

Luckier than me. I've worked at a few places where the code was simultaneously brilliantly written[0] and also unmaintainable nonsense that caused endless problems. One place had its own object model and ORM that absolutely no-one currently at the place understood and literally every bug filed (whilst I was there) could be traced back to that code.

(Probably just a coincidence that most of those places where Perl shops but I've seen it with Go too...)

[0] In terms of "cleverness", not in terms of "maintainability" or "readability".

same here, i call it aids (ai delusion sickness) and some companies i've seen have it bad

In general, it's bizarre that people look at problems this systemic and conclude that they are primarily a failing happening at the level of individual contributors. This organizational rot didn't even start with LLMs, though it's certainly been accelerated by them