There is some truth to your point but you might want to consider that often seniors concerned with code quality aren't being pedantic about artisanal craft they are worried about the consequences of bad code...
- it becomes brittle and rigid (can't change it, can't add to it)
- it becomes buggy and impossible to fix one bug without creating another
- it becomes harder to tell what it's doing
- plus it can be inefficient / slow / insecure, etc.
The problem with your analogy is that toasters are quite simple. The better example would be your computer, and if you want your computer to just run your programs and not break, then these things matter.
Perhaps a better analogy is the smartphone or personal computer.
Think of all the awful cheapest android phones and Windows PCs and laptops that are slow, buggy, have not had a security update in however long and are thus insecure, become virtually unusable within a couple years. The majority of the people in the world live on such devices either because they don't know better or have no better option. The world continues to turn.
People are fine with imperfection in their products, we're all used to it in various aspects of our lives.
Code being buggy, brittle, hard to extend, inefficient, slow, insecure. None of those are actual deal breakers to the end user, or the owners of the companies, and that's all that really matters at the end of the day in determining whether or not the product will sell and continue to exist.
If we think of it in terms of evolution, the selection pressure of all the things you listed is actually very weak in determining whether or not the thing survives and proliferates.
The usefulness is a function of how quickly the consequences from poor coding arrive and how meaningful they are to the organization.
Like in finance if your AI trading bot makes a drastic mistake it's immediately realized and can be hugely consequential, so AI is less useful. Retail is somewhat in the middle, but for something like marketing or where the largest function is something with data or managerial the negatives aren't as quickly realized so there can be a lot of hype around AI and what it may be able to do.
Another poster commented how very useful AI was to the insurance industry, which makes total sense, because even then if something is terribly wrong it has only a minor chance of ever being an issue and it's very unlikely that it would have a consequence soon.
> The usefulness is a function of how quickly the consequences from poor coding arrive and how meaningful they are to the organization.
I would just add that these hypothetical senior devs we are talking about are real people with careers, accountability and responsibilities. So when their company says "we want the software to do X" those engineers may be responsible for making it happen and accountable if it takes too long or goes wrong.
So rather than thinking of them as being irrationally fixated on the artisanal aspect (which can happen) maybe consider in most cases they are just doing their best to take responsibility for what they think the company wants now and in the future.
There’s for sure legitimacy to the concern over the quality of output of LLMs and the maintainability of that code, not to mention the long term impact on next generation of devs coming in and losing their grasp on the fundamentals.
At the same time, the direction of software by and large seems to me to be going in the direction of fast fashion. Fast, cheap, replaceable, questionable quality.
Not all software can tolerate this, as I mentioned in another comment, flight control software, the software controlling your nuclear power plant, but the majority of the software in the world is far more trivial and its consumers (and producers) more tolerant of flaws.
I don’t think of seniors as purely irrationally fixated on the artisanal aspect, I also think they are rationally, subconsciously or not, fearful of the implications for their career as the bottom falls out of this industry.
I could be wrong though! Maybe high quality software will continue to be what the industry strives for and high paying jobs to fix the flawed vibe coded slop will proliferate, but I’m more pessimistic than to think that.
- it becomes brittle and rigid (can't change it, can't add to it)
- it becomes buggy and impossible to fix one bug without creating another
- it becomes harder to tell what it's doing
- plus it can be inefficient / slow / insecure, etc.
The problem with your analogy is that toasters are quite simple. The better example would be your computer, and if you want your computer to just run your programs and not break, then these things matter.