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Comment by peder | Hacker News Reader

Sooooo much of what is considered "code quality" today is irrelevant when robots are writing the code. We've been largely optimizing for things like composability/unit testability in the past 15 or so years, and that's primarily a human concern that's unrelated to the final output.

Totally agreed that we're not looking at the correct metric right now. Increasingly, code quality will be determined by outcomes.

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> that's primarily a human concern that's unrelated to the final output.

It's an LLM concern too. LLMs seem to do better with well-organized codebases, just like the humans they were trained on.

I don’t agree with this. The things people care about with code quality if you really think about it actually match up surprisingly well with the metric which models are trained to emulate in pre training, namely compression and modularity. Those two ideas actually seem to be universal to intelligent systems. Writing verbose highly coupled code is I think provably stupid, though I don’t know that I could formalize it.

I think Martin F's team tied outcomes to factoring https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/refactori... which is crucial to code quality. Even grug brain developer agree.

On the other hand, there are claims that the best languages for robots tend to be terse (allegedly); I tend to regard a rich domain model (static types, not terse) as a major facet of high-quality code.

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