The silent death of good code • Hacker News Board

Re: The silent death of good code

#101

Post by dragonelite » Sun, Feb 08, 2026, 11:38 AM UTC

sibeliuss wrote: post #8

> 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…

You do know that in a business environment proof of concept is more a proof of production. Shit doesn't get rewritten when it can at this very moment start generating revenue and profits.

Re: The silent death of good code

#102

Post by CuriousSkeptic » Sun, Feb 08, 2026, 11:54 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #59

I really reasonate with this post, I too appreciate "Good Code"(tm). In a discussion on another forum I had a person tell me that "Reading the code that coding agents produce is like reading the intermediate code that compilers produce, you don't do that because what you need to know is in the 'source.'" I could certainly see the point they were trying to make, but pointed out that compilers produced code from abstra…

I like to think of it as the period when software engineering finally grows up to be a respected discipline with a body of actual theory

Re: The silent death of good code

#103

Post by thenanyu » Sun, Feb 08, 2026, 1:24 PM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #73

thenanyu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even remotely close to true anymore. Agents are far better than any intern or junior developer.

They most certainly are not.

CC got my dev env set up and running in 20 min. It had to fix my local node setup and a ton of other dependencies. A junior dev cannot do that in 20 days (unless they just asked CC to do it)

Re: The silent death of good code

#104

Post by perrygeo » Sun, Feb 08, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #6

This 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…

For me it comes down to Language. They're LLMs after all. They pattern match on tokens, and if your tokens have muddled semantics, you've lost before you even started.

I have a codebase where variables are named poorly - nah that's too generous, variable names are insane; inconsistent even within a single file and often outright wrong and misleading. No surprise - the LLMs choke and fail to produce viable changsets. Bad pattern = bad code generated from that pattern.

Going through and clarifying the naming (not ever refactoring) was enough to establish the pattern correctly. A little pedantry and the LLM was off to the races.

If LLMs are the future of coding, the number one highest priority for the software industry should be to fix muddled naming, bad patterns, and obfuscated code. My bet is that building clean code foundations is the fastest way to fully agentic coding.

Re: The silent death of good code

#105

Post by nacozarina » Sun, Feb 08, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

Next-gen clankers will run proprietary chips & new toolchains accessible only to paid subscribers. Old toolchains will be gone. And the clankers will consume the entire tech supply chain to do the transformation. The loss of memory & video component vendors is just the start. Open computing is dead, even Windows. Clanker hive supremacy is inevitable, barring catastrophe.