This is highly debatable. They look better, but whenever I inspect the walls and see what is holding the house together, I just shrug and leave my contact info, because I know I’ll be called to fix the mess.
> ...and building them increasingly feels like magic.
Engineering should not feel like magic to those with a proper education. Otherwise, we are merely practicing alchemy.
Unfortunately the author never even tried to debate. He made a big mental leap from "you can build entire neighborhoods and immediately remodel them with a click" to "the houses are better", with no word on how and why they are they better.
When something feels increasingly like magic it means you understand less and less of it. So in fact you are less and less qualified to say anything about the result.
The author is wowed by the process and the glitz and sees this as an equivalent to "quality of results".
Sure, it gave you a bad E. coli infection, but look how much of it you could eat.
You use a very selective or narrow definition of "better". The "worse" gets swept under the rug without the step where you balance to see if you have a net win. But at least unlike the author of the tweet you made your definition clear, and I appreciate that.
Maybe that was possible 2 years ago, but for the last year it's just not simply true.
Sure there will be codebases that will get messy, outgrow the amateur vibe coder, etc. But AI is already better than 90% coders. Certainly can focus better than 99% of coders.
As part of my current assignment I see code and tests that are 15 years old (or more), and I only hope that people who wrote this code have become better as software engineers since then. Otherwise there is no hope for humanity.
The irony of this metaphor is that new housing construction these days is really bad, just watch any of the inspectors posting to youtube or tiktok. Even those new 3d printed houses are crumbling after a year, and they can't be fixed because of the way they're built.
We had better built houses when they came as kits from Sears than we have today.
I have an active project where parts of it still uses on the back-end WebObjects, an ORM framework originally from NeXT and later apple. Over the years parts of it are being rewritten (WebObjects is not threadsafe) but it just keeps running and running processing millions of transactions per week.
macOS's peak was roughly 15 years ago, to be fair. Apple hasn't ever gotten things fully right after Snow Leopard. The 15 year old code is probably the best code in the stack.
I joined Asobo Studio[1] for an internship back in 2010, and some code there was already nearly 15 years old as they grabbed the remains of Kalisto[2] including the engine/editor. That editor (Pawap) is still used to this day, although the engine (Zouna) has been rewritten (but uses the same data backend as the old code, albeit heavily updated too). This was probably the oldest codebase I worked on at the time.
> Every file had a comment at the top with the date and the author’s name.
Yeah that is most likely less about pride in the craftsmanship and more likely a reflex from bad source version control software.
EDIT: Also, you know they didnt type these comments by hand right? And that the first code completion systems date back to the 70s, granted it was mostly spell checkers.
> The houses are better, and they go up faster...
This is highly debatable. They look better, but whenever I inspect the walls and see what is holding the house together, I just shrug and leave my contact info, because I know I’ll be called to fix the mess.
> ...and building them increasingly feels like magic.
Engineering should not feel like magic to those with a proper education. Otherwise, we are merely practicing alchemy.
> This is highly debatable.
Unfortunately the author never even tried to debate. He made a big mental leap from "you can build entire neighborhoods and immediately remodel them with a click" to "the houses are better", with no word on how and why they are they better.
When something feels increasingly like magic it means you understand less and less of it. So in fact you are less and less qualified to say anything about the result.
The author is wowed by the process and the glitz and sees this as an equivalent to "quality of results".
They're better because they get the business value faster and in a lot more flexible way, which in the end is what all businesses try to achieve.
Sure, quality and security suffer, but you're just to look at any airline's mobile app to see how little quality matters.
> Sure, quality and security suffer, but
Sure, it gave you a bad E. coli infection, but look how much of it you could eat.
You use a very selective or narrow definition of "better". The "worse" gets swept under the rug without the step where you balance to see if you have a net win. But at least unlike the author of the tweet you made your definition clear, and I appreciate that.
> because I know I’ll be called to fix the mess.
Maybe that was possible 2 years ago, but for the last year it's just not simply true.
Sure there will be codebases that will get messy, outgrow the amateur vibe coder, etc. But AI is already better than 90% coders. Certainly can focus better than 99% of coders.
As part of my current assignment I see code and tests that are 15 years old (or more), and I only hope that people who wrote this code have become better as software engineers since then. Otherwise there is no hope for humanity.
The irony of this metaphor is that new housing construction these days is really bad, just watch any of the inspectors posting to youtube or tiktok. Even those new 3d printed houses are crumbling after a year, and they can't be fixed because of the way they're built.
We had better built houses when they came as kits from Sears than we have today.
Windows 10 shipped with code that is from the 90's. Old does not necessarily mean bad. If it ain't broke.
> If it ain't broke.
It's windows - its broken.
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Especially with windows backwards compatibility it's not possible to rewrite it with every release
I have an active project where parts of it still uses on the back-end WebObjects, an ORM framework originally from NeXT and later apple. Over the years parts of it are being rewritten (WebObjects is not threadsafe) but it just keeps running and running processing millions of transactions per week.
macOS's peak was roughly 15 years ago, to be fair. Apple hasn't ever gotten things fully right after Snow Leopard. The 15 year old code is probably the best code in the stack.
I joined Asobo Studio[1] for an internship back in 2010, and some code there was already nearly 15 years old as they grabbed the remains of Kalisto[2] including the engine/editor. That editor (Pawap) is still used to this day, although the engine (Zouna) has been rewritten (but uses the same data backend as the old code, albeit heavily updated too). This was probably the oldest codebase I worked on at the time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asobo_Studio [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalisto_Entertainment
> Every file had a comment at the top with the date and the author’s name.
Yeah that is most likely less about pride in the craftsmanship and more likely a reflex from bad source version control software.
EDIT: Also, you know they didnt type these comments by hand right? And that the first code completion systems date back to the 70s, granted it was mostly spell checkers.
> The houses are better
Are they? Why? Even in the brick metaphor that doesn't work.
The good old days when people were people and not just IDs
15 years. Lol.
I worked on a reactor physics simulation app with 50 year old code then, which is now approaching 75 years old now. It compiled on Windows and *NIX.
I was about to say that libcern has some truly ancient bits in it and it's still being used today
Somewhere people working in Sabre are laughing...
15 years ago people weren't crafting artisanal lines of code to build by dry-stacking.
I bet some of the oldest artifacts in code say "TODO" or "Temporary work-around"...
Sure they do. And yet they still stand, which says something about their quality
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