Ask HN: Do you still read clean code and software architecture books?

Now that we have coding agents writing all our code for us, are you still needing to reach out and read books such as clean code and other software architecture books?

I think they are now more important than ever as there is more code being pushed out than one can read to see if it is robust as the agents claim.

5 points | by pelcg 1 hour ago

3 comments

  • boricj 27 minutes ago
    Just because coding agents can multiply our productivity doesn't mean that we should reduce ourselves to shoddy engineering, on the contrary.

    In fact, I see this as an opportunity to build anew and better. When you're no longer constrained by legacy baggage and constraints, you can collapse layers and introduce new ones that better fit what you're creating.

    I'm doing that in the project I'm working on at work. Being able to redefine how serialization/deserialization fundamentally works and interacts with domain objects is giving us unbelievable expressiveness, not by the amount of code written (in fact, it's heavily factorized across layers that were historically separate), but by exploring new designs paradigms.

    Don't just read these books. Write some new ones.

  • al_borland 22 minutes ago
    Agents still seem pretty bad at architecture. I still need to stay very much in control of how something is done, even if I have an LLM write some code here and there.

    For stand-alone bits of code where I don’t really care about the implementation, I will let an agent go wild. But for production code in the legacy code base, not a chance I’m doing that.

  • bjourne 34 minutes ago
    The only architecture advice you need is write short code and create few files. Now you know why LLMs mostly create mountains of trash.