❧ Alex Nedelcu writes that “people and organizations falling into the trap of no longer reading and writing code only do so at their peril.”
Fact is, vibe-coded projects devolve over time into an unmaintainable mess. The reason is simple, yet hard to fix: code maintainability and good architecture don’t have good measurements that we can apply, because it takes months, years even, to notice the effects of bad architecture or of unmaintainable code.
This is a valid concern that developers (and especially professional ones) should take seriously. However, I wonder if AI won’t just advance further so that it can account for this. It was only a year or two ago that LLMs couldn’t reliably count the letters in “strawberry” or do basic arithmetic without falling apart — now they pass a lot of competition-math and even research-level problem benchmarks. So, maybe people won’t have to read code again.