The silent death of good code
amit.prasad.me
The silent death of good code
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Re: The silent death of good code
#2The worst part of vibe coding, and developers as managers of "agents"
AI is at best a good intern or a new junior developer. We're locking in mediocrity and continuing enshittification. "Good enough" is codified as good enough, and nothing will be good or excellent. Non-determinism, and some amount of inaccuracy on the margins continually, no matter the industry or task at hand including finance, just so we can avoid paying a person to do the job
Re: The silent death of good code
#3The 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.
Re: The silent death of good code
#4The worst part of vibe coding, and developers as managers of "agents" AI is at best a good intern or a new junior developer. We're locking in mediocrity and continuing enshittification. "Good enough" is codified as good enough, and nothing will be good or excellent. Non-determinism, and some amount of inaccuracy on the margins continually, no matter the industry or task at hand including finance, just so we can avoid…
We’re not locking in anything, “at best a good intern or new junior developer” was maybe true at like sonnet 4 and earlier. Code is not codified it’s living. Models of tomorrow will correct the model outputs of today. At some point alarmingly soon, no one will read code just like nobody reads the assembly output of a C compiler.
Non determinism and inaccuracy are also very real features of human programmers.
Re: The silent death of good code
#5The worst part of vibe coding, and developers as managers of "agents" AI is at best a good intern or a new junior developer. We're locking in mediocrity and continuing enshittification. "Good enough" is codified as good enough, and nothing will be good or excellent. Non-determinism, and some amount of inaccuracy on the margins continually, no matter the industry or task at hand including finance, just so we can avoid…
We’re not locking in anything, “at best a good intern or new junior developer” was maybe true at like sonnet 4 and earlier. Code is not codified it’s living. Models of tomorrow will correct the model outputs of today. At some point alarmingly soon, no one will read code just like nobody reads the assembly output of a C compiler. Non determinism and inaccuracy are also very real features of human programmers.
yeah a lot of people are just coping. If someone wants to become better or more productive, invest in engineering guardrails and verifications validation layers.
There are thousand of examples where tech became obsolute and frankly it’s given. No coders opinion will change it, but everybody is free to do what ever hobby the want. Author does seem to accept it, but commentor above not.
Re: The silent death of good code
#6This 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 tried to test if Claude could add new features on the old code. Opus 4.5 just could not add the feature in the legacy module (which was a monster function that just got feature-crept), but was able to completely one shot it after the refactor.
So there is clear value in having "clean code", but I'm not sure how valuable it is. If even AGI cannot handle tech debt, then there's value is at least building scaffolding (or atleast prompting the scaffolding first). On the other hand there may be a future where the human doesn't concern himself with "clean code" at all: if the value of "clean code" only saves 5 minutes to a sufficiently advanced agent, the scaffolding work is usefuless.
My reference is assembly - I'm in my early 30s and I have never once cared about "clean" assembly. I have cared about the ASM of specific hot functions I have had to optimize, but I've never learned what is proper architecture for assembly programs.
Re: The silent death of good code
#7The worst part of vibe coding, and developers as managers of "agents" AI is at best a good intern or a new junior developer. We're locking in mediocrity and continuing enshittification. "Good enough" is codified as good enough, and nothing will be good or excellent. Non-determinism, and some amount of inaccuracy on the margins continually, no matter the industry or task at hand including finance, just so we can avoid…
The good thing is that now instead to spend 6 months - 1 year working on your app and making sure the code is just perfect you spend just a 1 or two , generate some garbage code but at least publish your app before you burn out. Once it gains some traction like it or not you gonna have to "fix the code" as well. I feel that AI is really a blessing for good programmers/coders because they start to focus more on the business of what they build than on the code.
Re: The silent death of good code
#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 down and understand. LLMs are fantastic for POCs _which then get rewritten_. Meaning: the point is to rewrite it, by hand. Even if this is not as fast as shipping the POC and pretending everything is ok (don't do this!) it still drastically speeds up the software engineering pipeline and has the potential to increase Good Code overall.
A perfectly reasonable rule in software organizations is: For greenfield code, LLMs are strictly required for 1st-pass prototyping (also required!). And then: Hand writes (within reason) for production code. Your company will not lose their competitive edge following this guideline, and this includes your hard-earned skills.
Re: The silent death of good code
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’re not locking in anything, “at best a good intern or new junior developer” was maybe true at like sonnet 4 and earlier. Code is not codified it’s living. Models of tomorrow will correct the model outputs of today. At some point alarmingly soon, no one will read code just like nobody reads the assembly output of a C compiler. Non determinism and inaccuracy are also very real features of human programmers.
yeah a lot of people are just coping. If someone wants to become better or more productive, invest in engineering guardrails and verifications validation layers. There are thousand of examples where tech became obsolute and frankly it’s given. No coders opinion will change it, but everybody is free to do what ever hobby the want. Author does seem to accept it, but commentor above not.
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Re: The silent death of good code
#10> Good Cirquits
Afaic, people designing circuits still do care about that.
> Good Assembly
The thing with the current state of coding is that we are not replacing "Coding Java" with something else. We are replacing it with "Coding Java via discussion". And that can be fine at times but it still is a game of diminishing returns. LLMs still make surprising mistakes, they too often forget specifics, make naive assumptions and happily follow along local minima. All of the above lead to inflated codebases in the long run which leads to bogged down projects and detached devs.