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The silent death of good code

amit.prasad.me

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Re: The silent death of good code

#91

Post by yoyohello13 »

OptionOfT wrote: post #86
EPWN3D wrote: post #79

No one likes good code because it takes a lot of upfront time. - PMs hate it because you're busy putting up scaffolding instead of painting - Managers hate it because they have to cover for it - Other engineers hate it because they could be doing it better - VPs and directors hate it because they can't think beyond the release cycle, so the engineer is an architecture astronaut who should focus There is basically no…

I like good code because it makes me not get pinged at 2AM when things fall over.

Right. Honestly if we just put managers in the on call rotation code quality would go up real quick.

Re: The silent death of good code

#95

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

bfung wrote: post #35

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-an…

All artificial things that we make are rough inside. Yet the living things are not, they are beautiful on every level. And above the mere survival needs we do have a yearn for the same quality in what we make.

Re: The silent death of good code

#96

Post by cadamsdotcom »

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…

> Good code was approximately never valued in enterprise.

Nope, the value the code creates was always what was valued.

Now we can refactor more easily than ever. And quite a lot of code was throwaway to begin with.. so there’s no need to deliver good code. Not in the first iteration. But if it is going to be improved upon, part of the improvement will be to prepare it for that improvement.

Re: The silent death of good code

#97

Post by aurareturn »

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…

I don’t worry about clean code anymore because I expect the model to read it in the future, not me personally.

Re: The silent death of good code

#99

Post by ahartmetz »

nemothekid wrote: post #88
amitprasad wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Perhaps the frontier models of 2026H2 may be good enough to start compacting and cleaning up entire codebases I don't think this will happen - or rather I don't think you can ask someone, human or machine, to come in and "compact and clean" your codebase. What is "clean" code depends on your assumptions, constraints, and a guess about what the future will require. Modularity where none is required becomes boilerpla…

Paying down tech debt doesn't necessarily take any knowledge of future changes. Code with tech debt didn't even handle past changes well. You can usually make future changes easier just by improving how the code does what it currently does.

Re: The silent death of good code

#100

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

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…

By good code people mean extensible usually (growth), not performant. Performant code has different value,often lower than extensible in eneterprise saas.
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