[zadikian]

I always felt like I abstract and modularize things way less eagerly than other programmers. Was pleasantly surprised to find that LLMs do it mostly my way by default, then again they're also bad at abstracting when it's actually needed.

[dan-robertson]

I think LLMs are trained to not refactor. I think it’s either that you would need to do something in training to make them want to do it and the labs don’t do that, or that the labs correctly guess that it would be very annoying for LLMs to go and refactor your existing code as they go. This creates bad effects (eg crazy hacks to avoid refactoring and, much worse, not refactoring the code they only just wrote as required) but I think the alternative would be worse – it’s not something you always want to read and the refactoring is often done incorrectly, restructuring the code to the best shape for the current task rather than something that balances many different needs.