Post #2189067

2026-04-02 14:36 UTC

Code quality has always been ONE factor; it’s never been always the most important. Eg we often accept complex internals as the price for a clean external API; and we all write sloppy code for one-offs, prototypes, etc. So part of me accepts the “code quality doesn’t matter” argument. I can see a vision of agentic engineering with systems that prove correctness; if an agent produces code that is provably correct, maybe the quality really doesn’t matter! (2/5)

Replies (2)

@jacob@social.jacobian.org 2026-04-02 14:36

I’m far from convinced that this is actually possible. It’s certainly not now — and I’m not talking about models. Testing and verification tools are nowhere near where they’d need to be, regardless of model quality. Today, code quality DOES still matter; even the best-case version of agentic engineering can’t produce code that’ll never require maintenance. But I can see a possible future where code quality might not matter, or will matter a lot less, and that’s FASCINATING. (3/5)

Open ##2189068
@chrisjrn@social.coop 2026-04-03 01:24

@jacob@social.jacobian.org Jumping on one specific thing: Rice's Theorem means that any "interesting" program has limits on the extent of static analysis, so "provably correct" is not a thing you can get. The things that would improve product quality the most are things that provably can't actually be automated in the general case. Those are the limits we have to reckon with.

Open ##2189111