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The silent death of good code

amit.prasad.me

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Re: The silent death of good code

#31

Post by ElatedOwl »

I think good code is even more important now.

People talk about writing the code itself and being intimate with it and knowing how every nook and cranny works. This is gone. It’s more akin to on call where you’re trudging over code and understanding it as you go.

Good code is easy to understand in this scenario; you get a clear view of intent, and the right details are hidden from you to keep from overwhelming you with detail.

We’re going to spend a lot more time reading code than before, better make it a very good experience.

Re: The silent death of good code

#32

Post by IhateAI_3 »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #23

I love the sentiment, but 40 years in the business realm of software development has taught me “good code” is never a priority for management. It’s difficult to explain good unit testing, tech debt, or just going through proper solution selection with management. So having used Claude Code since it came out I’ve decided the resulting code is overall just as good as what I’d see in regular programming scenarios.

[flagged]

Re: The silent death of good code

#33

Post by amitprasad »

Gehinnn wrote: post #21

Opus is quite good at refactoring. Also, we can finally have all the helper functions/beautiful libraries/tests that we always wanted to have. There is no excuse anymore to approximate a parser with regular expressions. Or to not implement the adapter class which makes an ugly unchangeable interface beautiful. I believe the right use of AI makes it possible to write more beautiful code than ever before.

I would be extremely happy to be proven wrong! I love using agents for exploratory prototypes as well as "rote" work, but have yet to see them really pay off when dealing with existing tech debt.

I find that the flaws of agentic workflows tend to be in the vein of "repeating past mistakes", looking at previous debt-riddled files and making an equivalently debt-riddled refactor, despite it looking better on the surface. A tunnel-vision problem of sorts

Re: The silent death of good code

#34

Post by coldtea »

gedy wrote: post #3

The 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.

If you did it for management yes.

But that's soviet bureucracy and Potempkin villages with extra steps.

Re: The silent death of good code

#35

Post by bfung »

If it’s easy to read and understand but doesn’t work, or is slow to execute, or costs a lot to run, is it good code?

If the function is a black box, but you’re sure the inputs produces a certain output without side effects and is fast, do you NEED “good code” inside?

After about 10yrs of coding, the next 10 of coding is pretty brainless. Better to try and solve people/tech interaction problems than plumbing up yet-another-social/mobile/gaming/crypto thing.

Re: The silent death of good code

#36

Post by FjordWarden »

Man am I getting tired of these articles and we can do without this neurotic melancholic whining. Maybe it is the title of the article that triggered me, but it reminded me of hearing Douglas Murray read excerpts from "The Strange Death of Europe" in his self-aggrandising pompous tone.

The authors colleague needed a couple of tries to write a kernel extension and somehow this means something about programming. If it was not for LLMs I would not have gone back to low-level programming, this stuff is actually getting fun again. Lets check the assembly the compiler produced for the code the LLM produced.

Re: The silent death of good code

#37

Post by amitprasad »

zeeed wrote: post #30
amitprasad wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It's hard to say. Perhaps LLMs of tomorrow will become capable enough to fix the mistakes of LLMs today. If so, great -- I'm worried about nothing.

If not, we could see that LLMs of tomorrow struggle to keep up with the bloat of today. The "interest on tech debt" is a huge unknown metric w.r.t. agents.

Re: The silent death of good code

#38

Post by coldtea »

woeirua wrote: post #12
gedy wrote: post #3

The 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.

Yes, just the people who actually made a difference in our profession, as opposed to producers of slop and corporate shit.

As civilizations declined, pride in one's work, would have been more or less as described in this comment.

Re: The silent death of good code

#40

Post by somewhereoutth »

woeirua wrote: post #12
gedy wrote: post #3

The 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.

However a lot of the modern world is carried by 'pride of workmanship' - and not just by those who 'make'. It's an extension of the 'planting trees' parable, to care about things even though you are not immediately (or ever) rewarded.
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