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Comment by guywithabike | Hacker News Reader

As we all know, there was no such thing as a messy, bloated codebase incomprehensible to humans before AI.

Of course there were plenty, but now we can produce such codebases at unprecedented speed.

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila." — Mitch Ratcliffe

I'm really getting tired of this argument. Yes, mess existed before everyone could 10x everything with AI. No, that doesn't mean there's somehow no difference between now and then.

If you really believe otherwise I encourage you to go have a chat with any one of a number of FOSS maintainers to hear their experiences pre and post LLMs.

I am also tired of the argument. Yes, people made messy, buggy things before. But AI agents provide away to create messiness and bugginess on an ever increasing scale. And just because things were bad before doesn't mean we should accept making them worse.

Indeed. What's been most interesting (for me) wrt LLMs is how they've exposed these incredibly warped perspectives. I'm not sure what more to make of it beyond noticing it though.

It's a corruption mentality. They assume everybody else is cheating and lying and everything is broken, so it doesn't matter if they lie, cheat, and break things. The important thing is what you can get away with and what you can get: apps that make money, features shipped to satisfy managers and get the paycheck. And then never think about the long term consequences. And a big part of this mindset is ridiculing or belittling those that care about doing things properly. This is the same mindset that is present in areas with high levels of corruption.

As much as I want to argue against, the evidence is pretty clear that your point applies to a significant proportion of people :/

Why should any rank and file Microsoft employee care about the long term health of the codebase? I'm struggling to find reason to care about not committing pure slop to my own employer's codebase but it's A) what they want and B) path of least resistance for me

Integrity? I understand that it's tough when incentives don't reward it, though.

is it integrity to ignore the very clear, direct requests of the person paying me? Like that's a nice idea, and I like what that page is saying, but reality is not so clear cut. If I believe our product is not generally in the public good, is it actually integrity to commit slop to the repo?

What scares me the most is that non-technical people in power don't see to understand the difference between messy buggy crap and quality. This isn't new. But now they're often the ones pushing the "AI driven" development methods, so they'll never admit to causing a problem they don't even see.

Lastly, their "solution" to the crapfest, I fear, will be society footing the bill for "more AI" to "fix it". 95% of people will just accept that software has to be shit, and we'll all pay for it, while quality will be shown the door for being more expensive.

I know right? Especially by Microsoft. The pinnacle of code quality!

and now there are 20x as many demanding maintenance everything is 20x better.

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