This is a dated view of AI research.
Promising research appears in workshops, blogs, and/or arXiV. Finished research appears in conferences. Nobody's sure what journals are for.
Of course if you are in one of the Ivy league universities this may be different. Otherwise... yeah, you can feel research moves too fast for journals, but curricular evaluation practices moves even slower.
I agree with GP. The view that conference publications is less important than journal papers is inaccurate, depending on your field.
In my field, it's as you describe. Conference papers are not polished, and journal publications is what matters in your academic career.
For many of my peers in some disciplines in CS, it was the opposite. Getting into a highly regarded conference was much more valued than publishing in a journal.
Then I found this was not limited to CS.
It really just depends on your discipline's culture.
On a personal note: I'm sick of smart-ass reviewers, unprofessional researchers, results over-selling (to put it mildly) and so on. I think the whole system is so corrupted that i just quit research in despair. Unfortunately, I don't see how blogs and/or just "publish the code" would magically solve all those problems.
Anyway, publishing your code is certainly a good thing to, so I applaud and encourage you to keep doing it!