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> I think the article underestimates how much intent can be grasped from code alone. Even without comments.

I agree, the human thought process always ends up getting embedded in a which of several possible ways any one thing might be done. But it's still a process, and a vastly inferior one to having a knowledgeable person on hand. Reverse-engineering has up until now been reserved to times when it is necessary. (I mean, we all still do it, especially on legacy codebases, but it's not good for productivity at all.)

> Humans (and I strongly suspect LLMs, since they're statistical synthesis of human production) are fairly predictable.

I disagree with the parenthetical. That's what stands out to me the most about LLM code: there are definitely intentions embedded in the code, but they're a hodgepodge of different intentions all tangled up together. You can't infer much of anything from a small snippet, because the intention behind that snippet was likely relevant to a completely different origin codebase that was piled up into a compost heap to grow an LLM out of. It's actually harder to make sense of an LLM codebase because the intentions distract and confuse the reader -- just as with text, we implicitly assume that a generated artifact means the same thing as if a human wrote it, and it doesn't.