No one cares about good code. It’s a means to an end. Your code doesn’t need to look pretty or be well documented or any of that stuff anymore because people are not looking at it. The only thing people care about is performant and error free code.

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tripleee 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People saying this are telling on themselves that they have no idea what quality code is. It's not about looking pretty or nice variable names.

Code quality matters to AI just as much as it did to people

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bbctr1 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you have any data backing this statement? Or is it just your experience?

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bpeng2000 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Personal experience:

AI tends to add new wheels for a new feature in a large codebase, because finding, understanding, and generalizing the existing code to integrate a new feature will likely break existing features, cost more effort (and token) to implement and test. Human reviewers also tend to like these code since they are clean, easy to review, and get the job done, especially when they are not familiar with existing codebase.

The issue is that wheels like these accumulate in the codebase, and they inevitably entangle. When an upstream specification changes, when a new feature that works with many existing features are introduced, all these wheels need to be revisited, and in many cases they are not because the new test cases do not cover all the paths. The code base got larger and more complex, and contains more bugs than the unit tests can cover, especially when unit tests are often "bent" to fit the wrong behavior unnoticed.

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tripleee 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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piker 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yep.

The worst part about this is that if you aren't watching it, the AI will "solve" this with a thousand assert_3_plus_5_equals_8() test cases that just further clutter the workspace and the context window. Churn baby churn.

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Rudybega 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I haven't had this issue since like last year with frontier models. What are you using?

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troupo an hour ago | parent [-]

All the models do this. I'm literally right now watching Opus 5.5 duplicating code even after telling it to fix duplication.

	▲	tripleee an hour ago \| parent [-]
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SmirkingRevenge 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The models are pretty good at finding code duplication and eliminating it though, and it's usually part of my AI review process at this point

If you let it go buck wild on a massive change, there are those times where it sort of paints itself into a corner but rewrites are cheap (for now), so it's just not that big of a deal, imho

	▲	tripleee 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
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gwynforthewyn 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Literally 50 years of engineering history and culture cares about whether code is good. There are libraries worth of books about it, not as a means to an app but for its own beauty. Just read “The Elements of Programming Style”, for example.

Do what you want, write apps with AI and don’t review code, it doesn’t impact me. The claim that no one cares about good code is demonstrably false, and that’s all I’m objecting to.

	▲	g-b-r 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> it doesn’t impact me so long as his software isn't used for anything that can affect you

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nerdo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not true, LLM’s will struggle with badly organized and designed large codebases just the same, though likely with less errors and profanities.

	▲	copperx 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The biggest concern is that AI can doxx you and find where you live if your code sucks. If that doesn't scare you, nothing will.

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weakfish an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> No one cares about good code. It’s a means to an end.

I do, my coworkers do, my friends do, etc etc.

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swat535 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

I think a more generous interpretation of the parent comment would have been: "No one [in business] cares about good code" .

Your end users certainly don't either, heck they'll gladly sit there and scroll through their phone until the 50GB React app loads.

	▲	xyzsparetimexyz 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't care about the opinions of end users with poor taste as much as I care about the opinions of end users with good taste.

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xyzsparetimexyz 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No code is error free. All code will need a fix of some kind eventually. When it does, it's better that the internals are not a total mess. In the same way that you don't want the insides of your car to be total alien nonsense either.

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g-b-r 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Good code is a means to the end of the code being error (and vulnerability) free, maintainable and performant.

And if people are not looking it, those people don't care about their customers.

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drewg123 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The way you phrase it makes me realize its almost like a GPL contamination. Eg, once you pull in GPL code, your project is infected and can never use a BSD (or other GPL incompatible) license.

Similarly, once you pull in terrible AI slop code, the project becomes unmaintainable by humans and you need to maintain it with AI.

	▲	gwynforthewyn 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There’s a little irony about the example you picked of the GPL, just because in the US the output of an LLM cannot be covered under copyright. The GPL works as an assignment of rights under copyright. This is, of course, tangential to your point.

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troupo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Code that isn't duplicated in 15 places, that doesn't read the whole database to fetch just 1 record, that doesn't do 15 database reads where one would suffice, that uses an optimized algorithm instead of an exponential one recreated badly from scratch... all that is also good code, and is just as important in LLM-slop era.