Lauren Tan：智能体写代码时代需要更新对好代码的定义

it's very interesting how many replies i've gotten about maintainability and clean code being still important. i would argue that that is no longer true and we all need to update our priors on what Good Code really means in 2026.

clean code has always come at a cost - performance. indirection and making code readable/understandable for a human is not free, it often comes at the cost of worse performance. we have historically been okay with this because of Moore's Law and the fact that most code is not on the hot path.

these principles also came from a time where humans maintained code. it made sense to optimize for humans then, but it makes less sense now when agents are already writing all the code. we will in fact probably discover and come up with new principles: principles of agent friendly architecture (i plan to write more thoughts about this soon)