alt Hacker News> Here's what I mean by "good code":
> [...]
> - It’s simple and minimal - it does only what’s needed, in a way that both humans and machines can understand now and maintain in the future.
But do the humans need to actually understand the code? A "yes" means the bottleneck is understanding (code review, code inspection). A "no" means you can go faster, but at some risk.
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> But do the humans need to actually understand the code? A "yes" means the bottleneck is understanding (code review, code inspection). A "no" means you can go faster, but at some risk.
I always thought of things like code reviews as semi pseudo-science in most cases. I've sat through meetings where developers obviously understand the code that they are reviewing, but where they didn't understand anything about the system as a whole. If your perfect function pulls on 800 external dependencies that you trust. Trust because it's too much of a hazzle to go through them. I'd argue that in this situation you don't understand your code at all. I don't think it matters and I certainly don't think I'm better than anyone else in this regard. I only know how things work when it matters.
If anything, I think AI will increase human understanding without the need to write computer unfriendly code like "Clean Code", "DRY" and so on.
OpenAI is implying that code may no longer be human readable in some circumstances.
> The resulting code does not always match human stylistic preferences, and that’s okay. As long as the output is correct, maintainable, and legible *to future agent runs*, it meets the bar.
https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/