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Bob Martin has built a career on asking the wrong questions. He is doing the same here as well.

I think Uncle Bob worship by OOP adherents is crazy, but I also think dismissing him this way is also crazy. His work on popularizing methods for writing good OOP is solid.

But at the end of the day, he's a guy with a long career in programming, which makes him significantly better than the median, but it doesn't make him three sigma above.

In this case, he's got a pretty good short- to medium-term argument that if you have a robust testing and verification suite, AI code that passes it all is a terrific outcome.

I'm really not convinced about long-term. Possibly, AI ends up writing even better in the future and we never have to worry about human maintainability.

But it's also possible AI is at/near its limit, and we'll always need human maintainers. In which case, incomprehensible vibe coding might be a problem.

You just have to make maintainability and readability explicit criteria at the strategic level and hold the AI accountable yourself, same as with testing and linting and the tactical level. Fable can generate code that is absolutely readable by a middle school kid, it'll just be less efficient at it than full jargon-laced fanciness, so finding the sweet spot isn't too hard.

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