The Codebase Is the Agent's Working Environment

Agents generate code in seconds, so investing in code quality looks obsolete. My daily work with agents shows the opposite. Every session starts by reading the existing code, and its quality decides how productive the session is. Agents amplify the local style. LLMs match the surrounding code. Clear conventions get reproduced, and so does degradation: in a codebase full of Manager s and Impl s,…