The silent death of good code

This. There’s no limitation to your prompting. If you feed rules and patterns for clean code to a bunch of agents they’ll happily work on that level.

Just right now no one cares enough yet. Give it a year or two.

I could conceive something evolving on a different abstraction layer - say, clean requirements and tests, written to standard, enhanced with “common sense”

This feels very odd to me, because I'm actually able to refactor and DRY and generally improve my code and tests and documentation much more with agents to help speed up the process than I ever would have before.

I also make sure to describe and break down problems when I ask an agent to implement them in such a way that they produce code that I think is elegant.

It seems to me like people think there's only two settings: either slaving away carefully on the craft of your code at a syntactic level, manually writing it, or shitting out first pass vide-coded slop without taking care to specify the problem or iterate on the code afterwards. But you can apply just as much care to what the agent produces, and in my experience, still see significant speedups, since refactoring and documentation and pulling out common abstractions and so on are something that agents can do extremely reliably and quickly, but otherwise require a lot of manual text editing and compile/test passes to do yourself.

As long as you don't get hung up on making the agent produce exactly character for character, the code you would have produced, but instead just have good standards for functionality and cleanliness and elegance of design.

IMO, you need to have the capacity to write Good Code to know what Good Enough Code is. It's highly contextual to a particular problem and season in a codebase's life. One example: ugly code that upholds an architecture that confers conceptual leverage on a problem. Most of the code can operate as if some gnarly problem is solved without having to grapple with it themselves. Think about the virtual memory subsystem of an OS.

The problem with this argument is many do not believe this sort of leverage is possible outside of a select few domains, so we're sort of condemned to stay at a low level of abstraction. We comfort ourselves by saying it is pragmatic.

LLMs target this because the vast, vast majority of code is not written like this, for better or for worse. (It's not a value judgment, it just is.) This is a continuation (couldn't resist) of the trend away from things like SICP. Even the SICP authors admitted programming had become more about experimentation and gluing together ready-made parts than building beautifully layered abstractions which enable programs to just fall out of easily.

I don't agree with the author, BTW. Good code is needed in certain things. It's just a lot of the industry really tries to beat it out of you. That's been the case for awhile. What's different now is that devs themselves are seemingly joining in (or at least, are being perceived to be).

Doesn’t the question then become “is there still an objective advantage to good code”

If the answer is yes then it’s a tragedy - but one that presumably will pass once we collectively discover it. If not, then it’s just nostalgic.