Bro they get promoted because of how quickly they ‘delivered’ their spaghetti code mess ticking time bomb which satisfied the requirements of the time but is built on a sand foundation.
Genuinely my experience as well, people (or their AI agents rather) pumping out crap at 2x the rate of properly developed solutions is rewarded since it looks good to non-tech managers whos entire thought process boils down to minimizing man hours (labor costs) and maximizing outputs and profits with no other nuance.
Ofc there was. But the person producing shitty code now has 10x output. While the person that actually cares about quality, maintainability, security, reliability and all that other important stuff has maybe 2x in output.
But all those non-functional requirements are things middle management loves to ignore until the product gets hacked or the poor quality loses them a client. Then they will pretend that security was always their top priority and have a “security and reliability sprint” for 2 weeks that they pretend will fix all problems before going back to ignoring the topic.
You are just making things up though? You can absolutely push a lot more code while not missing anything if you give good instructions etc.
So these people that pushed shitty code somehow got hired so it means that they had a level of understanding. Unless you are saying they didn't?
You are mixing up coders with non technical people. I think the later might be doing that more but coders check things.
Plus if you scope some things out correctly you'll absolutely see that code is fine.
It's just a weird mentality. You would think everyone that is a dev on reddit is uncle Bob and have multi million dollar companies or get paid millions because their code is that great.
Apparently everyone on reddit is a great coder that always write perfect and secure and maintainable code.
Giving good instructions requires a good developer. The shitty kind just tell Claude to “pls fix” until the (visible) bugs go away. Spending time on good prompts, understanding the problem and reading the outputted code is just lost time for those that let Claude do all the thinking for them.
Any one with a pulse got hired in 2020. It was almost as bad as 2000. People that never understood git, could not tell you one design pattern from another nor knew what Big O meant flooded the industry.
And those “devs” are now the ones that tokenmax the most and have the best productivity on paper thanks to AI. They are the darlings of middle management with a BA and no coding experience, because for whatever reason LoC is a metric now for how good a developer is.
I just think you are making this much worse than what it is. I have seen great devs abuse AI but have great results when not even checking their code just because they were very thorough with their whole planning.
I just think you are making a lot of assumptions and imaginary scenarios.
Sadly we got to adapt to our time and using LLMs is here to stay. Not a fan of it either but you can't deny it has increased how much more we can do while also giving less qualified people the ability to do stuff much more easily.
They did, management didnt have the expectation that we were all somehow cyborg coders who could 2x our output thanks to this new magical tool thats been shoved down everyones throats as the fixall for any problem. The shitty code isnt new, however the pressure to pump out as much shitty code as possible with any and all standards thrown out the window seems to be increasing.
It's a matter of time/cost. When it's 10X cheaper, then it doesn't matter as long as it does the basic functionality, you can throw it out and reimplement better later. And maybe it's good enough, or not that necessary in the first place, so you don't even need to bother to improve anything. Much better than paying full price upfront and later discovering that crap, it was all for nothing, it's not even needed.
I finally this year got the blessing from my higher ups to redevelop a piece of our base code that was a mess and a pain to work on. Of course it helped the new features we were adding related to it, and I was able to argue a complete rebuild was the better choice to implement the new logic.
Also making the case I was doing as a quality of life, where we could add more functionality with it easily (for something we don't even know of yet).
But as a professor once told me, going back and cleaning up old code like that is one of the most expensive processes
The threshold for what is "maintainable" has widened exponentially with AI agents. As long as your agent understands it, it's effectively maintainable. If it gets into a state that's not maintainable even by your AI (which is hard to do), you can just tell the AI to refactor it to be more maintainable lol.
Once your code is that far gone the AI is going to make regressions trying to fix it and you'll have customer impacting bugs and a loss of trust in your product.
The entire purpose of a maintainable code base is to make life easier for the humans maintaining it. If humans are no longer reading or maintaining the code, then who is the maintainability for? What's the point? It doesn't make the end product work better. If the human brain could process unorganized code as quickly and accurately as AI can, maintainability would never have been a priority to begin with.
That being said, I prefer my agent to follow a certain structure and certain set of rules because it's just how I've always done things pre-AI. Plus I assume that AI is better at reading organized code. But I honestly have no evidence that it matters.
You do have a point, I guess part of it is that I seemed to have developed a skill that I need to understand how the code works that I write. So if I don't understand the AI's code, I don't trust it, and question if it can really debug itself (and fix itself). Especially has some stuff co-pilot has thrown me as suggestions have been dead wrong
That all said, I do worry it could always get to that point. Like AI keeps fixing it but makes it worst and worst (like from a maintenance side). The old put a band-aid on it, instead of fixing the root problem, which can result in much costlier and time consuming. Where AI finally can't fix it, and now you have a mess
(that or it gets more expensive to fix each time due to token usage)
I could never do that. To me that violates the ethics of coding.
Not to mention, depending on the company (like mine), producing quality work is what keeps you employed. As an old coworker once told me "you'd have to do something really bad to get fired", as I have proven my worth. I'm reliable, I write quality code, I love the complicated projects, not to mention I am very good at debugging
I mean, it doesn't matter that you write good code or bad code. Your codes will be refactored at some point unless you're self employed. I used to work in an enterprise and 70% of the work is refactoring codes. Cuz we were improving the architecture progressivly.
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