AI Code Quality

Is Clean Code Dead?

August 12, 2026

Judging by LinkedIn and X, no one is writing code by typing anymore. Everyone's using AI coding tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor. Lately, things have gone even further. Now there's a heated debate about whether one should still read the code produced by the AI tools.

So if we're not reading the code anymore, does that mean that clean code is dead?

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What is clean code?

As nicely stated in Clean Code in Python, clean code is a set of rules and principles that help us keep our code readable, maintainable, and easy to extend. These rules might vary a bit from one language to another and from one team to another. Nevertheless, clean code is not the goal itself. Code is not clean just because it ticks every checkbox on the "Clean Code Questionnaire":

  • Did you apply DRY? -> Yes
  • Are all your functions shorter than X lines? -> Yes
  • Do you auto-format your code? -> Yes

"3x yes, your code is clean."

The main goal is to build software that customers love. The software that simply makes customers' problems go away. For this to be true, software needs to work reliably and needs to be able to adapt to the customers' needs over time. For example, no one wants to wait until the regulatory deadline to receive a software update that implements the new regulations. Also, no one wants to use software that's down for 7 hours a day. So clean code principles are there simply to help us reach the goal of building software that customers love.

You should own your output

How you get to such software is completely irrelevant. You can be handcrafting each line of code, going ballistic with AI agents, or anything in between. Whichever path you choose, you should own the output. Building 10 new features means nothing if you introduced a bug that cost the company more revenue than these 10 features can bring in. So use all the AI you can, but in the end you need to judge whether the output is worth having your signature and responsibility that comes with it.

If you can get there by adding more agents like QA, a code reviewer, and a common-sense reviewer, do that. If you feel like you can skip the code review, go ahead. Just make sure you really own it!

At Ren, we heavily use AI - it writes and reviews all the code. It's very helpful and makes us move faster than ever. On the other hand, we also see that it focuses too much on the implementation itself. Many times one needs to take two or even three steps back just to figure out that something can or should be done in a much simpler way. Or in a way with a smaller blast radius. Or that some MR needs to be split (despite being small) into two MRs to ensure reliability.

Similarly, one needs human judgment to see that, in one week, no one will know what the meaning of the 4th and 5th boolean elements in the tuple that control the flow downstream. We want to be in a state where we can easily continue our work even if they shut down all the AI tomorrow. Not because we're so afraid of AI being shut down. But because we own our code. We're the ones who need to miss Sunday gelato because our system goes down.

That's why we still do code reviews, and we'll continue to do so. We build it, we run it, and we fix it. And that's why we still need our code to be clean.

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Conclusion

To answer the initial question. No, I don't think Clean Code is dead. Actually, it's the opposite - it's more important than ever before. It's just that you can use AI to write it now.

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