My code works but it's messy—what does good code actually look like?

Working code that feels messy is a good place to be, because you can already see the gap. Good code is not clever or ornate. It is code the next person, often you in six months, can read and change without fear. Clarity is the whole game. Look for a few plain signs: names that say what they mean, functions that do one thing, and logic you can follow without holding ten things in your head at once. When you have to reread a block three times, that is the code asking to be simpler, not smarter. Take one messy function you wrote recently and rename its variables and split it until each piece reads like a sentence. Do that a few times and the standard stops being abstract. You learn good code by cleaning your own.