alt Hacker NewsI feel the same but the question I struggle most with is this: "Does it matter when the people who are going to come along and maintain this are just going to use AI to fix or adjust this maintenance nightmare?"
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Same. Messy code makes it harder for us to understand and thus maintain the code (which is why people often refer to code as a liability), but is that the case for AI tools as well? If not, it seems like clean code may not matter as much anymore.
The problem with crappy frontend code is not only the maintenance. It's that stuff such as responsive design, accessibility or cross-browser compatibility that work nearly for free with elegant code won't work at all.
The problem is that technical debt is compounding. Bad LLM architectural and implementation decisions just blend in to the background and you build layer upon layer of a mess. At some point it becomes difficult and expensive (token wise) to maintain this code, even for an agent.
I mitigate this by few things: 1. Checkpoints every few days to thoroughly review and flag issues. Asking the LLM to impersonate (Linus Torvalds is my favorite) yields different results. 2. Frequent refactors. LLMs don't get discouraged from throwing things out like humans do. So I ask for a refactor when enough stuff accumulates. 3. Use verbose, typed languages. C# on the backend, TypeScript on the frontend.
Does it produce quality code? Locally yes, architecturally I don't know - it works so far, I guess. Anyway, my alternative is not to make this software I'm writing better but not making it at all for the lack of time, so even if it's subpar it still brings business value.
At that point the code becomes a compile target, and then you need a new source of truth.
Which I think is perfectly worthy of exploration. Some people want to check in the prompts. Or even better, check in a plan.md or evenest betterest: some set of very well-defined specifications.
I'm not sure what the answer will be. Probably some mix of things. But today it is absolutely imperative that the code I write for the case I wrote it in is good quality and can be maintained by more than just me.