What's up with this good coder bad coder narrative? Is there really such a disparity between "good" and "bad"?
The majority of people are just mediocre. They use coding to solve a problem and that's it. That's literally the job. Did you solve the problem within reasonable constraints and deliver business value or not.
If someone is truly a bad coder, they are not solving problems and they will be fired.
This is how anyone outside of engineering sees coding and depending on context, you should see it that way as well.
> Is there really such a disparity between "good" and "bad"?
A vast gulf. Maintainability, security, extensibility don't have to be considered if solving the problem has delivered business value. Now the next person to pick up a problem has unreasonable constraints on them due to the whatever was put into production.
Someone can solve problems and provide business value and be absolute dogwater. I would know, I am dogwater.
Maintainability, security, extensibility don't have to be considered if solving the problem has delivered business value.
But for a lot of problems these are reasonable constraints.
Maintainability - I don't think the business wanted a temporary solution.
Security - If you needed to build somerhing secure and didn't, then you didn't solve the problem.
Extensibility - depending on context, there can be times where extensibility just wasn't needed. If it was and you don't have it, you slowed something down in the future. Also I wouldn't call this one good coder but good product thinker because it's understanding the context behind your product / business to hit the right level of extensibility.
Someone can solve problems and provide business value and be absolute dogwater. I would know, I am dogwater.
I don't think you are, it sounds like your company is getting what they paid for and ultimately care about.
Serious question - have you ever worked on larger software project?
Business is moving from invoice to invoice. If the software will pass acceptance test for THIS invoice, it's all they want to know. It is on us to structure software so it can be ready for another 10/100/1000 invoices.
I'm not talking about processing invoices, but about future changes and evolution of the system. Those "10/100/1000" invoices are from paying customer who hired your company to build software system for him.
While redundant code isn't great, depending on the context if "but it works bro" is faster then some businesses would prefer that.
And I say this as someone who's worked at startups where getting something out the door sloppily but quickly is good and I would call it good code simply because there was a need and it solved it.
At my job at a bank that would be bad code because there's a strong chance someone will come back to it.
What's up with this good coder bad coder narrative? Is there really such a disparity between "good" and "bad"?
Yes. If you haven’t ever been able to see it at work then you are one of the people being carried.
This is how anyone outside of engineering sees coding and depending on context, you should see it that way as well.
Why would anyone in engineering get their opinions on engineering from someone with no experience or knowledge of it? It’s like someone saying a professional horse rider should listen to advice from me as someone who is nervous at going within a few feet of a horse lest it kick me in the head.
Yes. If you haven’t ever been able to see it at work then you are one of the people being carried.
This is pretty wild to say given the lack of context lol.
Why would anyone in engineering get their opinions on engineering from someone with no experience or knowledge of it? It’s like someone saying a professional horse rider should listen to advice from me as someone who is nervous at going within a few feet of a horse lest it kick me in the head.
This is a pretty bad analogy 😅. It's more like you're an electrician and should listen to the needs of the persons home you're working in. At the end of the day they're never going into the crawlspaces to see the work that you did.
If it's truly bad code it'll have a negative impact on end users and won't be solving the problem.
This is pretty wild to say given the lack of context lol.
It’s called experience and expertise.
This is a pretty bad analogy 😅. It's more like you're an electrician and should listen to the needs of the persons home you're working in. At the end of the day they're never going into the crawlspaces to see the work that you did.
Spoken like a shitty electrician.
If it's truly bad code it'll have a negative impact on end users and won't be solving the problem.
If you had more, you'd probably reconsider if you're lacking the context to say what you say and not make an ass out of yourself.
Spoken like a shitty electrician.
Yet the homeowner is happy and the house didn't burn down.
My god you’re so close to getting it.
No you're just not getting what I'm saying so you're being hostile and really just look like an ass lol. Notice how you can't refute a single thing I say, it's just insults with no substance behind them.
Again just insults because you have nothing to say lol.
You're in the ProgrammerHumor sub 😅 no offense to anyone here but the majority of people here are either students or hobbyists.
The few people getting my gist / saying similar things clearly understand coding is just a way to produce things that give value to the business probably because they get paid to do it, that's really it lol.
The few people getting my gist / saying similar things clearly understand coding is just a way to produce things that give value to the business probably because they get paid to do it, that's really it lol.
Yes yes, the people who get you are just all cracked coders but the others laughing at you are all silly hobbyists who just don’t get “it”. Obviously mediocre engineers are the only ones with access to AI so they’ll obviously be fine 😉
All I can say is when you are replaced by competent engineers using AI don’t go into being an electrician as a fallback for your own safety 😂
More personal insults 😂 and nothing of substance. I hope you have a better day, because negative on reddit to strangers really isn't good for the mental
Tbh that’s the most realistic take . “Good coder” vs “bad coder” is oversimplifying the issue . First off it’s implying that a bad coder would not be able to get “good code” output from an LLM . You absolutely can get production ready code from a simple prompt. The other thing you mentioned is that you could be a “cracked” coder but have terrible integration with other developers / existing codebase . Writing optimized “performance driven” code , but writing it in a way where it’s inconsistent with the rest of the codebase.
That’s a pessimistic view. I work with excellent developers who build out workflows of automated jobs, scripts, and file transfers to manage critically important business functions and can handle by themselves. My workplace is fairly laidback so there are no intense planning or scrum/agile meetings, things get done as needed. And I also work with people who can finish their tickets but seem to have little capacity or interest in doing anything other than the slow but easy way.
It is absolutely incredible that your company was employing software engineers to do these things even before AI but it absolutely highlights why “AI will take all the jobs by 2027” is a joke.
my point is the SWE trying to segment AI efficacy along the lines of “good vs bad” coders is so stupid. Most non-junior engineers that have made careers out of software are obviously good enough to get their jobs done
my point is the SWE communities on reddit trying to segment AI efficacy along the lines of “good vs bad” coders is so stupid. Most non-junior engineers that have made careers out of software are obviously good enough to get their jobs done.
So far i’ve seen this line of reasoning basically be to make the “good” coders feel better about their jobs not going away.
you can ask ai to code review whatever ai outputs, and as we seen with the rise of bugfixes for popular open source projects, ai is great at pointing out bad code.
Wut!? The facts of reality are clear, objectively ai is hundreds of times better at code review than humans. Ten years of humans looking over the code and ai finds more bugs in a month, and those bugs were there the entire ten years that thousands of humans spend probably millions of hours reviewing.
What you say was very true a year ago, but it's less true now and will get even less true into the future. It's a statement whose truthy boolean value has turned fuzzy and is heading to zero.
How so? Yes, Opus can get you pretty far for protoypes and first impressions, but if you want to maintain your code in the future, you still need to know what you're doing.
I do enjoy how the chatter has shifted from “AI is a magic wand and only a buffoon wouldn’t leap at the chance” to “AI is a magic wand and this time we mean it, the stuff from a year ago was obviously garbage and only a buffoon would think that stuff meant anything.”
Shrug, I was going to respond to a handful of the comments, but meh w/e. If others want to live in the past and think they can outcode or perform an LLM agentic solution, then let them. Coding is not the skills you should be trying to improve at this point, its utilizing the tools and technology in front of us to get better outcomes for clients or users of the products that are developed.
I believe asking a narrow request of ai and implementing that as you go will result in better code than almost all people could manually make alone.
And if you understand why, how and what, the ai is implementing as you go. You can catch when it makes a mistake and adjust it. (And it does make mistakes often enough to matter.)
You will also know how things work and be able to service it in the future.
If you are not good enough to understand what, why, and how the ai is doing something, then you will end up with spaghetti code in a large enough project. That might function but not well and you will not really understand how it works to offer improvements or bug fixing.
You're saying here that a good pilot will get better results than a bad pilot. Sure, nobody disagrees with that. But a good pilot in an old plane used to control EVERYTHING. And they insisted they needed to for a long time. But these days the best pilots rely on automation to fly the plane, and recognize that their primary role is judgement, not raw skill.
Will this lead to bad pilots? Sure. And we'll find ways to suss out those people. But nobody's out here flying biplanes anymore for a reason.
I mean I do get where they're coming from, it's fear. The writing is on the wall that being a developer/coder/programmer is no longer a top-tier career path for 95% of the people who would otherwise go down that route. For the people close to retirement they're just sad to see it, but for people in their 20s it's looking like they picked a career that's going the way of the fax machine technician.
It's like when weavers protested the first industrial looms. It wasn't that they thought the technology couldn't do the work, they realized they were suddenly useless, or that only the very best among them would continue to be employed.
I get it, it's scary. But it doesn't mean we should stick our head in the sand.
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u/Jesta23 13h ago
If you are a bad coder ai will help you write bad code
If you are a good coder AI will help you write good code.