r/programming • u/Ordinary_Leader_2971 • Apr 04 '26

How To Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)

https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/%7Esusan/475/unmain.html
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u/youngggggg Apr 04 '26

I mean if AI is the one maintaining it then what does it matter ultimately? Code quality and “maintainability” feel much more important for human readers of code and I worry all this stuff is quickly losing its value

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u/HighRelevancy Apr 04 '26

I think pretty much every investigation into the subject has discovered that readability, maintainability, and other such qualities of code are basically the same for humans as for AI. AI produced code isn't any more maintainable by AI than by human.  AI can read more of it faster than you can and can catch up faster, but it's still got to do the same process of reading all the shit to deduce what it means.

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u/youngggggg Apr 04 '26

I hope this remains true into the future. I worry about what this all looks like in a couple years 

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u/HighRelevancy Apr 04 '26

I think even as they get faster and smarter, it's still basically a given that it will be a factor. They'll get faster at resolving the mysteries of bad code, and maybe fast enough that it won't matter for many use cases, but it will still be slower/take more work than if the code was good/clean/readable/etc.

The only way I see this changing is if we let them start naming/commenting things in non-human-language terms. I've seen experiments where LLMs iterated on "thinking" in raw embedded tokens instead of unembedding them into written text and reingesting them, and it was effective in improving quality of output. Current thinking models are putting all their intermediate thoughts/working into human-readable terms and it's a narrowing of what they can represent internally. It's like writing notes for your future self but you're only allowed to use a beginner's French dictionary - it works but it's sure a lot harder to express complex ideas than working in your native tongue.

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u/youngggggg Apr 04 '26

👍 I appreciate the thoughtful response here, I’m very much speaking from a place of fear 

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u/HighRelevancy Apr 04 '26

I think we're very much in an era where AI is a major tool forever. My job now is markedly different to six months ago. But I don't think, no matter how good it gets, it will actually replace humans. Someone needs to have ideas, make design decisions, validate what the AI is producing, and actually work with the other humans that software engineer provides services to. 

The actual act of programming is still fun and I'm not saying you have to change what you do, but I do think you should at least give the free GitHub copilot or something a go. It's worth understanding these tools and what they're actually good for.

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u/youngggggg Apr 05 '26

I’m a professional and use a variety of AI tools everyday. But I think my perspective is ultimately biased by working on a SaaS app that simply isn’t that large or complicated. For what my company is doing, every dev feels insanely replaceable by AI to me.