> I don't care how elegantly my toaster was crafted as long as it toasts the bread and doesn't break.

A consumer or junior engineer cares whether the toaster toasts the bread and doesn’t break.

Someone who cares about their craft also cares about:

- If I turn the toaster on and leave, can it burn my house down, or just set off the smoke alarm?

- Can it toast more than sliced uniform-thickness bread?

- What if I stick a fork in the toaster? What happens if I drop it in the bathtub while on? Have I made the risks of doing that clear in such a way that my company cannot be sued into oblivion when someone inevitably electrocutes themselves?

- Does it work sideways?

- When it fills up with crumbs after a few months of use, is it obvious (without knowing that this needs to be done or reading the manual) that this should be addressed, and how?

- When should the toaster be replaced? After a certain amount of time? When a certain misbehavior starts happening?

Those aren’t contrived questions in service to a tortured metaphor. They’re things that I would expect every company selling toasters to have dedicated extensive expertise to answering.

My contention is:

> A consumer

is all that ultimately matters.

All those things you’re talking about may or may not matter some day, after years and a class action lawsuit that may or may not materialize or have any material impact on the bottom line of the company producing the toaster, by which time millions of units of subpar toasters that don’t work sideways will have sold.

The world is filled with junk. The majority of what fills the world is junk. There are parts of our society where junk isn’t well tolerated (jet engines, mri machines) but the majority of the world tolerates quite a lot of sloppiness in design and execution and the companies producing those products are happily profitable.

You really underestimate how much work goes into everything around you. You don't care because it just works: the stuff you use is by and large not crap, which makes the crappy stuff all the more noticable. Check out the housing code for your area: everything from the size of steps to the materials used for siding are in there. Or look at the FCC specifications for electrical devices that make sure you don't inadvertently jam radio frequencies in your local area, or the various codes which try very hard to stop you from burning your house down.

You're right that "there are parts of our society where junk isn't well tolerated", but the scope of those areas is far greater than you give credit for.

I'm long term traveling, mostly through the developing world, where something like 84% of humanity resides.

All around me, people's houses, the roads, the infrastructure, food cultivation and preparation, furniture, vehicles, it goes on and on, the tendency is towards loose approximation, loose standards. Things are constantly breaking, the quality is low, people are constantly being poisoned by the waste seeping into their water, air and soil, by the plastic they burn to cook their food, by the questionable chemicals in the completely unsafe industrial environments they work in to produce toxic products consumed by the masses.

There is no uniform size of steps. Yet the majority of humanity lives this way, and not just tolerates it but considers it a higher standard of living than we've had for the majority of human history.

I don't think people in the first world are a different species, so we will also adapt to whatever shitty environment we regress into as our standards fall. We'll realize that the majority of the areas we may consider sacrosanct are in fact quite negotiable in terms of quality when it comes down to our needs.

All this is to say that yeah, I think people will generally tolerate the quality of software going down just fine.

That's a sad way to think. I'd like to hope that humanity can improve itself, and that includes building products that are safer, more refined, more beautiful, more performant and more useful. I agree that there's a lot of crap out there, but I still want to believe and strive to make things that are excellent. I'm not ready to give up on that. And yes, I still get annoyed every time my crappy toaster doesn't work properly.

There is some truth to your point but you might want to consider that often seniors concerned with code quality aren't being pedantic about artisanal craft they are worried about the consequences of bad code...

- it becomes brittle and rigid (can't change it, can't add to it)

- it becomes buggy and impossible to fix one bug without creating another

- it becomes harder to tell what it's doing

- plus it can be inefficient / slow / insecure, etc.

The problem with your analogy is that toasters are quite simple. The better example would be your computer, and if you want your computer to just run your programs and not break, then these things matter.

Perhaps a better analogy is the smartphone or personal computer.

Think of all the awful cheapest android phones and Windows PCs and laptops that are slow, buggy, have not had a security update in however long and are thus insecure, become virtually unusable within a couple years. The majority of the people in the world live on such devices either because they don't know better or have no better option. The world continues to turn.

People are fine with imperfection in their products, we're all used to it in various aspects of our lives.

Code being buggy, brittle, hard to extend, inefficient, slow, insecure. None of those are actual deal breakers to the end user, or the owners of the companies, and that's all that really matters at the end of the day in determining whether or not the product will sell and continue to exist.

If we think of it in terms of evolution, the selection pressure of all the things you listed is actually very weak in determining whether or not the thing survives and proliferates.

The usefulness is a function of how quickly the consequences from poor coding arrive and how meaningful they are to the organization.

Like in finance if your AI trading bot makes a drastic mistake it's immediately realized and can be hugely consequential, so AI is less useful. Retail is somewhat in the middle, but for something like marketing or where the largest function is something with data or managerial the negatives aren't as quickly realized so there can be a lot of hype around AI and what it may be able to do.

Another poster commented how very useful AI was to the insurance industry, which makes total sense, because even then if something is terribly wrong it has only a minor chance of ever being an issue and it's very unlikely that it would have a consequence soon.

Hattmall said it well with this:

> The usefulness is a function of how quickly the consequences from poor coding arrive and how meaningful they are to the organization.

I would just add that these hypothetical senior devs we are talking about are real people with careers, accountability and responsibilities. So when their company says "we want the software to do X" those engineers may be responsible for making it happen and accountable if it takes too long or goes wrong.

So rather than thinking of them as being irrationally fixated on the artisanal aspect (which can happen) maybe consider in most cases they are just doing their best to take responsibility for what they think the company wants now and in the future.

There’s for sure legitimacy to the concern over the quality of output of LLMs and the maintainability of that code, not to mention the long term impact on next generation of devs coming in and losing their grasp on the fundamentals.

At the same time, the direction of software by and large seems to me to be going in the direction of fast fashion. Fast, cheap, replaceable, questionable quality.

Not all software can tolerate this, as I mentioned in another comment, flight control software, the software controlling your nuclear power plant, but the majority of the software in the world is far more trivial and its consumers (and producers) more tolerant of flaws.

I don’t think of seniors as purely irrationally fixated on the artisanal aspect, I also think they are rationally, subconsciously or not, fearful of the implications for their career as the bottom falls out of this industry.

I could be wrong though! Maybe high quality software will continue to be what the industry strives for and high paying jobs to fix the flawed vibe coded slop will proliferate, but I’m more pessimistic than to think that.

Who does it fall on to fix the mess that's been made. You do care if the toaster catches fire and burns your house down.

More review items to consider on a PR:

* You have made a new file format. Consider that it will live forever.

* You have added exactly what the user/product team asked for it. It must be supported forever.

Part of my job is to push back on user requests. I also think a lot about ease of use.

I think even with an LLM that can one-shot a task, the engineer writing the prompt must still have "engineering judgment".

>I think part of the problem a lot of senior devs are having is that they see what they do as an artisanal craft. The rest of the world just sees the code as a means to an end.

Then you haven't been a senior dev long enough.

We want code that will be good enough because we will have to maintain it for years (or inherit maintaining from someone else), we want it to be clean enough that adding new features isn't a pain and architected well enough that it doesn't need major rewrite to do so.

Of course if code is throwaway that doesn't matter but if you're making long term product, making shit code now is taking on the debt you will have to pay off.

That is not to say "don't use AI for that", that is to say "actually go thru AI code and review whether it is done well enough". But many AI-first developers just ship first thing that compiles or passes tests, without looking.

> I don't care how elegantly my toaster was crafted as long as it toasts the bread and doesn't break.

...well if you want it to not break (and still be cheap) you have to put quite a bit of engineering into it.