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by lijok 92 days ago
By what metric is “the level of quality is much, much higher” in the Django codebase? ‘cause other than the damn thing actually working, the primary metric of a codebase being high quality is how easy it is to contribute to. And evidently, it’s not.
2 comments
ErroneousBosh 92 days ago
Have you spent much time with the Django codebase?

I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9 days most of the assistance you got on the IRC channel was along the lines of "it's in this file here in the source, read it, understand it, and if you still have a question come back and ask again". I probably learned more about writing idiomatic Python from that than anything else.

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paganel 92 days ago
> I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9

I can confirm that that was the general mindset back then, and I think that's what made the project last for 20 years. I myself ended up doing some monkey-patching for the admin interface on 0.92 (or 0.91? it's been a lot of time since then), all as the result of me going through the source-code. Definitely not the cleanest solution, even back then, but it made one getting to know the underlying code so much more.

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ErroneousBosh 92 days ago
Someone in an IRC channel I'm in (recently! It's still alive!) asked if I fancied taking a look at some Django code for them because they'd been asked to find a contractor to modernise it and make it suitable for 2025 hosting.

Sure, I thought, this'll be fun.

Holy shit. It was something I'd started working on in the aforementioned 0.9x days, and which someone else had, uh, "extended and modified" after I left the web dev place where I'd worked at the time. Remarkably it was still pretty understandable.

I didn't want anything to do with the person that ran the site, not even just to take money off them, so I passed on it.

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nuschk 92 days ago
The code is very dense. Clear, concise, elegant. But dense. An LLM doesn't generate code like that.

I think it's perfectly doable to use an LLM to write into the Django codebase, but you'll have to supervise and feedback it very carefully (which is the article's point).

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