alt Hacker News> No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good your code is. The general public does not care about anything other than the capabilities and limitations of your product.
The capabilities and limitations of your product are defined in part by how good the code is. If you write a buggy mess (whether you write it yourself or vibe code it), people aren't going to tolerate that unless your software has no competitors doing better. People very much do care about the results that good code provides, even if they don't care about the code as an end in itself.
I think this is exactly the point though (maybe more of the link than of this comment) - a sufficiently good product by all external quality metrics is fine even if the code is written on one line in a giant file or some other monstrosity. As long as one black box behaves the same way as another in all dimensions, they are competitive. You can argue that internal details often point to an external deficiency, but if they don’t, then there is no competitive pressure.