alt Hacker NewsThere'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.
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> 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.
Yes. But I think the idea is without "hand written domain driven design development" the result trends to "vibe coded by someone with no technical knowledge or inclination," as developers de-skill.
I agree that "maintainability" is the wrong place to stake one's flag. It's a technical problem and will probably be overcome. The "lack of wisdom" in AI coded projects which does not strike me as a soluble technical problem concerns questions like: which software is worth writing and which isn't? How are tradeoffs evaluated? I don't think AIs are structurally capable of answering these questions in the same way humans are. But they make those decisions anyway!
//There's a continuum between "vibe coded by someone with no technical knowledge or inclination" and "hand written domain driven design development".
Somewhere in the middle of that continuum sits - "domain driven specifications, described using high level english concepts(that are well defined) from the domain , combined with a selection of a few standard architectures"
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.
I find it funny how you can pick examples on one side of the spectrum and then generalize to the entire spectrum.
Induction fallacy at its best
> 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
> But yes, the coding agents will not magically make everything maintainable if you don't tell them to.
You say that like adding "Make it maintainable." to your prompts solves the problem. But the reality is we only have weak metrics for measuring maintainability. For example, you can trivially optimize for Cyclomatic complexity by blowing away abstractions and duplicating code everywhere. That doesn't make the code better. Cyclomatic complexity is a tool that has to be applied judiciously.
That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't use AI to generate code. But it does mean if you want your project to scale, you're still going to need a lot of developer involvement at the code level to ensure the code remains maintainable so that future developers can build on top of it. AI is not like compilers, which allow developers to build complex solutions without being proficient at the next level down (assembly).
The author admits to a measurement: maintainability. There are quantitative and qualitative ways to measure this, the biggest signal being outright abandonment
> But yes, the coding agents will not magically make everything maintainable if you don't tell them to.
But that's not actually a change. Humans wouldn't magically make everything maintainable if you don't tell them to (and maybe not even if you do). You have to monitor them and train them, carefully, basically forever.
> 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.
The trillion dollar question is how you do this, if your employees do not care (they are optimising for salary & time spent not code quality) and you have no way of telling apart AI slop vs. good maintainable code. (If you could you would just train the AI.)
Before AI there was at least some way to tell apart good programmers from bad, because there was some human effort involved in coding. Now with AI and slop generation there is almost now way to do this.
You can, but nobody does. Of course, there's a lot of non-AI slop too. (Hello systemd)
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> But yes, the coding agents will not magically make everything maintainable if you don't tell them to.
Yet.
I'm sure in few years, as new criteria enter benchmarks, AI will be creating the clearest and smartest code people every seen, by default.
Plenty of measurements exist, but the trick, as the article said, is finding good measurements.
Cyclomatic complexity has been pretty solidly discredited within the maintainability research community for decades.
Sonar's cognitive complexity metric is a bit better, but here's a study that found that it still only has about a 0.5 correlation with how much difficulty programmers actually had reading code as measured by multiple methods.
They found that the most accurate way to measure code complexity that didn't involve something like an eye tracker or EEG is still basically just vibes - asking programmers if they thought it was hard to understand.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...
Halstead Effort came in second, and scored pretty well, but here's another one where it doesn't do so well, either. And it scores the SonarQube metrics even worse, with only a 0.35 correlation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01641...