alt Hacker News> Once you can ask your agent to change a feature and be 100% sure they won't break other features then you don't care about how the code looks like.
That bar is unreasonably high.
Right now, if I ask a senior engineer to change a feature in a mature codebase, I only have perhaps 70% certainty they won't break other features. Tests help, but only so far.
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But if push come to shove any other engineer can come in and debug your senior engineer code. That's why we insist on people creating easy to change code.
With auto generated code which almost no one will check or debug by hand, you want at least compiler level exactitude. Then changing "the code" is as easy as asking your code generator for new things. If people have to debug its output, then it does not help in making maintainable software unless it also generates "good" code.
This bar only seems high because the bar in most companies is already unreasonably low. We had decades of research into functional programming, formal methods and specification languages. However, code monkey culture was cheaper and much more readily available. Enterprise software development has always been a race to the bottom, and the excitement for "vibe coding" is just the latest manifestation of its careless, thoughtless approach to programming.