AI Agents Reward Boring Code. Stop Being Clever.
Your cleverest abstraction is the agent's blind spot. In the age of AI coding, legibility isn't a style preference — it's a measurable performance characteristic.
- AI coding agents reason over a context window and a pile of statistical priors. They thrive on conventional, explicit, locally-readable code and flail on clever indirection, metaprogramming, and hidden magic.
- Cleverness is context you forgot to write down. Every implicit behavior the agent can't see in the window is a fact it has to guess — and guessing is where it goes wrong.
- The codebase is the context. Boring, predictable, grep-able architecture isn't just kind to the next human — it directly raises your agent's success rate.
- This inverts a decade of "smart" engineering instincts. The clever abstraction that impressed reviewers in 2015 is now actively taxing your throughput.
- Agent success rate is the most honest legibility metric you've ever had. If the agent keeps...
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