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[return to "Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem"]
1. monero+M9[view] [source] 2026-02-03 06:00:44
>>jinhku+(OP)
First you must accept that engineering elegance != market value. Only certain applications and business models need the crème de le crème of engineers.

LLM has been hollowing out the mid and lower end of engineering. But has not eroded highest end. Otherwise all the LLM companies wouldn’t pay for talent, they’d just use their own LLM.

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2. WD-42+7f[view] [source] 2026-02-03 06:48:56
>>monero+M9
I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value. You won’t see it right away which is probably where this sentiment is coming from, but it will absolutely catch up to you.

Elegant code isn’t just for looks. It’s code that can still adapt weeks, months, years after it has shipped and created “business value”.

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3. lockni+Ph[view] [source] 2026-02-03 07:11:17
>>WD-42+7f
> I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value.

That's a rather short-sighted opinion. Ask yourself how "inelegant code" find it's way into a codebase, even with working code review processes.

The answer more often than not is what's typically referred to as tech debt driven development. Meaning, sometimes a hacky solution with glaring failure modes left unaddressed is all it takes to deliver a major feature in a short development cycle. Once the feature is out, it becomes less pressing to pay off that tech debt because the risk was already assumed and the business value was already created.

Later you stumble upon a weird bug in your hacky solution. Is that bug negative business value?

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