Basecamp 5 is live! And the new website is a throwback to a simpler time. Just show the damn product. Just list the features. Yes, it's agent accessible, but it's not agent hysteric. basecamp.com/

my typical input to codex is like: "okay I want to achieve X. but I can think of like 4 ways of doing it. if we do Y we have to deal with Z. if we do A we have to deal with B. I think? maybe? idk what I'm talking about. is there some way to do C without D? what do you think?"

I think the treshold for clean code has shifted now agents can maintain messier code more easy than humans. Speed at business value was always more important than clean code. But value speed decreases if you don’t (or didn’t) keep it clean. It’s not that clean code isn’t important anymore. But the criteria should be maintainability. Not clean code in itself. Agents can maintain messier code more easily now. So clean code has become less important. Clean code can still be wonderful in itself. But more as a form of art. Not as a form of necessity. Teach your agents to write clean code. And you’ll have the best of both worlds.

This year (probably closer to next 3 months) I think programmers should not see themselves as programmers anymore. Not even the kind that uses AI agents to “generate code” - that’s still programming, that’s still thinking your job is to “build stuff with characters on a screen”. I think this year programmers will more and more become “systems guardians / maintainers”. Guiding and guarding that what the end user / customer needs happens, in a dynamic environment where agents will generate most of the code, with real humans hardly inspecting it anymore. This means that your job as programmer will be creating / instructing agents and building workflows and environments where these agents will do it safely. And steer them left or right and nudge them where they go off the path. Keeping systems maintainable and reliable is your new job. In an environment where problems are solved at the speed of light. We used to care a lot about “well factored code” because humans had to maintain them. The human factor will mostly become obsolete. While I do think that a lot of maintainable code best practices are critical for agents to also keep doing their job. The importance of the “craft” of writing code for the humans may become obsolete very fast. The best programmers will know how to see the right path. And they will be the people who can instruct and teach agents at scale. But agents and LLMs will be the primary “audience” of writing or reading code now. So we should change our perspective of “what writing good code” means. Maintaining the stability, effectiveness, speed, etc of the whole system is now the job of programmers. Without perhaps ever writing a single line of code again.