[wiremine]

> The code they [LLMs] produce is often fine. It works. It passes tests. It might ship as-is.

I don't disagree, but I've been thinking about this a bit: a lot of _human_ written code was/is less-than-fine. And a lot of human devs didn't understand the context when they wrote it.

I'm not advocating that we fire devs, or evangelizing that LLms are awesome. But I do wish there was a slightly more honest take on the pre-LLM world: it's not just about cost reduction, it's about solving some long-term structural deficiencies of industry.

[soperj]

> a lot of _human_ written code was/is less-than-fine.

At least at my work place this is often the case whenever we bring in contractors who will never be tasked with maintaining their code.

Middle management rarely ever gives us the time to fix this broken mess, and when they do, it's actually in a neat maintainable state.

We recently took 700mb of compiled code and reduced it to under 40mb just by getting rid of useless libraries, and removing unused code, and consolidating all the build objects into one object. This code ran significantly faster too.

The result was that the release team was pissed and made a big stink about how this was causing or going to cause all sorts of issues. We surmised that it was because it reduced their OT.

It's been over a year and none of the issues have ever occurred.

My biggest issue with LLM written code is that it's often submitted by non-programmers, and often fails the first test, which is "does this even work, and solve the issue?". A test that I normally wouldn't even do since no one on my team would submit code that doesn't compile, or doesn't fix the problem.

[jochem9]

If you're at a stage where code doesn't compile and doesn't do what you want, then that's really easy to improve.

- let the llm (agent) compile the code and iterate until it does.

- state your intent more clearly.

[soperj]

The problem is that an actual person is submitting this code, and that we have to review it. They don't seem to know how to compile, or run a local version of our framework on docker to deploy it to.

[bluefirebrand]

> a lot of _human_ written code was/is less-than-fine. And a lot of human devs didn't understand the context when they wrote it.

I don't think anyone truly disputes this, but I don't think it's a good argument.

If we already had a sort of poor quality output when humans were at the helm, then what can we expect from AI steered by the sort of humans that produced poor quality code?

My guess would be even more poor quality code, at much higher volumes than before. It is impossible for me to see this as an improvement over "some people always made poor quality code"

[wiremine]

> then what can we expect from AI steered by the sort of humans that produced poor quality code.

Great point, and I think that's my argument: above-average engineers can now produce more above average code. We don't need as many (any?) below-average developers moving forward.

[bluefirebrand]

It's possible, but I think unlikely. For one thing, most managers can't really tell who is above or below average. We still in 2026 have "lines of code" as a usual metric for judging the quality of a dev.

So how do you think that will play out in reality?

[wiremine]

I'm not sure, but it might be recursive: above-average managers can tell the difference, and so we won't need as many below-average managers. But this requires above-average leadership, and the market will need to reward those organizations.

[creesch]

> it's not just about cost reduction, it's about solving some long-term structural deficiencies of industry.

You know, I hate that this is a world where I have to ask myself if this is LLM written because it is one of those patterns.

But that is besides the point of what I wanted to say anyway. Those deficiencies aren't going to be solved by LLMs I recon. In fact, they likely will make things worse. As you said, a lot of human devs didn't understand the context when they wrote code previously. True, but LLMs are even worse at context in many areas and still need human prompting for input.

The only thing I really see happening is that the blast radius of people not fully grasping the context and still producing something is going to be larger. More specifically, it is already larger. Previously incompetence limited the damage people could do, now that is less of a factor.

[wiremine]

> You know, I hate that this is a world where I have to ask myself if this is LLM written because it is one of those patterns.

Lol, nope, I just sound that way. :-)