[andybak]

I can't help but feel that people continually underestimate how bad human written code becomes over time. The exception is probably single-person passion projects or open source projects that maintain quality governance over time.

I strongly suspect most closed source code developed under commercial or internal pressure is pretty awful after a few years of development.

All LLM code has to do is suck less than existing code. And that's presuming the code quality doesn't improve as the models, the harnesses and our ways of working with them improve.

[embedding-shape]

Sucky human-written code is still based on human understanding, which can change over time, be readjusted or solidified. People implement something wrong once, then update their perspective, then in the future does it right.

LLMs doesn't have this benefit. You forget to add the correct to the system prompt, and the LLM will repeat the same mistake over and over, and worse than that, their mistakes aren't based on their understanding, it's basically random guesses.

Humans, even bad coders, still seem to have some sort of architecture in mind, even if it's spaghetti, whereas LLMs (obviously) don't think more than a few steps, and never about the full scope of what they're contributing too, and on purpose too, because you want the context to be as small as possible when you work with LLMs.

With LLMs you need to thread carefully between "What does the LLM need to know?" and "Can I skip passing this to the LLM this time?" while a human you can more or less dump them everything you sit on, and let them shift it through, and they'll mostly make it out OK.

[xzenor]

And where do you think the LLM learned coding from?

But anyway, let the LLM verify the code to give advice on improvements but don't let it write code unverified. That's my opinion on it anyway.

[O5vYtytb]

I've been sent code from vendors that didn't even compile, long before llms were a thing. Most shops that aren't primarily software have really really terrible software.