Code Hygiene in the Age of AI Pair-Programming: Lessons from a Real Codebase Review
Why "hygiene" and not "quality" Code quality is a big, fuzzy word. Code hygiene is the practical subset of it — the small, mechanical habits that keep a codebase healthy over time: consistent naming, sane file organization, dependency discipline, and the humble but critical CI gate that catches mistakes before they ship. None of it requires deep architectural genius. All of it requires consistency . This matters more than ever now that a growing share of code is scaffolded by AI copilots and written by developers early in their careers. AI-assisted code is often locally excellent — a single function, a single file, will look clean and idiomatic. What it doesn't automatically give you is global consistency across a hundred files written over many sessions. That's still a human job. I recently reviewed a FastAPI backend built almost entirely this way — a junior engineer, working with GitHub Copilot, building a conversational AI product. The architecture ...