[vunderba]

I've been contracting for a fairly largish company (around 300 devs split across ~40 teams). The US based company was bought out by private equity about a year ago and many senior/lead engineers were forced out and contracted out to cheaper overseas labor.

The company has been relatively ambivalent about the usage of code assistant AI, but during PR reviews it has become very apparent that its seen widespread adoption among the outsourced dev teams purely because of code duplication. Our company has a fairly large number of repositories and bespoke libs for utility type functionality.

In the past, a programmer might have internally said to themselves, "There's no way that somebody hasn't already written this stupid function X or method Y", and they'd take a few minutes to search or reach out to see if it exists within an organization.

Instead during some of the recent code reviews, there has been a huge uptick in core functionality that is very obviously being spit out by the LLM. At best its just extra unnecessary code. At worst it will introduce new bugs since our custom functions often handle business domain specific edge cases that an LLM simply wouldn't know about.

[redleggedfrog]

Totally lines up with my experience as well. We also have the opposite problem of reams of code generated years ago from a period of unsupervised offshore work where we're slowly paying down the debt but the LLMs will attempt to use the old code for new work. Most of it is spaghetti UI code and nearly impossible to reuse effectively but the LLMs give it their best and we have prompt around it.