The obituary writes itself: in the vibe coding era, AI writes the code and mostly AI reads it, so clean code — a discipline for human readers — is dead. The obituary confuses two different things that happened to share one name.
Clean code was always two bundles stapled together. The first bundle is presentation: rules for a human scanning a page. Line width — keep it under 120 columns. Long, explicit, self-describing names. Never use a switch statement. These rules existed because a person had to hold the code in their eyes and in their head at reading speed. If the reader is now a model that does not get tired and does not skim, this bundle genuinely loses its point. Let it go; I won't miss it.
The second bundle was never about reading at all. High cohesion. Low coupling. The SOLID principles. Strip the textbook language and these rules govern something else entirely: where knowledge lives, and how far a change is allowed to travel. One fact in one place. A boundary that decides what may be known from outside. That is not typography. That is information governance.
And governance does not care who holds the pen. The failure mode it prevents is shotgun surgery: a single logical change that has to be made in many scattered places. A human editing scattered places will miss one — everyone who has maintained a codebase has the scar. A model will miss one too. Its miss rate may be lower; it is not zero. Every scattered site is an independent roll of the dice.
The point of the structural rules is to stop rolling. Make the change have exactly one home, and the miss stops being unlikely and becomes impossible. A structural guarantee is 100%; vigilance, human or machine, is a percentage. Anything that can be moved from the percentage column into the guarantee column should be moved — that was true when the author was a person, and it is just as true when the author is an agent.
This is the same discipline I apply to the agents themselves: don't exhort the model to be careful — shape the environment so the careless move cannot be made. Structure first, checks second, attention last. Clean code's second bundle is that discipline, applied to the codebase instead of the harness.
So no, clean code is not dead. Half of it was for the reader, and the reader changed. The other half was for the information — and the information is still scattered, still duplicated, still one missed site away from a bug, no matter whose hands are on the keyboard.