I always thought AOP was super cool, but also that it completely destroys readability and the ability to understand a codebase. I also think it's probably one of the worst concepts to embrace in the age of agentic coding. That would be like a foot missile.
There are a limited number of patterns that absolutely do benefit from AOP though. The obvious one is logging. I don't think there's many though.
Regardless, AOP is the last thing I'll be using these days. With LLMs I've been moving in the opposite direction with a focus on explicitness and correctness. Typed, compiled, non-null languages with clear, obvious, and well documented conventions.
I've feel like AOP is Spring on steroids. Same downside for both IMO.
I think that's a good point, never thought about it like that. I like the abstraction level that Spring Boot brings, but working with a principal engineer who was very into AOP on my previous team was a huge pain. Like you and GP said, AOP absolutely destroys readability. Current team has code split into a million xyz-common libraries, which isn't my preference, but I can still click through to see the source of the library. I will never get what AOP truly improves on
[dead]