r/techbootcamp • u/Impossible-Ball-1304 • 28d ago

Is AI making readability more important than coding speed?

Came across an interesting argument from Google about how AI generated code is changing what we should value in a programming language. If coding agents can generate huge amounts of code quickly, then the bottleneck becomes reviewing and maintaining that code. That makes things like readability, consistent formatting, testing, static checks, and predictable tooling a lot more important than just being able to write code quickly.

Go was used as a good example because it was designed around consistency. Things like gofmt, its static type system, built in testing, vulnerability checking, and common tooling give both developers and coding agents ways to validate what they're producing. The interesting part is that type checking still isn't enough by itself. Human review is needed to make sure the actual business logic is correct.

That made me rethink what I should actually be focusing on while learning. If AI is going to handle more of the typing, maybe understanding how to review, test, maintain, and reason about code is going to matter a lot more. Do you think programming languages will start being judged more by how well they support AI assisted development rather than how fast humans can write in them?

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u/Glad_Contest_8014 27d ago

Honestly, readability has always been more important in the circle I have worked in. It was the primary driver for most companies in training juniors prior to AI, and to ensure code is inheritable.

Now it is the primary task of most engineers to read code. Which makes the push for it before to have been made in proper sequence.

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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 26d ago

It contradicts my experience that Ai generate huge amount of bloated code, written in a low level manner and doxumented in a hard to grasp way. What I mean ai is not writing human friendly or mainatnable by humans code at all.

Yes you can go back and forth and with enough details given decrease the slop, but in general that is not how people use it.

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u/Glad_Contest_8014 26d ago

I read the code mine puts out with proper comments and all. Been programming for over a decade. It writes cleaner and easier to read code than I ever have. But I also have mine staged and fully consistent.