On Quality

What is quality?

If you look at the dictionary you will find the following explanations:

• the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something: an improvement in product quality | [count noun]: these colleges provide a better quality of education.
• a distinctive attribute or characteristic possessed by someone or something: he shows strong leadership qualities | the plant’s aphrodisiac qualities.

In a nutshell the general excellence of standard or level (a masterpiece), a high social standing or the distinguishing characteristics possessed by something or someone.

It can also mean meeting or exceeding requirement standards and specifications in a business context.

Or, if you do consulting work, it could mean satisfying your customers needs. Quality oftentimes refers to how well something fullfills its intended purpose or function.

More generally though, quality is how good something is compared to similar items or how well it satisfies needs.

Sidenote

Years ago, when we ran a boutique software development company, patheleven, our aim was to wow our customers with every interaction we had with them. This lead us to not only producing “quality” software, but also refining how we talked to our customers (how we listenend to them, figured out their needs and our interactionns with them). We’d taken inspiration of renouned restaurants in the wold like Noma and El Bulli.

Why is quality in Software so important?

It’s been known for some time (well, known by some people) the importance of writing code following known best practices to make it more habitable and maleable.

Code, although a set of instructions for the computer to execute at it’s core, it’s written for humans to reason about. The higher the quality of the code (in terms of it’s readability and accessibility) the easier it is to work with faster.

With the raise of vibe coding, the practice of telling an LLM to write the code for us, we can see a steep increase in code that is, by all accounts, sloppy and riddled with avoidable complexity. Moreover, Ai generated code has been proven to produce code that isn’t production ready without the oversight of human operators that make sure the code does what it’s supposed to do.

Code quality is largely undervalued at the business level. This is evident in the rampant problem of technical debt. Today, technical debt consumes one-third of technology budgets, yet only 10% of business managers actively manage technical debt.

Ai, in code, tries to solve the wrong problem; the speed of typing. As you well know, typing has never been the bottleneck. Adam Tornhill , back in September 2023, wrote an interesting article about the speed vs. quality myth, I recommend reading.

From one gut feeling I derive much consolation: I suspect that machines to be programmed in our native tongues —be it Dutch, English, American, French, German, or Swahili— are as damned difficult to make as they would be to use.

Interestingly enough we can go way farther back in time to find evidence about why using natural language (i.e. instructing an LLM to code in natural language) is a bad idea. No other than prof. dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote about On the foolishness of “natural language programming” back in 1978!

Although I think LLMs can be helpful in research (as a programming buddy you can ask question to for example), I do not believe they should be used to replace humans when writing code. We posses a capacity of reasoning a machine has yet to acheive.

So, as a parting message I recommend you to invest in learning how to write elegant, habitable code. If you are a business person my recommendation is to invest in training your developers to produce quality code to move faster instead of the Ai slob generation.

To go fast you need to go sure and steady!