Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

Re:Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI by 0xbadcafebee on Sunday April 05, 2026 @06:19PM (#47654533)

I have worked at companies from startups to fortune 500. They all have garbage code. Who cares? It works anyway. The world is held together with duct tape, and it's unreasonably effective. I don't believe "code quality" can be measured by how it looks. The only meaningful measure of its quality is whether it runs and solves a user's problem.

Get the best programmer in the world. Have them write the most perfect source code in the world. In 10 years, it has to be completely rewritten. Why? The designer chose some advanced design that is conceptually superior, but did not survive the normal and constant churn of advancing technology. Compare that to some junior sysadmin writing a solution in Perl 5.x. It works 30 years later. Everyone would say the Perl solution was of inferior quality, yet it provides 3x more value.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI by airstrike on Sunday April 05, 2026 @06:50PM (#47654740)

I hear you about "it just works" mattering infinitely more than some arbitrary code quality metric

but I'm not judging Claude Code by how it looks. I kinda like the aesthetics. I'm talking about how slow, resource hungry and finnicky/flickery it is. it's objectively sloppy

[ Parent | on HN ]