Patio looks great
At some point my friend re-did the patio at his suburban Bucks County home. He is a Russian American as well, and as part of our immigrant community everyone knows “a good guy”. You can always call someone who is only referred to by their first name. This person charges far less than a private licensed and insured contractor costs. When it was finished, the patio looked fantastic. They built a beautiful wall with small square pillars and even attached some nice tiles to the side of the pillars. It looked great. But a couple of years later the tiles on the pillars separated away and had to be entirely re-done. Most likely the people doing the work used the wrong kind of bonding agent that was not correct for outdoor exposure in the hot sun. This is probably due to inexperience.
There are many such choices in our lives and we learn lessons the hard way. I live in the Cleveland area now and we have a lot of Sherwin Williams stores around here. There are different types of paint you can buy and I notice that the exterior paint often costs a lot more than interior paint. I know that if I painted my house using the cheaper interior paint it would look no different than the exterior paint on day one. But give it a couple of years and the temperature changes outside and the moisture are sure to make the interior paint bubble and flake off. I would have to repaint the house again.
Coding as a hobby
I learned to code at a young age and was always fascinated with making the computer do stuff. Back when I was not coding professionally and I didn’t know any better my goal was just achieving the result. When I was a baby programmer in college I made a PHP site for a faculty member. Surely it had SQL right there in the UI, but it worked right? And in a way it did. It was a small demo website for a professor and we didn’t care about performance, availability, scalability. I didn’t even know what the last two words in that sentence meant. And the professor didn’t know either. They wanted their list in the database that they could edit and then display. It was very simple.
Funny thing: every new feature took longer than the previous one.
At the time I didn’t know words like “coupling” or “technical debt.” I just knew the codebase started fighting me. Fortunately I graduated and this little toy became someone else’s problem.
Computers are slow
When I was a kid I thought computers were fast. They could do math wicked fast. Search through millions of elements in less than a second. Billions of transistors. Then I became a professional programmer and discovered computers are slow. Not because the machines got worse. Because our expectations exploded. And they got slow very quickly. Most of my professional career has been spent making computers perform tasks that the users want of them in a reasonable amount of time. Sometimes that time is measured in minutes. Sometimes it is seconds. Most often though it is in milliseconds and sometimes in what the cool kids call nanos. We created indexes. Added queues. Batched requests. Introduced caching. Partitioned databases. Switched APIs from single-item calls to bulk operations. Moved synchronous work into asynchronous pipelines. Replaced REST bottlenecks with gRPC. A lot of work. A lot of years spent making systems reliable. Because computers are slow. AWS can get very expensive very quickly if you spend too much compute resources. This is why we have PRs. This is why we have unit tests, functional tests, end-to-end tests. Observability and logging tools. I once watched a nightly process go from 45 minutes to seconds because someone finally replaced thousands of synchronous calls with batching.
Nobody looks at the code
But now we are in a new age. The professor or founder who never looked at the code is running a fleet of agents. The website works it looks great, see. You say you didn’t look at the code.
You never looked at the code.
You paid engineers to look at it for you.
We looked at the code. Over the years we used a lot of tools to make your website work the right way. Fast. Reliable.Compliant. As our toolbox grew we could deliver features faster. The next word machine is a great tool. But I wouldn’t trust it to replace the pros.
Ironically the AI doesn’t have a last name either. The flock of agents just finished your application. It looks shiny and new, and it works. Look at the tiles. Smell that fresh paint. You didn’t look at the code. You didn’t look at what is holding those beautiful tiles to the patio pillars. You didn’t look at the words on the paint can. Give it a couple of winters, friend. I look forward to looking at that code for you.