Pablo Restrepo Henao

Clean Code in the Era of LLMs: Do Good Practices Still Matter?

Instead, research from METR, CodeRabbit, and GitClear is converging on an uncomfortable truth: code duplication has quadrupled, copy-pasted code now exceeds moved code, bugs have risen 70%, and security issues have nearly tripled. AI didn't break our codebases. It amplified what was already broken. So what do we actually do about it? Do decades of hard-won engineering wisdom still apply when a model writes half the code, or do we need a new playbook entirely? Are clean code, SOLID, DDD, TDD, and the design patterns we've spent decades arguing about dead weight in the age of Claude Code and Copilot, or do they matter more than ever? This talk makes the case for the second answer. Your codebase is now a prompt: clean code leads to better AI suggestions, which make it easier to stay clean. Messy code leads to worse suggestions, which make it harder to recover. We'll walk through which practices now matter more (SOLID, DDD, TDD), which ones have quietly turned against you (hello, aggressive DRY and Abstract Factories), and how to collaborate with an LLM without becoming a rubber stamp for its output. You'll leave with a concrete framework, Adversarial Collaboration, that you can apply the next morning: generate, critique, refactor, verify. Not vibe coding. Not perfectionist prompting. Real engineering, just faster.