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One truism about coding agents is that they struggle to work with bad code. Code quality matters as much as always, the experts say, and AI agents (left unfette
by bccdee 6mo ago
One truism about coding agents is that they struggle to work with bad code. Code quality matters as much as always, the experts say, and AI agents (left unfettered) produce bad code at an unprecedented rate. That's why good practices matter so much! If you use specs and test it like so and blah blah blah, that makes it all sustainable. And if anyone knows how to do it right, presumably it's Anthropic.
This codebase has existed for maybe 18 months, written by THE experts on agentic coding. If it is already unintelligible, that bodes poorly for how much it is possible to "accelerate" coding without taking on substantial technical debt.
- tedmiston 6mo agoi think you are conflating anthropic (the startup) with claude code (the leaked source of one of said startup's products) i.e., the claude code codebase doesn't need to be good right now [^1] — so i don't think the assumption that this is an exemplary product / artifact of expert agentic coding actually holds up here specifically [^1]: the startup graveyard is full of dead startups with good code
- bccdee 6mo agoI'm not taking a "zero technical debt" stance. Every successful startup eventually ends up treating their 1.0 codebase as a legacy burden. That's the cost of doing business, but it is a real cost. If Anthropic could have kept their code quality high with a few clever tricks and a few extra tokens, surely they would have. So I take this whole episode as confirmation that code which is subject to high-velocity low-supervision work by agents decays quickly even under ideal circumstances.