Will Code Readability Matter In The Future?

I was watching this Twitch story today with two developers I really respect — Jeffrey Way and Enuno Maduro and they were discussing what a developers job will look like in two years.

Jeffrey explained that he already sees a difference between the way the ‘older’ generation approaches code and the newer generation coming in. The older generation is all about clean code, readability and making maintainable code that will be easy to update.

However, with AI making more and more advancements and the token availability becoming higher and higher is this really something we will have to be concerned with?

I think this is actually a really good question and one we should think about.

For me, it’s a question of whether or not generative AI in the not too distant future will take full control of the code. Meaning the actual writing of the code will be totally up to the AI. Developers will still have control over direction and architecture but all the code itself will be written by AI.

If AI will write all the code then code generation becomes very cheap (relatively), code readability doesn’t really matter and maintainability will be left up to the AI.

Is this a good idea?