Post #2189082
2026-04-03 04:53 UTC
@jacob@social.jacobian.org I think this is a subtle category error, in the sense that "readability" (and "code quality" more generally) is a transitive adjective. Readable to whom? High quality according to whose taste? We strive for an "objective" sense of code quality because the audience we are usually addressing is the pool of potential candidates who may become future maintainers of the code, and that's a nebulous group. But, that group's nebulousness eventually must be removed as it becomes "the current team"
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@glyph@mastodon.social 2026-04-03 04:59
@jacob@social.jacobian.org all of that is to say: the reason readability matters is that if you want to maintain some code, some specific group of humans must maintain an understanding of its structure, such that they can effectuate *and be held accountable for* required changes. The putative cost reduction of an "agentic" tool inherently assumes that you can shrink that group by replacing some of them with LLMs. Maybe, eventually, some will be able to. But ultimately *somebody* still needs to read all the code.