One thing that's stuck with me recently is the word elegance.
I started using it as an input when talking to any LLM. The output is just better. More than any other term, this might be the best all-purpose word that makes an AI agent produce something worth reading. But that made me think. Why does it work? What is elegance actually asking for?
By definition: the quality of being graceful and attractive in appearance or behaviour.
That's what humans strive for. But seldom do.
Think about all the dirty code you've written. The non-standardized shortcuts taken to just make it work. The config nobody documented. The service that one person understands and everyone else is afraid to touch. Until a year ago, all of that could be justified in the name of velocity. If it works, it's alright. Right?
No. It's not. The one who wrote it knows more than anyone that it's not alright. It's just delaying the inevitable. This isn't a new habit. Companies have been doing this for decades. All companies, till date, are doing this.
The junk problem
Now every company is setting up AI infrastructure to build their own dark factories. Autonomous pipelines. AI agents doing the work of whole teams. The pitch is compelling.
But most of them are going to build it on top of all the junk humans created. And I believe most of them will fail because of it. You can't automate your way out of a mess you never cleaned up. The agents will reflect the system. And the system is not elegant.
What elegance actually looks like
The best example I've found is open source maintainers. The good ones.
When you interact with them, they demand quality and hygiene as if it's non-negotiable. For them, it is. They don't have deadlines. They don't have stakeholders breathing down their necks. They just want the thing to be done right and to actually be useful to other people. No shortcuts. No "we'll fix it later."
What a different way to build.
The ask
Our AI infrastructure should be held to the same standard. No trying to make it fit somehow. No duct tape. No "it works on my machine."
This sounds utopian. I know. But I'd argue it's the only way. The companies that rush AI infra onto years of accumulated technical debt aren't building dark factories. They're just automating the mess. More output. Same chaos.
The ones who get it right will be the ones who treated elegance not as an aesthetic preference, but as a hard requirement.
And not just for code. Work in general. More standardisation. A trail of decisions. Less offhand deals. Less middle-manager politics that exist to patch over systems that should have been designed better to begin with.
Elegance isn't a finishing touch. It's the foundation. The ones who build on anything less are just choosing a slower way to fail.