Agents can write good code. If you don't like the way that they write code, tell them to write it differently. Do that until you think the code is good.
The silent death of good code
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Re: The silent death of good code
#12The silver lining is realizing that many of my mgmt never cared about good code or quality to begin with. So I was fooling myself. The AI/LLM excitement just makes it more obvious now.
So much this. No one ever really cared about “good code” except some engineers who took an irrational amount of pride in their code.
Re: The silent death of good code
#13Good code was approximately never valued in enterprise. How many companies worth billions or even trillions have webpages that take 5+ seconds to load text, and use Electron for their desktop applications? In that regard, nothing has changed.
There is still a market for good code in the world, however. The uses of software are nearly infinite, and while certain big-name software gets a free pass on being shitty due to monopoly and network effects, other types of software will still find people who will pay for them if they are responsive, secure, not wildly buggy, and can add new features without a 6 month turnaround time because the codebase isn't a crime against humanity.
On another note, there have been at least four articles on the front page today about the death of coding. As there are every other day. I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them?
Re: The silent death of good code
#14The worst part of vibe coding, and developers as managers of "agents" AI is at best a good intern or a new junior developer. We're locking in mediocrity and continuing enshittification. "Good enough" is codified as good enough, and nothing will be good or excellent. Non-determinism, and some amount of inaccuracy on the margins continually, no matter the industry or task at hand including finance, just so we can avoid…
That's not even remotely close to true anymore. Agents are far better than any intern or junior developer.
Re: The silent death of good code
#15> This same colleague then invested time into understanding the kernel subsystem, the exact reasons why the original C program was written how it was, and rewrote the Rust translation himself. The difference was night and day; the code flowed naturally, explained itself and the underlying subsystems, and may genuinely be some of the nicest parts of the entire codebase. This is the point that everybody needs to calm d…
That sounds nice in theory but how many managers are going to tolerate a rewrite when there is something "good enough" sitting in front of them? (They can't see the tech debt and the vulnerabilities, just that it Apparently Does The Thing.)
Re: The silent death of good code
#16I've come accept that producing code I'm truly proud of is now my hobby, not my career. The time it takes to write Good Code is unjustifiable in a business context and I can't make the case for it outside of personal projects.
Re: The silent death of good code
#17Agents can write good code. If you don't like the way that they write code, tell them to write it differently. Do that until you think the code is good.
There's an opportunity-cost here. I use agents to be more productive. As many have noted, "Good Code" doesn't rank highly compared to actually shipping a product.
The tragedy, for me, is that the bar has been lowered. What I consider to be "good enough" has gone down simply because I'm not the one writing the code itself, and feel less attachment to it, as it were.
Re: The silent death of good code
#18Good code was approximately never valued in enterprise. How many companies worth billions or even trillions have webpages that take 5+ seconds to load text, and use Electron for their desktop applications? In that regard, nothing has changed. There is still a market for good code in the world, however. The uses of software are nearly infinite, and while certain big-name software gets a free pass on being shitty due t…
> I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them?
Look, it's either this or a dozen articles a day about Claude Code.
Re: The silent death of good code
#19This is something I've been thinking about as I start to adopt more agent-first coding. There is a real advantage to having good code especially when using agents. "Good Code" makes iteration faster, the agent is unlikely to make mistakes and will continue to produce extensible code that can easily be debugged (by both you and the agent). A couple months ago I refactored a module that had gotten unweildly, and I trie…
Right: Having "Good Code" is an investment into future velocity.
IMO we shouldn't strive to make an entire codebase pristine, but building anything on shaky foundations is a recipe for disaster.
Perhaps the frontier models of 2026H2 may be good enough to start compacting and cleaning up entire codebases, but with the trajectory of how frontier labs suggest workflows for coding agents, combined with increasing context window capabilities, I don't see this being a priority or a design goal.
Re: The silent death of good code
#20Good code was approximately never valued in enterprise. How many companies worth billions or even trillions have webpages that take 5+ seconds to load text, and use Electron for their desktop applications? In that regard, nothing has changed. There is still a market for good code in the world, however. The uses of software are nearly infinite, and while certain big-name software gets a free pass on being shitty due t…
Good code is extremely subjective, most bad code is built on a good code foundation. And most foundational software (think linux, ffmpeg, curl, v8, etc.) maintainers are pushing back.
Once AI/Agents actually master all tools we currently use (profilers, disassembly, debuggers) this may change but this won't be for a few years.