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The silent death of good code

amit.prasad.me

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Re: The silent death of good code

#61

Post by love2read »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #13

Good 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…

So funny when people point at electron as if it singlehandedly makes every program unusable.

Also, I would assume there are not many significant pages on $B/Trillion companies that take 5 seconds to load text that are used frequently.

> I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them?

People never get tired of reading or commenting on commentary on their hobbies.

Re: The silent death of good code

#62

Post by logicprog »

love2read wrote: post #46
logicprog wrote: post #24

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 sett…

> Either sleeping away carefully on the craft of your code manually writing it, or shitting out first pass vide-coded stuff without really taking care to specify the problem or iterate on the code afterwards. I think the thing you are missing is that people are > shitting out first pass vide-coded stuff without really taking care to specify the problem or iterate on the code afterwards to assume that people will take…

But that's kind of my point — there's still a choice whether to care about the quality of your code and spend time refining it or not with agentic coding as with any other technology; people who took the time to write good code before can absolutely continue to do that, and people who didn't care about good code before will not care about good code now either. It was a choice that was not the path of least resistance before, and it is still a choice that is not the path of least resistance now.

Now, there is the very valid point that those that don't care about code quality can now churn it out at vastly accelerated rates, but that didn't really feel like what the original article was talking about. It felt like it was specifically trying to make the claim that a Gentic tools don't really afford the ability to refine or improve your code or strongly discourage it, such that you kind of can't care about good code anymore. And it's that that I wanted to push back on.

Re: The silent death of good code

#63

Post by logicprog »

BobbyJo wrote: post #51
logicprog wrote: post #24

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 sett…

There has always been a tension between "take the time to build something you know will work" and "prioritize speed over all else and hope you get lucky and it doesn't fall over too fast" in software. AI is making the difference in speed between the two schools of thought larger and larger, and it's almost certain to make the latter philosophy more financially attractive.

Yeah, I can see that. But that didn't really feel like what the original article was arguing. It felt more that it was arguing that even people who care about good code, if they use agentic tools at all, can't produce good code, and it was the advantage in the velocity of agentic tools as a whole over the production of good code as a strictly separate category that was the problem?

Re: The silent death of good code

#64

Post by bilinguliar »

charcircuit wrote: post #54
IhateAI_3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Why would you adopt agent first coding? Since most work on software projects is going to be done via coding, debugging, QA, etc AI agents you should prioritize finding ways to increase the velocity of these AI agents to maximize the velocity of the project. >Are you that bad at it? That is irrelevant. >Is there anything you really have to get done regardless of quality right this second? You are implying that AI age…

> That is irrelevant.

Why?

Re: The silent death of good code

#65

Post by love2read »

amitprasad wrote: post #55
ElatedOwl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author effectively argues deep thinking is dead, that people are no longer going to take the time to understand the problem and solution space before they solve it. I think that’s untrue, I think it’s /more/ important than before. I think you’re going to have significantly more leverage with these tools if you’re capable of thinking. If you’re not, you’re just going to produce garbage extremely fast. The use of t…

Just because you or I may invest effort into deep-thinking, it does not mean that others will. I'm not worried about this at Modal, but I am worried about this in the greater OSS community. How can I reasonably trust that the tools I'm using are built in a sound manner, when the barrier to producing good-looking bad code is so low

> How can I reasonably trust that the tools I'm using are built in a sound manner, when the barrier to producing good-looking bad code is so low

Honest answer: You never could.

Re: The silent death of good code

#66

Post by bilinguliar »

lclarkmichalek wrote: post #42

Hilarious. The code being produced previously was crap - it was just your crap. Baseline agents produce something similar, but can at least be guided, durably, towards producing less crap code.

Guided by the last generation of people with the know-how.

Re: The silent death of good code

#67

Post by geraneum »

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…

> you could design a lot of things successfully just assuming that the value of 'pi' was 3. But when things had to fit together, they wouldn't.

Apt analogy. I’m gonna steal it!

Re: The silent death of good code

#68

Post by charcircuit »

bilinguliar wrote: post #64
charcircuit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why would you adopt agent first coding? Since most work on software projects is going to be done via coding, debugging, QA, etc AI agents you should prioritize finding ways to increase the velocity of these AI agents to maximize the velocity of the project. >Are you that bad at it? That is irrelevant. >Is there anything you really have to get done regardless of quality right this second? You are implying that AI age…

> That is irrelevant. Why?

That commenter is try is trying to imply that AI agents are a form of crutch. Like if you are bad at programming you use an AI agent to program for you. In reality programmers of all skill levels are migrating to using AI agents for programming.

Re: The silent death of good code

#69

Post by ollysb »

Good code has always been written with a reader in mind. The compiler understanding it was assumed. The real audience was other engineers. We optimized for readability because it made change easier and delivered business value faster.

That audience is changing. Increasingly, the primary reader is an agent, not a human. Good code now means code that lets agents make changes quickly and safely to create value.

Humans and agents have very different constraints. Humans have limited working memory and rely on abstraction to compress complexity. Agents are comfortable with hundreds of thousands of tokens and can brute-force pattern recognition and generation where humans cannot.

We are still at the start of this shift. Our languages and tools were designed for humans. The next phase is optimizing them for agents, and it likely will not be humans doing that optimization. LLMs themselves will design tools, representations, and workflows that suit agent cognition rather than human intuition.

Just as high-level languages bent machine code toward human needs, LLMs let us specify intent at a much higher level. From there, agents can shape the underlying systems to better serve their own strengths.

For now, engineers are still needed to provide rigor and clearly specify intent. As feedback loops shorten, we will see more imperfect systems refined through use rather than upfront design. The iteration looks less like careful planning and more like saying “I expected you to do ABC, not XYZ,” then correcting from there.

Re: The silent death of good code

#70

Post by willtemperley »

ElatedOwl wrote: post #31

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 wi…

LLMs also make refactoring for readability, simplicity and performance far easier.

Nothing has fundamentally changed! A good solution is a good solution.

I do worry that the mental health of developers will take a downturn if they’re forced into a brain rotting slop shovelling routine, however.

So yes readability and good concise code is still important.

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