I mean, in your defense, last year I think you would have been right, but right now? Codex rocks, as does Claude. I am literally making money shipping a greenfield project to a customer right now. I'm basically a cheap consultant that is incrementally adding features to make something exactly what they want for way cheaper than it would be to do it the old way.
There are hiccups, outages, things to fix etc. but the customer is happy with the output, and the reduced price means they get bespoke solutions rather than some BS one size fits all SaaS app. Then my job is maintenance and effectively "ITSM." Which kind of sucks in some ways, I miss writing real code for real projects, but this is the future going forward. If you want something for your business, you'll generate it rather than pay for it and for now at least, getting beyond localhost requires someone who knows a bit about computers or is willing to learn. Most small businesses aren't willing to learn.
Now, to your point. Is the code all that clean? Nope (and in your defense sometimes I read through the codebase and shudder)... but who cares? Like, for awhile I would go through and frantically edit it, but why? It worked. Not only that, but there's going to be a new model in 3 months or whatever that can clean it up and make it less shitty. I've literally done that a couple times since I started doing this in January.
The customer ain't reading the code. They don't care as long as the the functionality works - that's what counts. The gazillion tests I have keep it stable as I push code, and the CI/CD pipeline removes a ton of the ass pain I'd have without it.
The biggest thing I'm worried about when it comes to clean code and good design is trying to make sure I keep the token count down on these projects so I can actually do meaningful work without burning through a week's worth of tokens in a single day. That, and I like to try to keep a sort of architectural bird's eye view on what's happening...
Like, I'm not sure what niche of the industry you're in, but for the stuff I'm using it for, stuff is working really well with LLMs.
I started this by doing some work for an old employer that asked me to start by modernizing an excel spreadsheet into an app I made for them like 10 years ago? They kept asking for more though since, and they’re my biggest customer right now. Which is good because I only have the bandwidth for like one more place right now.
I’ve had a few sort of one off things with other places? But I’m working on getting another company in the same industry right now and I’ll be able to adapt most of the code I’ve built here for another company if they end up deciding to use me.
But my biggest value to companies is “I already know this industry extremely well.”
Typically, this is not the type of phrase that is said right before everything goes extremely well
So much of the financial world runs off excel.
Think about all the geneticists that complain about excel re-writing DNA sequences.
It doesn't matter if its high stakes or low stakes. People use the software that generates the results they like. Not the software that is "correct to use".