[unknownfuture]

> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world.

I genuinely don't know if that's true and I doubt you do, either. It's all feels right now.

What I do know is I run a couple of personal projects and I can say they are of objectively higher quality now that I'm using AI to build out proper CI pipelines, expand test coverage, produce higher quality architectures, etc.

Why?

Because in the past I didn't have the capacity to invest in that kind of hardening, but with AI, now I do.

Of course you'll probably make the claim that my code is probably crap, the tests suck, etc, because you've already made up your mind. But having been in the industry for 25 years, I can tell you definitively that you'd be wrong about that.

Now, what'll happen to the median codebase? God only knows. Maybe I'm especially diligent.

But given we're really only 6-12 months into the agentic coding era, I think the only conclusion you can make is that the jury is still out.

[daveidol]

Well said. People love to make everything black and white / good and bad. But things are rarely that simple.

[unknownfuture]

And I get that compulsion to boil this mess down into a simple good/bad dichotomy.

I absolutely have deeply mixed feelings about these tools, the ethics associated with them, the impact on the industry, on the talent pipeline, etc.

But I also can't deny that they are incredibly powerful tools that are here to stay in one form or another.

And I say that as someone who, a year ago, was absolutely convinced that they were incremental at best and scoffed at everyone who said something like "yeah but they're so much better now!" or "they're only going to get better!"

Well, they were right, they did, and the world has changed. AI generated code is landing in the Linux kernel. 250+ security holes were found and fixed in Firefox. The impact is here and now, and it's mixed and ugly and complicated.

[prerok]

Even if the jury is still out, I would still say you are both right already.

The amount of slop produced even in company setting is staggering and I don't like it one bit that neither the submitter nor the reviewer of the PR paid due dilligence. And I am only complaining because it then becomes my problem. So, then I have to start nagging people to clean that up. I can say with 100% certainty that the problems I face now would not have happened without LLMs.

That said, used with care, with proper supervision, with dilligence to review what LLMs did, I still think they can be and are beneficial.

I think that we are just not used to getting results of questionable quality from the tools we use. So, I am hopeful that we will learn and it will improve with time but still find myself dreading the age of the vibe coder.

[unknownfuture]

Very well said.

I also think reading and reviewing code is a skill that connected to but very much independent of the writing of code, and the use of coding agents requires us to be far more skilled and diligent at it.

So put another way, people who were good at coding without agents may in fact be a poor fit with them, which means the entire industry is experiencing a dislocation between skills we have and skills we need, leading to extremely bimodal outcomes.

[prerok]

Indeed, however I would also point out that senior engineers have already been expected to be good at reading code: they were expected to evaluate the code quality of other contributors, so they had to be able to do that.

In fact, from my personal experience, going from junior to mid to senior, that was the hardest thing. Reading the code and thinking if what they did was really correct and will not have additional undesired side-effects was hard to become efficient at (it didn't help that we were working in C back then).

So, really, I think that for juniors it's actually much harder because if they want to do due dilligence they have to do the same evaluation but without the years of experience working with that code base. I can understand, even if I don't like it, that they just submit the output of the LLM for the senior to review.

[unknownfuture]

> Indeed, however I would also point out that senior engineers have already been expected to be good at reading code: they were expected to evaluate the code quality of other contributors, so they had to be able to do that.

Yeah, but the frequency, volume, and complexity of that activity, and its ratio versus all the other work that a developer was previously expected to do, has shifted dramatically, not least because now we're having to review the output of our own coding agents as well as that of other developers on our teams.

As a consequence, folks who were marginal but capable at that skill now likely find themselves working beyond their ability.

> So, really, I think that for juniors it's actually much harder because if they want to do due dilligence they have to do the same evaluation but without the years of experience working with that code base. I can understand, even if I don't like it, that they just submit the output of the LLM for the senior to review.

Yup, couldn't agree more.

[sillyfluke]

It's a bit weird when the article in question is predominantly about software development in a professional setting and the top comment is about how some people in thread are disregarding this context and opining unrelatedly about their unique solo development or personal project development experiences, to then respond to said comment by insistently going on about how AI is great for your personal projects, when people are unable to assess the value of your AI-assisted personal projects and whether they would concur with the high opinion you have of them. A turd with a CI pipeline is still a turd, I think we can all agree on that. IF someone said AI is great because they can now expand test coverage and build a CI pipeline for their todo app in rust, it wouldn't exactly be the proof you're looking for I don't think.

But I agree fully with your last paragraph, and said something similar in a comment elsewhere where I stated my tangible bar as being a Ladybird like browser built from scratch achieving Chrome parity in six months while doing continuous stable releases with coding agents in tow. Otherwise, as you said, the jury is still out.

[blks]

People now just tell on themselves when they say that their projects’ quality is significantly better now with LLMs

[unknownfuture]

What, that my personal project quality was low?

Yes! It absolutely was (and in many cases still is)! Both projects I've originated and projects I've inherited. I'm not ashamed to admit that. I build in my spare time to create things people (in particular myself) want to use, not to construct ivory towers of architectural purity.

Hell, I inherited maintainership of one gem that barely had a functioning test suite at all and is now at north of 85% coverage and is something I can now change with far greater confidence, and I recently forked a repo to work on another project that was a damned disaster that I massively refactored to make it clean and maintainable.

The world is absolutely full of janky side projects. Is that surprising to you? They're side projects, ffs, not five-nines planetary scale platforms.