> It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory.

> I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI.

I agree, and I've been thinking similarly. But I don't think there's anything "new" about what understandable and well-factored code should look like. It's the same principles as ever.

A lot of agent-written code looks like what you'd get if you gave an enthusiastic human slightly too many stimulants and asked them to take the shortest path to reach the goal. Plausibly this is just a result of the LLMs not being "smart enough" to do any better, but I think there's also an incentives problem. How do you reward human-understandability in benchmarks and unsupervised training?