alt Hacker News> But you don’t care about code quality anymore right.
Why did we ever? Because it made it more feasible to maintain and reduced bugs. Well structured, designed code bases are simply far easier to work with.
I'm sure we've all had greenfield AI projects where we just let it go nuts doing whatever it wants, then all of a sudden you need what should be a stupid easy change, and it just falls over completely or becomes borderline impossible. Each change needs 5+ other changes until you basically can't touch the thing. The difference is, AI will keep trying until you run out of money or you give up, but this way of programming is bad and we labeled it bad for a reason, and I don't know why as an industry we're thinking it's no longer important.
I mean, code complexity is still something that should be accounted for and frowned upon. I think the issue is just that the tools we have to measure complexity (or linting, or coverage, or flakiness, etc) currently aren't integrated into the CI/CD in any meaningful way other than 'here's a comment on your PR.'
I think about test-driven development and how good versions of that were socialized norms, processes and checks that happened prior to outputting code. Just telling an LLM to do TDD just creates a hellish CI latency tail with too many tests - you have to have taste and discernment there and none of that's built-in. Context rot is still too much of an issue especially if you're on a distributed MS model. I've had a little luck with whole system ADRs helping (with a lot of skills + active prompting) but the context still degrades over longer sessions or the further into a sprint you get.
I've seen some preliminary 'innovations' like this with LLM-driven shared wikis but it's all very hand-wavey and not standardized across the industry. It really feels like people are just waiting for these frontier labs to fully solve code quality (my gut says that the scale of improvement is logarithmic, not exponential, at least not until there's actual revolutionary research on LLM outputs at the scale of something like tensors) or they hope that some outfit with a fully vibe-coded website that promises to solve all of these things will solve all of these things.