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.
Those metrics don't amount to wisdom. Wisdom is something like realizing that you don't have to special-case some code over <here>, you just need to create a new reusable primitive over <there> that fixes two bugs with one stone, and you'd probably wind up needing it anyway. Both bits of code could sail through all the measurements of code maintainability you could come up with, and an agent suggest to me the brittle solution, but I came up with the more maintainable one.
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.
dualvariable · · focus · HN ↗