Code Is No Longer Written for Humans

I used to think maintainability lived mostly inside the code. Good variable names. Clean abstractions. Small functions. Predictable file structure. A tasteful amount of comments. The goal was obvious: make sure the next developer could open the file, understand it quickly, and change it without breaking everything. That instinct is still fundamentally correct, now more than ever. It is just no longer enough. We knew it probably never was, but we got away with it for a long time because the next reader was always a human with implicit context. Over the last few months, I have spent a lot of time building software with AI coding agents. Not as autocomplete. Not as a novelty. As actual collaborators that read the codebase, propose changes, write implementation, run checks, and iterate. And that experience has changed how I think about what code is for. Here is the hot take: Code is no longer written primarily for humans to read line by line. It is increasingly written as the executable ou