Ask HN: Does code style matter much anymore?
A discussion post questioning whether code style and readability conventions remain important in an era of AI-generated code, prompted by reviewing junior developer code that works functionally but violates project conventions.
With the advent of agent generated code, everyone's seeing a lot of code generated, in part at least, with the help of the agent. I'm currently reviewing some code done by a junior developer. It's in a somewhat legacy (6 years old?) Swift code base. The submission is out of step with the conventions of the rest of the code base, and has lots of "best practice" things, but that aren't really relevant to the current problem. And the object design is terrible.
But, the code works fine and fits the desired bill.
I find myself wondering, in an age where LLMs reason about and generate the code, how much value should I place in code/structure readability? It's a very intrinsic value for me. But maybe this is a case where one's aged experience becomes a liability, where spaghetti code isn't a problem anymore of the LLMs reason about code differently. What are others doing?