What code quality means to a business

Two senior devs meet at the coffee machine. 😄

"Your code is wrong."

"No, YOUR code is wrong."

"You're using the wrong library."

"No, YOU'RE using the wrong library."

They're probably both right — and that's the funny part.

Each one writes maintainable code, they just see "quality" through their own lens, instead of zooming out a bit.

From a business perspective, code quality is surprisingly simple: it solves the problem now, and it can be changed when requirements shift.

That's it.

If both approaches check these boxes — the rest might just be a matter of taste. 🔧

Our attachment to SOLID, DRY and other buzzwords is just how we make code both work now and stay maintainable in the future. I say this as someone who wrote code for years until one day I unexpectedly became a CTO and had to learn business thinking.

What's important is that from this point of view, debates about whether AI writes good or bad code are senseless.

If AI code works and can be reasonably modified later by AI — maybe it's not as bad as we engineers think?