Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dartos 873 days ago
Replacing poor code, with poor code that nobody really understands isn’t good either.

Imagine hiring a junior to write your code, except they’d just stop existing when they were done.

You’d need to ask a whole new junior to explain it to you later (if you were relying on AI)

At the recent startup I was at, the CEO (who was also an engineer) basically relied on chatgpt to make the whole app.

It was a complicated and fragile codebase. The docstrings, which were also AI generated, were frequently out of date if not just wrong.

We were in the midst of rewriting it before we went bust.

2 comments

Their metric doesn’t include old poor quality code that was recently replaced.

It only looks for brand new code that was immediately reverted/rewritten, and also looks for code that was copied from the internet vs. from within the repo (the former is probably non-idiomatic for the code base in question).

Well if you need it touch it again, you hope for an even better AI.
lol, I mean I guess that’s one way to do it.