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by braza 719 days ago
> And the code is godawful

You would be surprised on how big corporations are running on not so elegant code and generating revenue all over.

I used to be more principled around code best practices and having things well written, but with the LLMs I just discovered that unless your in a very critical domain where performance or maintenability is a hard requirement, the LLMs with bad code just solve the problem and everyone can be happy.

2 comments

Everyone, that is, except for the customers dealing with buggy slow products that will eventually be breached and leak their data. And the good developers who now have to hunt for dumb bugs without clues for where to look because the person who generated the code can’t help either.
But good developers can use LLMs to hunt for the dumb bugs ;)
Are these the same companies we hear about because the got hacked because of security holes in their code?
It’s not a direct relationship as far as I know. The point is that maybe the LLMs gave enablement for the people that thinks about software as a “means to an end” and I think it’s completely fine.

I like elegant code, well written and easy to maintain; but for a long time the field of programming started to develop the pristine idea that the programming _was the end_ and not as a way to achieve something.

What’s the post author made was to bring it in a more latent way saying that you could use programming to achieve the same results but you do not need.