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.
> 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.
The trillion dollar question is how you do this, if your employees do not care (they are optimising for salary & time spent not code quality) and you have no way of telling apart AI slop vs. good maintainable code. (If you could you would just train the AI.)
Before AI there was at least some way to tell apart good programmers from bad, because there was some human effort involved in coding. Now with AI and slop generation there is almost now way to do this.
> if your employees do not care (they are optimising for salary & time spent not code quality)...
From what I see is it's mainly managers and higher brass who doesn't care about code quality and sustainability, and aims to drive time to market metrics down aggressively with AI.
Any employee who cares about code quality will become a poor performer with a red luddite label because they dare to change what the AI has emitted for them.
I'd love to be wrong, very wrong about this, actually.
> Any employee who cares about code quality will become a poor performer with a red luddite label because they dare to change what the AI has emitted for them.
I think that's true but it's a special case. AI is here to stay and with AI coding IS faster and quality is better than ever before. Ideally you want your luddite fired along with the slop generators and keep the ones who are using AI and taking their time to deliver a maintainable code.
Chances are high the luddite is the one with the deepest understanding about the product and the code base - the one who is actually passionate about the project and actually cares.
That could be the case. But if other companies figure out a way to deliver good code with AI, then the company with the luddites is going bankrupt. Luddites are better than slop generators, but both are worse against a developer with AI who actually cares and has a deep understanding of the code base and programming.
Well, and that's how you get enshittification everywhere. Everyone just cares about time to market, consumers are left to drown among a sea of slop, and honest businesses go down because they cannot stand a chance against slop peddlers flush with VC money.
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.
abroszka33 · · focus · HN ↗
The trillion dollar question is how you do this, if your employees do not care (they are optimising for salary & time spent not code quality) and you have no way of telling apart AI slop vs. good maintainable code. (If you could you would just train the AI.)
Before AI there was at least some way to tell apart good programmers from bad, because there was some human effort involved in coding. Now with AI and slop generation there is almost now way to do this.
bayindirh · · focus · HN ↗
From what I see is it's mainly managers and higher brass who doesn't care about code quality and sustainability, and aims to drive time to market metrics down aggressively with AI.
Any employee who cares about code quality will become a poor performer with a red luddite label because they dare to change what the AI has emitted for them.
I'd love to be wrong, very wrong about this, actually.
abroszka33 · · focus · HN ↗
I think that's true but it's a special case. AI is here to stay and with AI coding IS faster and quality is better than ever before. Ideally you want your luddite fired along with the slop generators and keep the ones who are using AI and taking their time to deliver a maintainable code.
mschuster91 · · focus · HN ↗
abroszka33 · · focus · HN ↗
zxor · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think companies are living and dying, by how much code they can produce. Even tech companies.
abroszka33 · · focus · HN ↗
mschuster91 · · focus · HN ↗
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗
mschuster91 · · focus · HN ↗