There's a continuum between "vibe coded by someone with no technical knowledge or inclination" and "hand written domain driven design development". You can absolutely use coding agents AND have maintainable code. But yes, the coding agents will not magically make everything maintainable if you don't tell them to.
"Code maintainability and good architecture don’t have good measurements that we can apply"
Who has no wisdom? There are dozens of ways to measure code maintainability. Cyclomatic complexity is just one.
Nothing stops you from wiring up something like SonarQube metrics to your agentic coding workflow.
> yes, the coding agents will not magically make everything maintainable if you don't tell them to.
There's the rub. It requires knowing about and caring about maintainability. And a lot of the people who "haven't written a line of code since 2025" don't care
Humans aren't magical, so if people can figure out what maintainable code is and how to write it, so can a non-human. Furthermore, humans are rather unlikely to be the optimal form of intelligence for software architecture and engineering, so it's almost certainly the case that if humans can figure it out, some non-human could do it better. That it's not yet solved by models suggests that it's not easy and maybe even not practically achievable with current tools. But that's not the same thing as not solvable.
> Furthermore, humans are rather unlikely to be the optimal form of intelligence for software architecture and engineering
I like this framing. Humans invented software (and engineering in general) as a means to solve problems with methods that work best for us. There may be entirely different, and parallel, problem-solving methodologies outside of human best-practices.
davedx · · focus · HN ↗
"Code maintainability and good architecture don’t have good measurements that we can apply"
Who has no wisdom? There are dozens of ways to measure code maintainability. Cyclomatic complexity is just one.
Nothing stops you from wiring up something like SonarQube metrics to your agentic coding workflow.
aprilthird2021 · · focus · HN ↗
There's the rub. It requires knowing about and caring about maintainability. And a lot of the people who "haven't written a line of code since 2025" don't care
datsci_est_2015 · · focus · HN ↗
I’m beginning to believe that if this was a “solvable” problem then the billions of dollars poured into coding agents would have solved it by now.
thfuran · · focus · HN ↗
datsci_est_2015 · · focus · HN ↗
I like this framing. Humans invented software (and engineering in general) as a means to solve problems with methods that work best for us. There may be entirely different, and parallel, problem-solving methodologies outside of human best-practices.