alt Hacker NewsWhy would you care about architecture? It was an issue when humans were writing code so architecture mattered in the sense that you needed a sweet spot between current requirements and future extensions.
The agent can rewrite half your codebase in one day, so architecture stops mattering for the most part.
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Almost all scalability and performance optimization is architectural in nature. AI writing the code doesn't eliminate this concern.
Some apps don't care about scalability and performance but many do. Ignoring architecture all but guarantees inefficient, wasteful software.
Why try to make things that are good? Why care about anything? Why not just turn our minds over to the machines, and let them rock us to sleep like babies?
An agent can rewrite a small codebase in half a day, I have millions of lines of code - it can't rewrite that in half a day.
Abstractions. They make it easier for a human to understand. We need abstractions to fit systems into our working memory. Agents dont.
How are you going to read the code if it's not structured in a way you understand?
Mhh I've tried one-shotting double buffered IO a few times and it just can't do it. Maybe it's a prompting issue, maybe LLM's have a hard time with thinking about parallel processes.
I'll create a simple "framework" of what I know works. After that's there the LLM is fantastic.
Why would you care about architecture? Ability to implement the current feature, ability to implement future features, maintainability, and (at least sometimes) performance.
But why would you care when an AI can just rewrite it? Yes, but can it rewrite it to a good architecture? Or just to a different one?
Does a good architecture make code easier for an AI to maintain? I don't know, but I think it's at least not proven that it doesn't.
Because even if the rewrite worked, and worked perfectly, you've (a) lost a day, and (b) there's no guarantee that you won't have to do that all over again in a few days' time, because you're still not thinking about the architecture.
But if the codebase is large enough, and if you don't have tests for everything, you'll likely lose stuff along the way. So you'll then spend at least another day tidying up the rewrite, just getting it back to where you were two days ago.
Does that sound like fun? Wouldn't it be easier to just plan it correctly the first time?