Every new tool opens the door to new practices that were previously impossible, and LLMs have brought us Vibe Coding. The concept is simple: you describe an LLM what you want, and the LLM produces code. Then you play with your application, if it seems to work then you crack open a beer (or your beverage of choice); if it doesn't then you tell the LLM what the problem is and ask it to fix the code. It's a loop of refining the requirements over and over until the LLM gets it right without ever loo
The moment at which I knew this article couldn’t be taken seriously came later than expected, but here it is
How does one measure code quality? I’m a big advocate of linting, and have used rules including cyclomatic complexity, but is that, or tools such as SonarQube, an effective measure of quality? You can code that passes those checks, but what if it doesn’t address the acceptance criteria - is it still quality code then?
What if we don’t define code quality in terms of the aesthetics of that code?
Why is the perception of code quality so important prior to that code ever having been executed?
How can we test our code? What does it’s testability tell us? What do it’s tests tell us?
Is our test code good quality? Does it need to be? How can we know it is? Is it’s quality measured by the same metrics as the code it is testing?
‘Clean Code’ by Uncle Bob is a good place to start when answering these questions.
And here I was, almost agreeing. Clean code is defining quality through aesthetics, and that book is a very bad advice of how to define anything
That’s a very narrow definition of the contents of the book.