[ben_w]

Mm.

I'd agree, the code "isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impressive".

However, I've seen some totally successful, even award-winning, human-written projects where I could say the same.

Ages back, I heard a woodworking analogy:

  LLM code is like MDF. Really useful for cheap furniture, massively cheaper than solid wood, but it would be a mistake to use it as a structural element in a house.

Now, I've never made anything more complex than furniture, so I don't know how well that fit the previous models let alone the current ones… but I've absolutely seen success coming out of bigger balls of mud than the balls of mud I got from letting Claude loose for a bit without oversight.

Still, just because you can get success even with sloppy code, doesn't mean I think this is true everywhere. It's not like the award was for industrial equipment or anything, the closest I've come to life-critical code is helping to find and schedule video calls with GPs.

[theshrike79]

"Without oversight" is the key here.

You need to define the problem space so that the agent knows what to do. Basically give it the tools to determine when it's "done" as defined by you.