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> 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.

discuss

AlexCoventry|7 days ago

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/

Quothling|7 days ago

> 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.

xyzsparetimexyz|7 days ago

> If anything, I think AI will increase human understanding

How?

hansmayer|6 days ago

Code reviews are pseudo-science now? Computer unfriendly code? What are you talking about? Do you understand that this babble makes zero sense ? Are you one of those product managers who recently learned to vibe-code? If so, make sure your latest Replit project does not delete your production database..