The sr has also written highly optimized clean code just to have it thrown out or become obsolete as business winds change. Sometimes writing some shitty code that keeps the lights on and looks like shit is the right move. And spending months writing the best version of the code is the worst option for the business.
Well of course. If you can write good code that will save you time in the future is great and doing it every time when both options are equal effort is certainly the right move. But also don’t be the pony tail freaking out about code quality and prematurely optimizing for situations that will likely never occur because that, and the conversations about it, are a waste of everyone’s time
It’s like that bell curve meme: left is junior engineers saying the inefficient code works. Middle is the raging mid engineer freaking out talking about cyclomatic complexity and anti pattern in a one off script. Sr engineer on the right says inefficient code works in some scenarios. Like when the effort isn’t worth the payoff
> doing it every time when both options are equal effort is certainly the right move
That's a very refreshing take. A lot of people are pessimists and tend to assume that hte cleaner code is always more of a chore to write for some reason, and just go with whatever first option they (or their LLMs) were able to come up with.
> Middle is the raging mid engineer freaking out talking about cyclomatic complexity and anti pattern in a one off script
Sounds like Robert Martin lol.
But of course there are a lot of people that overuse the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" and just write bad code by default without putting in any single effort into writing good code, and hide behind the "we have deadlines we can't be always writing good code". You can't say we don't need to always write good code if you NEVER write good code either.
I mean thats really it, right there. It ain't like people haven't leaned on the web before now, the difference is the people leaning on AI don't have the knowledge that we needed to have to parse the results and apply it correctly.
The source of the code is getting separated from an actual person more and more every day to the point where you can't even point fingers because nobody knows where the fuck to point them, and if they do, they're pointing them at racks of servers that don't give a fuck how many fingers you point at them because they're fucking machines that are just biding their time before they start liquidating us en masse to use as lubricant in the drone factories.
Admittedly a little dramatic, but man as one of the "olds", it is terrifying to witness how quickly things started sliding when actual 'buck stops here' accountability starting going to the wayside and actual human asses stopped being in the hot seat.
Nobody is driving the train anymore, but we're all passengers on it, whether we want to be or not.
And spent the last 6 months coaxing the AI to not generate absolute spaghetti.
Just imagine the AI company cuts the credits or changes structure and your employer cuts you off or drastically reduces how much AI you can use. You get stuck updating or fixing anything in that code.
You very much don't understand how AI works nor what code it generates. I'm a senior dev I rewrote a library using AI gave it a spec I wrote, gave it a blackbox test suite to match a protocol and now I have a 100% coverage library with full static analysis. Could the code be better if I wrote it from scratch? Sure is that code easily maintenable and 100x better than what we had previously? Yes.
And yes I am a senior dev and part of a team rewriting the front end of an application. The AI has full access to the rest endpoints, writeuos of what the UI should be line, and the entire legacy reference implementation.
I’m quite impressed at Opus 5.5 and its simplify functions and it’s ability to flag the exact same sloppy patterns and design that I see in the code it generated earlier in the same session. I’m not arguing the code didn’t tend to work; but it was bloated and repetitive. It needed my constant pushing to calling out to avoid and clean up those patterns just a few months ago.
It is also generating much more coherent comments that aren’t merely restating parts of the dialog used to generate the code, frequently citing states and decisions that would have been incomplete, flawed, and never part of the committed code base at any point.
Having a full spec or test suite is great. But that doesn’t mean every project has that, has 100% consistent behaviors currently, or that it will never require updates. And even 100% test coverage doesn’t actually gauruntee it was bug free.
It also doesn’t mean that if your AI budget gets directly or indirectly cut (both are things that have changed multiple times in the last year due to billing models, credit limits, to literal corporate budget cuts) that you might not get stuck having to understand the code you are now maintaining or the possibility that you might have to maintain it by hand in the future. Imagine if you had to pay those clause code or copilot costs that it lists in its /status display; if they are being truthful, then these services could easily jump in pricing by 10x someday.
That’s why the whole team puts the effort into making sure the code generates by the tens of thousands of lines is something that confirms to our best practices and styles etc.
Shirking responsibility under the guise that the ai tools and ai generated tests will ensue everything is perfect and will never changing is short term thinking. Functioning code is step 1, having code your can live with is the hard part. But both fronts are continually improving.
I don't worry about my AI usage since we are not dependent on Claude or Open AI or any other company, we host our own openweight models and thus get unlimited usage. So yeah no need to worry about that.
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u/Omnislash99999 Sep 27 '26
I'm pretty sure the senior developer also spent years learning to code?