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
I have not found it difficult to get these systems to write maintainable code. You're probably correct that most people don't care about this so they don't bother to do so. But IMO, this doesn't seem like a problem that is crying out for a solution.
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.
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗
aprilthird2021 · · focus · HN ↗