Me Included

Every driver thinks that he is better than the average driver on the road. Ask programmers. 10 out of 10 will tell you that their code is better than average. Me included. Why does it matter? Because every programmer now says AI code is bad.

Is it? Depends on how you define good or bad. Ask 10 people and most likely you will get 10 different answers. Some will argue about strong typing, abstractions, design patterns, etc. I would say that pure functional code is good code. But that was not really about aesthetics. It was ergonomics. This was dictated by the biggest limitation that the code used to have - human cognition. Computers don’t care how many design patterns you use, or if your function is pure. Computers don’t see any of it anyways, all a CPU sees is machine instructions. But it mattered for humans. Good code was a code that humans could easily understand. And all the answers above were the correct answers to the same question. Different people have brains wired slightly different, their cognition style differs and that’s why their answers differ.

But now it does not matter. Now the entire paradigm has shifted. Capabilities of human cognition don’t define your code base quality. What matters now is if the code is correct. If it does what it is supposed to. Fixing bugs, developing new features, maintenance used to require deep understanding of the code by engineers. Line by line. That was the constraint for how fast we could build.

I tried to keep reading my code line by line, and make every line beautiful. But others don’t, so I can’t keep up. Their agent will have a different definition of good code and will eventually rewrite my carefully crafted lines anyway. Why bother? I stopped reading. Now the constraint is how well we can verify that agents generated correct code. So we are moving one level of abstraction up. Again. Structure still matters. Architecture is more important than ever before. But now tests are the boss.

Now every programmer says: “My agent’s code is better than your agent’s.” Me included.