On the other hand, if you mean tight, performant, simple, well-factored code, then yeah. LLMs simply aren't there, and may never be. On the other hand, maybe that matters less than we thought it did. Time will tell.
The issue is nobody is spending time in review because the stuff coming out "just works". So if no one is reading the code, what is the big deal with naming? The big deal is we need to know what our later sessions are talking about and we need linguistic separation of concerns.
A higher level form of programming, if you will. Linguistic precision seems to be where the specificity can be lost or won. The naming will reflect that with some degradation. But humans will also degrade the spirit of the specifications as well in many cases!
Hopefully this post makes some sense to someone.
People used to be able to write code that was horrible by all the standard metrics but still "just worked" (or at least appeared to). From the stories I've heard, it would get into production all the time, too. But if it's a bigger problem now, then necessarily we know how to fix it, so.
I guess the excitement of the new toy is just leading to some irresponsibility.
But we don’t always do that and then things get rewritten and broken etc
Welcome to life in software dev 2026, not so different from 1996
I mean, who's doing the factoring then?
Also "great point" is sadly a phrase that has been co opted by sycophantic AI so I can no longer take it seriously.
I see it as a multiplier (the bicycle metaphor) and yes certainly getting across town on a bicycle or across the country on a plane is less cumbersome on your health than walking every where.
I don’t ride motorcycles, I rode a scooter for a long time doing a delivery job as a younger man and the speed and instability (of two wheeled motorized vehicles) along with lack of visibility to others creates a dangerous combination.
And yes I can see the corollaries there to AI usage especially in these days when the excitement of the acceleration is being found seductive by many and without much visibility into the longer term consequences.
To me it's just crazy of how dumb it is to test an idea with a vibecoded shitty app. I'm not saying it should be perfect from day zero, let's pretend we are talking about cakes, how crazy it would sound you will tell people to try and judge your new idea of a cake you don't even know how it taste or what's inside?
For the first group, it doesn’t matter how good your cake is. If you spend a year perfecting it, you won’t sell them any more cakes. And for many products, this group is basically 100% of customers.
It's disappointing that the prevailing sentiment now is that architecture is less important than we thought. Software is always going to be getting more important, and all of it should be well thought out. If these people had these tools in 2004 they might've made thousands of fragmented buggy social media startups and actually slowed progress on that front.