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High quality c++ code today looks exactly same as it did six months, hell, six years ago. Innovation doesn’t come from code tricks

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True innovation is doing something new that has never been seen before. Even if you are doing it in a stable language that's just a stable poetry form (rhyme and meter and formatting), the real magic is the content of the poetry, and the real beauty of code is when the poetry reads well to both audiences, the compiler and the next maintainer, on multiple levels, the literal and the metaphorical.

LLMs can't reach the metaphorical. LLMs don't know what true beauty is. I will grant you they have gotten great at the literal and the poetry forms. But it is the beauty that elevates things to my quality bar, and makes a difference between "legacy code" and "innovation" to me.

What you're describing is not innovation in the business sense but some kind of experimental art. Software engineering is not art as the name suggests - it's a craft, even though there's a self-expression component to it.

I think we have different definitions of what a craft is. My boundary between art and craft is a lot looser, for instance. The way I see it there is craft to the best art and there is art embedded in the best craft. I think you are right that companies seem to ignore both the art and craft of software engineering and long wish the process were a predictable industrial machine much more than an art or a craft. But I will absolutely disagree with you that just because companies desire it to be an industrial process doesn't mean it isn't my job to understand the art of software design and how that influences the crafting of software.

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