This is highly debatable. They look better, but whenever I inspect the walls and see what is holding the house together, I just shrug and leave my contact info, because I know I’ll be called to fix the mess.
> ...and building them increasingly feels like magic.
Engineering should not feel like magic to those with a proper education. Otherwise, we are merely practicing alchemy.
Unfortunately the author never even tried to debate. He made a big mental leap from "you can build entire neighborhoods and immediately remodel them with a click" to "the houses are better", with no word on how and why they are they better.
When something feels increasingly like magic it means you understand less and less of it. So in fact you are less and less qualified to say anything about the result.
The author is wowed by the process and the glitz and sees this as an equivalent to "quality of results".
Sure, quality and security suffer, but you're just to look at any airline's mobile app to see how little quality matters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asobo_Studio [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalisto_Entertainment
I worked on a reactor physics simulation app with 50 year old code then, which is now approaching 75 years old now. It compiled on Windows and *NIX.
Yeah that is most likely less about pride in the craftsmanship and more likely a reflex from bad source version control software.
EDIT: Also, you know they didnt type these comments by hand right? And that the first code completion systems date back to the 70s, granted it was mostly spell checkers.
Are they? Why? Even in the brick metaphor that doesn't work.
15 years ago people weren't crafting artisanal lines of code to build by dry-stacking.
I bet some of the oldest artifacts in code say "TODO" or "Temporary work-around"...