Good Code

Perhaps counterintuitively, in a world with AI coding agents, great codebases are more important than before. You'll hear business people opining that "the code doesn't matter anymore" or "the cost of producing software is going to zero," but those are uninformed opinions from non-technical people. Sorry not sorry.

Agents primarily want to finish the task in front of them. They do not inherently care about:

• The engineer who will read this code two months from now
• The next task in your Jira backlog that will build on this change
• The function on line 117 that seems to do nothing, but which Steve said NOT TO TOUCH because prod breaks in weird ways if you delete it

It's your job to care about that stuff. You have much more than a single ephemeral window of context about your codebase, team, company, and users.

Two Truths

1. AI agents can make you more productive in a great codebase.
2. AI agents can turn a good codebase into a bad one rapidly.

Aiming the Slop Cannon

When you prompt, be sure to demand things that you care about:

• Minimal diffs
• Existing patterns over novelty
• Clear naming conventions

But just asking the clanker is still not enough. You always have to review the code, understand the architecture of the project, and yes, very often you will still need to force the agent to go down a different path from what it initially thought was best.